Crusty old Harry Truman was the last holdout on Mount St. Helens and almost surely the first person to die when the volcano erupted on May 18, 1980. The owner of a resort on Spirit Lake in the shadow of the mountain, Truman, 83, had refused to evacuate despite urgent warnings of imminent disaster. Interviewed by local media in March 1980, less than two months before the eruption, Truman vowed he would never leave his home and business, and besides, he said, "the mountain will never hurt me" (Eruption, 78). Truman's occasionally profane pronouncements made for good copy, and soon the national media was landing helicopters in his front yard for interviews. No outsiders were present when the mountain finally blew on a quiet Sunday morning, but Truman, defiant to the end, was buried alive. His legend lives on. "With his ten-dollar name and hell-no-I-won't-go attitude, Truman was a made-for-prime-time folk hero. He was the proverbial farmer sitting on his front porch, cradling a shotgun and refusing to move when the bulldozers showed up to build a freeway" ("The Old Man and the Mountain").
Early Adventures
In 1981, a year after Truman's death, his niece Shirley Rosen wrote a book about her uncle's life. Rosen was 14 years old when she spent her first summer at Spirit Lake in 1948, working alongside her aunt Edna – Truman's third wife and one true love. Of young Truman, Rosen writes:
"Harry Truman was born in West Virginia in October of 1896. His parents were Newberry and Rosa Belle Truman and he was their first child, born in a log cabin in the tiny community of Ivydale, northeast of Charleston, where even today only 200 people live. They called the boy Harry R. Truman, although later no one would know what the R stood for and even Truman himself wasn't sure what day in October he had been born on. He settled on October 30 and celebrated his birthday then" (Truman of St. Helens, 28).
In 1907 the Trumans – grandfather Elijah; his three grown sons Floyd, Marion, and Newberry; and their families, including 11-year-old Harry and his 3-year-old sister Geraldine – moved to Washington to work in the timber industry and buy a farm. They settled in Napavine, where the brothers bought a donkey engine to pull logs out of the woods, and then moved to a dot on the map called Nesika in eastern Lewis County, where the family purchased 160 acres. The Trumans built their houses with timber cut from the land, raised dairy cows and hogs, cultivated vegetables and fruit, and kept a stable of horses. "Harry would become skilled at fishing, hunting and trapping. Regulations were slowly being established in the area, but folks from the hills of West Virginia weren't accustomed to laws governing fishing, hunting and trapping – or distilling. Harry learned that, too" (Truman of St. Helens, 31).
Truman was one of seven students in the 1917 graduating class at Mossyrock High School. That year he bought his first car, a Mertz roadster, drove it hard, wrecked it, and fixed it himself. "That was the beginning of Harry's lifelong love affair with the automobile" (Truman of St. Helens, 36). He also played baseball and chased girls. "He thought he was the 'cock of the walk'," recalled classmate Grace Sears Finstad. "He was good-looking, and all the girls liked him. You couldn't help but like him; he'd talk to anyone and he was always neat and clean. But he was a cocky guy" (Truman of St. Helenss, 34). A cocky guy who swore profusely: "Harry just couldn't talk without cussin'," said childhood friend Charlie Osborne (Truman of St. Helens, 35).
Loudly patriotic, Truman enlisted shortly after graduation with visions of becoming a swashbuckling aviator in World War I. Instead, he was trained as a mechanic with the 100th Aero Squadron. His closest brush with death occurred on his way to Europe when a German U-boat torpedoed his troopship the SS Tuscania. A nearby destroyer rescued Truman, but 210 soldiers were lost in the waters between Ireland and Scotland. Truman spent the rest of the war in England and France, fixing planes and learning to fly, returning home unscathed in June 1919. Back in Lewis County, he got a job working as an auto mechanic at a Ford dealership in Chehalis and married Helen Hughes, the daughter of a sawmill owner. Their daughter Betty was born on March 11, 1922.
