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Sometimes, you just have to settle for 'close enough'
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
10/15/2007 4:49 AM |
On Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, I wrote about once seeing ol’ Harry S Truman, in the flesh, when I was just a little guy. He was on his way to Key West on one of his fishing trips. This would have been sometime back in the last half of the 1940s.
Some 20 years later, I found myself living and working in Washington, D.C. where I was managing a camera department in a large membership department store named GEM, for Government Employees Mart, or maybe it was Market, I don’t remember for sure.
Anyway, at Christmas time, business was quite heavy, as you might imagine, so I had put on some part-timers to help with the holiday madness. As luck would have it, one of those I hired was a fellow named Larry something-or-other, and his “real” job was as a White House policeman. The White House has its own police force, separate from the Washington, D.C. police; or at least, it did back then.
Larry was quite a good salesman, and I was always happy to see him show up for work, confident that he could handle the crowds of eager shoppers with both aplomb and dispatch. Larry normally came in and worked Friday evenings and on Saturdays, but he got off his regular duties at the White House about noon on Friday, as I recall. One Friday morning, we were experiencing pretty heavy sales, and I realized we would probably need Larry early that day, so I called the White House and asked to speak to him. The switchboard operator hesitated a moment, then patched me through to Larry.
I quickly explained my situation to him and asked if he could come in early. “Sure,” he said, he’d just grab a quick bite to eat, change clothes and then come on in. Then he started to say something else when suddenly, in mid-sentence, he slammed the phone down into its cradle and cut our connection. I remember thinking, “That’s kind of odd.” I started to call him back, but then thought I needn’t bother. He already had agreed to come in early and that was the entire purpose of my call to him.
A couple of hours later, in pops Larry, ready to take up his position behind the sales counter, but first, he came over to me to say, “Sorry about hanging up on you so abruptly, but LBJ was just coming around the corner, and he doesn’t like us taking personal calls over the phones. The guy wanders around the White House all the time turning off light switches. Wants to save tax money, he says.”
Well, the point of all this is – after seeing Truman one time early in life, I never did see another President of the U.S.A., but I have shaken the hand of a man who used to work for one – and I guess, that’ll just have to be close enough for me! |
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Re: Sometimes, you just have to settle for 'close enough' |
By Kay McCullough on
10/15/2007 7:24 PM |
| I loved this! <br><br>BUT, as an avid Lady Bird fan and presidential trivia buff, I read a story about LBJ that he wasted a heck of a lot of White House water and heat on a special, super-duper extra-tall shower head. It took an army of plumbers and engineers to try to put it in to his liking with the antiquated pipes and inadequate heater abilities in that locale; and he never was satisfied with the results. |
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