THE PRESIDENCY: Fish & Quips

In a nightspot bar on Key West’s Duval Street, a full-bloused songstress named Rae Waller was tickling the patrons’ ears with a new song about Harry Truman. (Sample verse: “Bar pianos strain their glands/For the touch of Harry’s hands.”) Yet while the song poked fun at him, Key West’s most important tourist was more than welcome in the southernmost city in the U.S.

The fact that Truman has made Key West his vacationland is now the town’s biggest asset. Because of the Truman boom, air-conditioned motels are blooming like red spider lilies in October, new stores are opening, restaurants are crowded, the sidewalks are flowing with women in shorts and halters and men in atom-flash sport shirts. Harry Truman promptly got into the gay spirit, appeared for a press conference wearing soft blue wash slacks, white shoes and a white tail-out shirt decorated with bright blue sea gulls.

Tug on the Vine. Only the gamblers are disgruntled about the visitation. State officials, fearing headlines in this year of Kefauver, sent word along the grapevine: shut down while the President is in town. The Saturday before he landed, Duval

Street presented a moving scene. Sad-faced gamblers stood by as vans backed up and hauled away dice tables, roulette wheels and blackjack tables.

Despite such precautions, there was an incident which caused a shudder to run through the Chamber of Commerce. Truman, out for his daily swim, was standing waist-deep in water near the sand of Truman Beach. As usual, three Secret Service agents were in the water near him and two more were in a small boat not far away. The men in the boat suddenly shouted with alarm. They had spotted two large grey fish about four feet long pursuing a school of four-inch garfish. The Secret Service men thought the big fish, heading for the area where Truman stood, were barracuda. Truman splashed ashore. The men in the boat hauled in General Harry Vaughan, Truman’s military aide, who was farther from shore (seems he’s always in deep water, quipped a correspondent).

Loyal Key Westers, fearing that such incidents might frighten away tourists, insisted that they had never heard of barracuda bothering anyone on the shallow beaches. What the Secret Service men saw, they said, might have been mullet, which are no more dangerous than un-swallowed goldfish.

“Not in Directory.” While the fish didn’t snap at the presidential party, Key West’s mosquitoes did. Cold rains followed by 90° heat brought them out in swarms. Presidential Assistant John Steelman tried to play golf, quit on the first hole, came back slapping at his legs, arms and neck. There was a run on the dispensary’s supply of insect repellent. Then the word went out from the Little White House, and Navy fighters whipped low over the area to spray DDT from their belly tanks. Truman, who has often commented that he is thick-skinned, said the mosquitoes weren’t bothering him at all. Despite all the excitement, there were some who seemed slow to realize that Harry Truman was in town. A letter addressed to him was delivered late, after it was rescued from a doubtful post-office clerk who had stamped the envelope: “Not in directory . . .”