Tragedy visited Truman on May 8, 1923, when his father Newberry was killed in a logging accident near Chehalis, crushed between two logs while trying to execute a dangerous maneuver with a donkey engine. Around this time, a disillusioned Truman traveled to Nevada to try prospecting; when that failed, he returned home to start a bootlegging operation. "Soon Truman was picking up liquor smuggled into San Francisco and running it up to southwestern Washington. Whorehouses on the coast in Aberdeen and Hoquiam were among his regular stops" (Truman of St. Helens, 42). Truman briefly operated a gas station in Chehalis called Harry's Sudden Service while continuing to sell bootlegged whiskey and moonshine on the side. But bootlegging was dangerous, and before long Truman needed a new calling:
"Truman's bootlegging eventually sent him and his young family into hiding at Spirit Lake in 1926, after he ran afoul of gangsters making a hostile takeover. His homesteading supplies included a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun. In many ways, Truman was as unpredictable as the land under him. He could show frontier hospitality, then on a whim toss someone out because he didn't like their looks. Tales around Castle Rock have him backing up his edicts with the show of a gun" (Barber).
Life on Spirit Lake
Truman found his heaven at Spirit Lake. The waters teemed with fish, and he could poach deer, elk, and bears from the woods. Land was available for lease from the Northern Pacific Railroad; eventually Truman's spread encompassed more than 50 acres. It didn't bother him that there was no electricity, running water, or telephone service, or that the road to Castle Rock was unpaved and often impassable in the winter. Helen wasn't happy living a spartan life, however, and the couple soon divorced.
Truman started out running a small gas station, grocery, and boat rental, a business he shared with Jack Nelson. When the partners fell out, Nelson moved across the lake to run his own lodge. "Truman stayed on to operate the business and build a large log home at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Toutle River. It was indeed the isolated spot Truman had sought" (Truman of St. Helens, 42).
In 1935, Truman married Marjorie Bennett Brown, a divorced French teacher from Seattle. Marjorie had a 9-year-old daughter, Joan, and a volatile temper to match Truman's. Their stormy marriage endured for more than 12 years, until Truman surprised her with divorce papers in 1947. While Marjorie was away visiting family, Truman transferred his affections to another woman, Edna Henrickson, known by all as Eddie. They married soon after and ran the resort together for nearly 30 years. "Marge Truman died seven years later, when she was only 53 years old. Her death was caused, her daughter would come to believe, by a broken heart. Truman himself had never been happier. He was in love, his namesake was now President and his resort business was booming" (Truman of St. Helens, 60).
By 1948 the resort featured a main lodge; 21 cabins along the beach; canoes, rowboats, and 5-horsepower runabouts for rent at the dock; and a Chris-Craft power launch on which Truman conducted $1 tours of the lake. Truman sold beer, fishing licenses, bait, and tackle. As business grew, the restaurant in the lodge became too small; Truman and his brother-in-law Buck Whiting built a new one closer to the lakeshore in 1958. They called it the Lookout Restaurant & Starlight Room Lounge.
In 1953, Truman befriended U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980). Douglas had arrived at the lodge looking for a room but Truman took a quick look and instructed his niece to tell the "old coot" they were full. Quicky realizing his mistake, Truman chased after Douglas and convinced him to return. During their ensuing five-day pack trip into the wilderness, during which Truman suffered burns from a camp stove, the men became drinking buddies and lifelong friends. When Truman celebrated 40 years in business in 1969, Douglas sent him a congratulatory note:
"Dear Harry,
"Your forty years at Spirit Lake has probably revised the entire folklore and body of legends of that historic area. The strawberries and the bears have also grown bigger and bigger, thanks to you. I hope you have got those hot stoves under better control and that they have stopped moving around to your annoyance. Harry, make the next forty years the same as the first forty. But do be careful; and remember that I am not always there to take care of you. Yours faithfully, William O. Douglas" (Truman of St. Helens, 106).
Rumblings
Truman's contented life was shattered when Eddie died in September 1975. She had gone upstairs for a nap and Truman found her unresponsive, dead of a heart attack. After that, his mood soured and his drinking increased. "He was so angry and mean that people around the lake tried to avoid him. The lodge stank of piss from his sixteen cats. The papers couldn't print half of what he said, since mostly what he did was swear" (Eruption, 78). When an Oregonian reporter visited in April 1980, he found a forlorn Truman and a rundown lodge. "I've kind of let the place go to hell since then," Truman said. "Eddie and I had spent 37 years loving, working, fighting, laughing, dancing and really living on our mountain and lake. Go look at the old pictures I have on the wall over there – she was some woman" (Perry).
Truman might have lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, but on March 20, 1980, an earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale shook Mount St. Helens to life. A week later, the mountain erupted for the first time in 123 years, venting steam and ash and blackening the flanks of the volcano. As the media rushed to the scene, Forest Service workers suggested that reporters seek out Truman, knowing the quotes would be colorful.
