There is an old proverb that says, “You are only two [2] people away from knowing anyone in the world.” I know it is probably not true but it is amazing when you talk to people how you interconnect with them.
I just finished watching the four [4] hour mini-series on PBS about Harry Truman. He was quite a man … A simple man with no college education who failed many times in his life … He failed as a farmer … Failed as a Haberdasher filing for Bankruptcy when he was thirty-seven [37]. Married the one and only girl in his life, Bess Wallace. His mother-in-law never thought he was good enough for her Bess even when he was President of the United States.
I am old enough to remember that nobody liked him and his approval ratings were in the 20’s … 22-23% … the lowest of any president … ever.
Slowly, people have come to respect him and he is now considered one of our “best” Presidents.
He came a long way and earned the respect of the people … He spoke what he felt and thought and earned the title “Give’m Hell Harry.” Who can forget the sign on his desk “The Buck Stops Here.”
BEIGHEY – TRUMAN CONNECTION
My connection to Harry Truman was through my grandfather Clifford Beighey, who himself was a Haberdasher with a Haberdashery on 1012 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington DC. Thr building has been torn down to make way for a high-rise Office Building.
Clifford and my grandmother lived Several miles up the road on Connecticut Avenue in a very nice apartment at 4801 Connecticut Avenue NW, Apt 604. In 1996, the apartment building was still there and looks the same.
What follows is an account as told to me by my Grandfather … It is slightly different than the account on the PBS Documentary.
“The Vice-President, Harry Truman, and Bess lived in an Apartment across the street from us on Connecticut Avenue … they had no Secret Service and no car or driver.
I would go to the bus stop to ride the bus down to my store and waiting at the stop would be Harry Truman. He would get on the bus with me reading his newspaper as he made his way to his office. I knew who he was but even though we exchanged courtesies we never had long conversations on the bus trip.
One night during the summer, I awoke during the early hours of the morning and it was so bright outside you would have thought it was daylight.
There were floodlights and police everywhere … I had no idea what was going on but found out later that day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died and Harry Truman was the President of the United States and he was now entitled to Secret Service Protection.”
After only a little over 80 days in office the little man from Missouri with the wire-rimmed glasses was thrust into the biggest job in the land … President of the United States.
THE BORING-DUBOIS, PA CONNECTION
I just finished watching the four [4] hour mini-series on PBS about Harry Truman. He was quite a man … A simple man with no college education who failed many times in his life … He failed as a farmer … Failed as a Haberdasher filing for Bankruptcy when he was thirty-seven [37]. Married the one and only girl in his life, Bess Wallace. His mother-in-law never thought he was good enough for her Bess even when he was President of the United States.
I am old enough to remember that nobody liked him and his approval ratings were in the 20’s … 22-23% … the lowest of any president … ever.
Slowly, people have come to respect him and he is now considered one of our “best” Presidents.
He came a long way and earned the respect of the people … He spoke what he felt and thought and earned the title “Give’m Hell Harry.” Who can forget the sign on his desk “The Buck Stops Here.”
BEIGHEY – TRUMAN CONNECTION
My connection to Harry Truman was through my grandfather Clifford Beighey, who himself was a Haberdasher with a Haberdashery on 1012 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington DC. Thr building has been torn down to make way for a high-rise Office Building.
Clifford and my grandmother lived Several miles up the road on Connecticut Avenue in a very nice apartment at 4801 Connecticut Avenue NW, Apt 604. In 1996, the apartment building was still there and looks the same.
What follows is an account as told to me by my Grandfather … It is slightly different than the account on the PBS Documentary.
“The Vice-President, Harry Truman, and Bess lived in an Apartment across the street from us on Connecticut Avenue … they had no Secret Service and no car or driver.
I would go to the bus stop to ride the bus down to my store and waiting at the stop would be Harry Truman. He would get on the bus with me reading his newspaper as he made his way to his office. I knew who he was but even though we exchanged courtesies we never had long conversations on the bus trip.
One night during the summer, I awoke during the early hours of the morning and it was so bright outside you would have thought it was daylight.
There were floodlights and police everywhere … I had no idea what was going on but found out later that day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died and Harry Truman was the President of the United States and he was now entitled to Secret Service Protection.”
After only a little over 80 days in office the little man from Missouri with the wire-rimmed glasses was thrust into the biggest job in the land … President of the United States.
THE BORING-DUBOIS, PA CONNECTION
One of the Secret Service assigned to protect President Truman was Floyd Boring.
Floyd Murray Boring, grew up in DuBois, Pennsylvania and graduated from what was Sandy Township High School before it merged with
DuBois High School. He spent nearly five years as a Pennsylvania State Policeman after graduating from high school. He entered the Secret Service in November 1943 and joined the White House protective detail in March 1944.
I believe he grew up in and around the Dixon Avenue area of Sandy Township.
Little is heard about Floyd “Toad” Boring in an around DuBois but he had one of the most interesting careers of anyone from DuBois, PA.
Floyd M. Boring, guarded five presidents … Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson.
Mr. Boring was with President Franklin D Roosevelt when he died at Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945, and accompanied his body to the funeral at Hyde Park, N.Y.
He was not with President Kennedy's Secret Service detail in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated (That said, Mr. Boring played a pivotal role in the security planning of JFK's fatal trip to Dallas, as he was in charge of the advance arrangements, according to the research of Secret Service expert Vince Palamara.)
Boring’s involvement with President Truman was his most famous assignment.
On the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1950, Truman was taking a nap at Blair House, where he was living while the White House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, was being renovated. Mr. Boring was stationed outside Blair House with several uniformed White House guards, while two Secret Service agents were posted inside.
