Harry Truman 1945 Typed Letter Signed as President - Just After Assuming Office

33rd President. Typed letter signed “Harry Truman” AS PRESIDENT, April 28, 1945, The White House Washington stationery, to Mary Womack in Saint Louis, Missouri, in full:

It certainly was a pleasure to get your good letter of the twenty-fourth and the clippings which you enclosed. I read both of them with a lot of interest.

The quotation which you gave me from Tennyson is the one I carry in my pocket all the time.

I was glad to see the picture of the High School class - it was a lucky thing the names were there because there were about three that I could not remember.

Best of luck to you.

Accompanied by original White House mailing envelope.

Part of a small grouping of letters we are offering sent from Truman to his old high school friend Mary B. Womack. Truman and Womack graduated Independence High School in 1901, along with Truman's wife Elizabeth ("Bess") Virginia Truman. Womack achieved a senior role with the Missouri State Teacher's Association and visited Truman in Washington when she stayed with her brother, himself a senator from Missouri.

An interesting letter given the fact that Truman rose to the Presidency just 2 weeks earlier upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman references the Tennyson poem that he would “carry in my pocket all the time” - which was titled “Locksley Hall”. According to Tennyson, the poem represents "young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings.”