The New York Times assigned Molly Ivins to cover the developing story. "Reporters, ever fond of crusty old codgers, have become enamored of Harry Truman, 83 years old," Ivins wrote on March 31. "The two most common questions asked at the Forest Service center are 'How's Mount St. Helen's?' and 'Where's Harry Truman?' Mr. Truman was on the front page of Sunday's San Francisco Examiner, is a particular favorite of television reporters, and has become so popular that he scheduled a news conference" ("2nd Crater ..."). In truth, the news conference was arranged not by Truman but by law enforcement. On March 30, police escorted Truman to the high school gym in Toutle so he could meet with reporters. Some had been waiting three days for an interview. "'It'll be an experience,' promised Ray Blaisdell, chief deputy of the Skamania County Sheriff's department. 'I dare you to print what he says. He hasn't got a civil word in his mouth. But he's a pretty nice old guy'" ("Harry's Coming Down ...").
Truman loved to grouse about the media, telling a local writer he was tired of "all the jackass reporters who never heard of Spirit Lake before" trying to make him a folk hero. But just a few days later, "Harry was cooking an Easter turkey and entertaining an NBC film crew from Burbank, Calif. They had come to do a piece on Harry for the Today show" ("Truman Makes 'Today' ...). The media ate up every word when Truman held court. "Harry Truman was just what the press needed, right down to his pink [1956] Cadillac. He was a human face in an otherwise remote area, and his colorful and not altogether sober language was a free-flowing and uninhibited antidote to the micrometer-precise words of the scientists. 'If I hadn't been there these past five or six weeks,' he told reporters shortly before his death, 'you tell me boys, what the media, the press and the TV would've gotten out of Mount St. Helens'" ("The Old Man and the Mountain").
Last Days
In early May, The Seattle Times sent reporter Hill Williams to interview scientists monitoring the volcano. "Timberline Camp, the end of the road on the north slip of restless Mount St. Helens, was a strange place," Williams wrote in his 2017 memoir Writing the Northwest. "Earthquakes caused by molten rock bumping and cracking its way up inside the mountain would shake snow off tree limbs. Some shakes were strong enough that geologists would grab their instruments to keep them from falling over. Pickup trucks would rock on their springs. The jagged Goat Rocks, visible occasionally up toward the summit when clouds parted, were moving an astounding five feet a day, pushed out by rising magma in the mountain" (Writing the Northwest, 91).
Williams stopped to see Truman, who was outside shoveling snow. Truman showed him around the lodge and brought out a stack of letters. Truman could barely tolerate children, yet the letters from concerned fifth graders in Brooks, Oregon, and Grand Blanc, Michigan, moved him to tears. "These kids really care about me. And look how they indent their paragraphs and how neat the letters are. Those kids are no dummies" ("Worried About Harry? ..."). But he wasn't any more receptive to their advice than he was to evacuation orders from the county sheriff. "Do you have a family?" asked one young correspondent. "If you do, why not go back to them? I don't think you would enjoy being covered with steaming, boiling lava." Another fifth grader warned, "if the mountain erupted you would be burned and it would hurt," and another pleaded, "You can replace a house or lodge or something like that, but you can't replace YOU" ("Worried About Harry? ...").
Truman did come off the mountain several times before the eruption, but he always returned home. In late April he took a two-day trip to Minnesota to visit old friends. On May 14, four days before the eruption, he traveled by helicopter (paid for by National Geographic) to Clear Lake School in Brooks, Oregon, to answer questions and sign autographs. Back at Spirit Lake, he admitted to being frightened by frequent earthquakes, and for a while he had felt safer sleeping in the basement of the lodge. He was rattled but still steadfastly naïve. "Truman thought that the trees were somehow going to block all that rock and snow from descending on him, as if he'd never seen an avalanche up there. He'd told the press, 'The mountain will never hurt me. When you live someplace for 50 years, you either know your country or you're stupid'" (Eruption, 78).