“It was a beautiful day, about 80 degrees outside,” Mr. Boring recalled in a 1988 interview for the Truman Library. Mr. Boring had been teasing one of the uniformed guards, Leslie Coffelt. “I was kidding him about getting a new set of glasses,” Mr. Boring said. “I wanted to find out if he had gotten the glasses to look at the girls.”
Moments later, at 2:20 p.m., two men approached Blair House and opened fire with pistols, trying to shoot their way inside and assassinate Truman to further the cause of independence for Puerto Rico.
Mr. Boring, drawing his .38-caliber Colt pistol, known as a Detective’s Special, fired a bullet through the hat of one of the gunmen, Oscar Collazo, grazing his scalp. Mr. Collazo was also shot in the chest, and bullets grazed his nose and an ear. He was captured at the entrance to Blair House as Mr. Boring kicked his pistol away from his side.
Griselio Torresola, the other gunman, shot Mr. Coffelt, who killed him with return fire. Mr. Coffelt died of his wounds hours later. Two other White House policemen were wounded.
When the shooting stopped, Mr. Boring went up to see Truman and, as Mr. Boring recalled it, “He said, ‘What the hell is going on down there?’ ”
Mr. Boring later said that in addition to firing the shot that grazed Mr. Collazo’s head, he thought he had fired the bullet that hit Mr. Collazo in the chest. But in their book “American Gunfight” (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. wrote that the bullet may have been fired by a White House policeman, Joseph Davidson, and ricocheted off an iron fence before hitting Mr. Collazo.
Mr. Collazo, the surviving gunman, was imprisoned until 1979, when he returned to Puerto Rico, where he died in 1994 at 80.
While guarding Truman, Mr. Boring also dealt with a frightening moment on the Potomac River one day when Truman struggled while swimming off his yacht, the Williamsburg.
Truman was not a good swimmer, Mr. Boring said in his oral history interview, and when he got into the water he started to struggle. Seeing his plight, and with others panicking around him, Mr. Boring threw Truman a life preserver and helped pull him in.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Boring visited Truman at Independence, Mo., and found that Truman remembered him. “He said, ‘You’re the guy that saved my life, twice.
Floyd Boring retired in 1967 and entered private security work.
Floyd “Toad” Boring died on February 7, 2008 at the age of 92.
Little is heard about Floyd “Toad” Boring in an around DuBois but he had one of the most interesting careers of anyone from DuBois, PA.
Floyd M. Boring, guarded five presidents … Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson.
Mr. Boring was with President Franklin D Roosevelt when he died at Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945, and accompanied his body to the funeral at Hyde Park, N.Y.
He was not with President Kennedy's Secret Service detail in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated (That said, Mr. Boring played a pivotal role in the security planning of JFK's fatal trip to Dallas, as he was in charge of the advance arrangements, according to the research of Secret Service expert Vince Palamara.)
Boring’s involvement with President Truman was his most famous assignment.
On the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1950, Truman was taking a nap at Blair House, where he was living while the White House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, was being renovated. Mr. Boring was stationed outside Blair House with several uniformed White House guards, while two Secret Service agents were posted inside.
“It was a beautiful day, about 80 degrees outside,” Mr. Boring recalled in a 1988 interview for the Truman Library. Mr. Boring had been teasing one of the uniformed guards, Leslie Coffelt. “I was kidding him about getting a new set of glasses,” Mr. Boring said. “I wanted to find out if he had gotten the glasses to look at the girls.”
Moments later, at 2:20 p.m., two men approached Blair House and opened fire with pistols, trying to shoot their way inside and assassinate Truman to further the cause of independence for Puerto Rico.
Mr. Boring, drawing his .38-caliber Colt pistol, known as a Detective’s Special, fired a bullet through the hat of one of the gunmen, Oscar Collazo, grazing his scalp. Mr. Collazo was also shot in the chest, and bullets grazed his nose and an ear. He was captured at the entrance to Blair House as Mr. Boring kicked his pistol away from his side.
Griselio Torresola, the other gunman, shot Mr. Coffelt, who killed him with return fire. Mr. Coffelt died of his wounds hours later. Two other White House policemen were wounded.
When the shooting stopped, Mr. Boring went up to see Truman and, as Mr. Boring recalled it, “He said, ‘What the hell is going on down there?’ ”
Mr. Boring later said that in addition to firing the shot that grazed Mr. Collazo’s head, he thought he had fired the bullet that hit Mr. Collazo in the chest. But in their book “American Gunfight” (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. wrote that the bullet may have been fired by a White House policeman, Joseph Davidson, and ricocheted off an iron fence before hitting Mr. Collazo.
Mr. Collazo, the surviving gunman, was imprisoned until 1979, when he returned to Puerto Rico, where he died in 1994 at 80.
While guarding Truman, Mr. Boring also dealt with a frightening moment on the Potomac River one day when Truman struggled while swimming off his yacht, the Williamsburg.
Truman was not a good swimmer, Mr. Boring said in his oral history interview, and when he got into the water he started to struggle. Seeing his plight, and with others panicking around him, Mr. Boring threw Truman a life preserver and helped pull him in.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Boring visited Truman at Independence, Mo., and found that Truman remembered him. “He said, ‘You’re the guy that saved my life, twice.
Floyd Boring retired in 1967 and entered private security work.
Floyd “Toad” Boring died on February 7, 2008 at the age of 92.
So, there is the connection … Larry Beighey to Clifford Beighey to President Harry S. Truman to Floyd Boring to DuBois, Pennsylvania … My Hometown.
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