Truman told one reporter he had found an old mine shaft deep in the hills and dug it into a cave. He said he would go there with some food and two kegs of whiskey if the mountain blew. It was the kind of fairytale the media found irresistible. One day in early May, Truman came outside to find four helicopters parked in his driveway. One frequent visitor was Dwight Reber, a pilot for a helicopter service in Oregon. During a stop at the lodge on May 9, Reber vowed that he would rescue Truman in the event of an eruption. A powerful earthquake rocked Mount St. Helens the following day, and on May 11 scientists issued their most serious warning yet: It was no longer a question of "if," they said. An eruption was now seen as inevitable. On May 13, another quake let loose an avalanche of ice on the mountain's north flank. Officials again urged Truman to vacate, offering to fly him out via helicopter, but he said, "I've made up my mind more than ever not to leave" (Kershner).
At least five people – R. W. Landon, Bob Nix, George Barker, Rob Smith, and Kathy Paulsen – visited Truman on his penultimate day. All five pleaded with him to come down. Landon, a Washington State Patrol Chief, said Truman told him, "If I go down to the lowland, I will drink myself to death" (Radford). Sheriff's deputies Nix and Barker chatted with Truman one last time. "Harry Truman looked at me like he wanted me to just hit him over the head and put him in the back of the car," Nix recalled. "He was nervous, but damned if he was going. I had no choice other than kidnap him, which I wasn't going to do" (Trent). Paulsen and Smith, a friend of Truman's whose family operated a lodge on the Toutle River, came by to help Truman sharpen saws. They left after 6 p.m., the last people to see Truman alive. "As Smith and Paulsen prepared to leave, Truman followed them to their truck. Truman leaned in the window and said that he would see them the next day – he was planning to come to Castle Rock to buy primroses to plant in the garden. Smith and Truman both got teary when it came time to leave. 'Oh, c'mon,' said Truman, 'let's keep a stiff upper lip'" (Eruption, 129).
The Reckoning
Mount St. Helens exploded the next morning at 8:32 a.m. The New York Times reported:
"Scientists have deduced that the triggering event was a fairly severe earthquake (magnitude 5) that dislodged a gigantic bulge, formed in recent weeks on the mountain's north side. In the largest landslides ever recorded by American geologists, this bulge slipped down the mountain like a vast sliding door. With this 'door' open, rock that had become supercharged with highly compressed gas exploded, ejecting to the north a tremendous horizontal blast ... The scope and violence of the blast are reflected in its casualty list: more than 100 square miles of forest buried or blown down, 61 people killed or missing, and an estimated 7,000 elk, 12,000 deer, 300 bears and 5,000 coyotes" (Sullivan).
Truman had been terribly wrong about the magnitude of a possible eruption, doubly so about his ability to escape in the event of one. It may be that he was still sleeping when the mountain erupted, or perhaps he was moving around, feeding his cats or pouring a cup of coffee. His demise came quickly, as it did for two others nearby. Portland geochemist Bob Kaseweter and his girlfriend Beverly Wetherald had obtained permission to conduct seismic research from their cabin on the Toutle River:
"The three people nearest Mount St. Helens – Harry Truman in his lodge on Spirit Lake, and Bob Kaseweter and Beverly Wetherald in their cabin a mile downstream – were close enough to hear a rumbling from the mountain as its north flank began falling toward them. But before the avalanche reached them, the expanding cloud overtook the falling earth and raced ahead. The cloud sped down the flank of the volcano, ripping the forest from the mountainside as it passed. When the cloud hit the resorts and camps around Spirit Lake and the cabins on the Toutle River, it blew the structures to bits. A few seconds later, the avalanche reached Spirit Lake and the Toutle River. It buried the lodge and cabins under hundreds of feet of steaming stone, earth, ice, and mud. Harry Truman, Bob Kaseweter and Beverly Wetherald were dead before they could have known what was happening" (Eruption, 145).
As the drama unfolded, helicopter pilot Dwight Reber tried to make good on his vow to rescue Truman. Reber spent the first few hours after the eruption ferrying a Portland television crew around the south side of the mountain. Dropping the crew in Vancouver, he stopped to refuel in Kelso and then "continued up the Toutle toward Harry Truman's lodge. He crept along the base of the ridge ... Blue lightning bolts struck all around him. The air smelled strongly of sulfur. If he kept going this way, he'd hit Spirit Lake eventually. He came to a wide, flat area covered with logs. The air temperature gauge read 140 degrees Fahrenheit; the helicopter strained to stay aloft, but he'd made a promise to Truman. Then, though a hole in the debris, Reber saw open water. This must be Spirit Lake, he thought – or what was left of it. Harry Truman and his lodge were gone" (Eruption, 173).
Truman was presumed dead, and no effort was made to find his remains. He had surely been blown to bits, incinerated – or worse. Science writer Sam Kean compared Truman's fate to victims of the Mount Vesuvius eruption in Italy in 79 A.D., noting a few possible outcomes: "Several Vesuvius victims were buried in ash, which hardened around them and left a human-shaped cavity in the ground as their bodies decayed. So that's one potential end. But Truman's campground lay so close to Mount St. Helens there's an even wilder possibility: that he vaporized almost instantly" ("Harry Versus the Volcano").
After
Family and friends gathered June 15 for a memorial service at the American Baptist Church in Longview. Truman left behind his sister Geri Whiting of Castle Rock. Three days before the service, Whiting, 74, and her husband Buck flew by helicopter over the blast zone and Geri tearfully dropped carnations and daisies on the smoking site where Truman once lived. "We put it right down, as near as I could tell, on Harry's lodge," Buck said. "It was just ashes and dust there, about 30 feet from a big steamy fumarole" ("Family, Friends Say Goodbye ..."). At the service, the Rev. James Conrod said "younger people may not understand the decision made by Harry, but we older people – we understand that that was his lake, he chose to live there and he chose to die there" ("Family, Friends Say Goodbye ..."). Richard Ice, a relative from San Francisco who grew up in the Truman household, was one of the speakers. He "said Harry was 'not only a fast talker but loud. He had an opinion on all subjects and a definitive one.' From March through May, when Truman became a pen pal for hundreds of children and was the subject of songs and poems, Ice said Truman was 'at the peak of his life'" ("Family, Friends Say Goodbye ...").
In September, a bank auctioned off what was left of Truman's estate. In the end, his eight heirs split $58,000. Some who followed the Truman saga were surprised to learn that Harry and Eddie had owned a second home, which they called Tanglewood, near the Columbia River between Washougal and Stevenson, and that they spent time there occasionally. The auction was held at Tanglewood with about 100 bidders in attendance. "A carnival atmosphere prevailed. Bids were offered for Truman's prized swizzle stick, his Portland telephone directories, canned goods that Truman never had a chance to eat, and even the house's toilet." Also purchased were his rusted tools, ashtrays, first-aid kits, silver hardhat, and, much desired, his personal wet bar. "I'm out here to buy some of these things as a remembrance," one bidder said. "The man's part of history. He's a legend" ("Harry Truman's Priceless Junk").
Remembering Truman
By 1981, dozens of bands had recorded songs about Mount St. Helens and its most famous victim, and Hollywood had rushed out a feature film with Art Carney – reportedly Harry's favorite actor – cast as Truman. The movie, St. Helens!, was panned by critics. "Capitalizing quickly on the disaster, this cheapie was realized just a year after the event," wrote TV Guide. "Carney plays Harry Truman, the real-life man who refused to leave his home despite the imminent disaster. Surrounded by stock characters, Carney's performance makes this film – although the best reason to see St. Helens is the fantastic footage of the volcano's eruption" ("St. Helens Reviews"). The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dismissed St. Helens! as "silly and insulting, both to the grandeur of the event and to the thousands of people whose lives it shook out of the mundane" (Simmons).
Today Mount St. Helens presents its own reminders of Truman. The hike to Harry's Ridge begins from the Johnston Ridge Observatory at 4,314 feet and straddles the north flank of the volcano. Another path, the Harry Truman Trail, yields expansive views of Spirit Lake and the Pumice Plain below the crater. Down the mountain in Castle Rock, Harry R. Truman Memorial Park was christened in the 1980s and a headstone was installed, inscribed with words written by Truman's sister Geri. But Truman was a divisive folk hero in Castle Rock, and the park was later renamed Castle Rock Lions Club Park. The headstone remains, an attraction for tourists.
For many, Truman's story excites the imagination even today. In his 2001 book The Mythical West, Richard W. Slatta describes Truman as "one of the few figures of the West whose fame comes far more from circumstance and fate than from personal feats. His notoriety is the product not of any legendary skill or gallantry but of his unbendable character and response to the forces of nature ... A close look at Harry Truman reveals traits that few people would describe as heroic. His fiery attitude, brash speech, love of the outdoors, and fierce independence, however, made him a folk hero the media could adore. As Truman himself understood, 'The press is all powerful'" (The Mythical West, 349).
