One afternoon in the summer of 1953, a small, wrinkled old man named Walter Williams shuffled into a Veterans Administration hospital in Houston, Texas. Williams complained of pain in his lower abdomen. He’d come to the VA, he said, because he was a veteran – of the Civil War. Only problem was, Williams claimed to have served in the Confederate army – which, of course, did not qualify him for VA benefits. After much discussion, the hospital decided to admit Williams anyway, for “humanitarian reasons.”

Walter Williams, who said he was born in 1843, would live another six years, and upon his death he would be acclaimed the “last Civil War veteran.” Whether he really was or not is uncertain – most researchers now believe Williams was at least ten years younger than he claimed to be – but at least one bona fide Civil War veteran was still alive in 1953. Albert Henry Woolson, who had been a drummer boy in a Minnesota regiment when he was around 15 years old, was passing the time at his home in Duluth watching television. Woolson would live another three years. (Also alive in 1953 was Samuel Seymour, the last living witness to Lincoln’s assassination. As a five-year-old, Seymour’s parents took him to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater, giving young Samuel a most memorable night out.)

1953 was a year of transition. Not only were Civil War veterans watching I Love Lucy. In England, a new queen, Elizabeth II, was crowned on June 2. The ceremony was televised around the world. Even though he’d met the queen when she visited Washington as a princess (pictured above), Harry didn’t watch. “I was not curious about it in the slightest,” he wrote a friend.

That spring, the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee, the first major league baseball team to switch cities in 50 years. Within five years, four more franchises – the Browns, A’s, Dodgers, and Giants – would also move. (The A’s move from Philadelphia to Kansas City would make Bess, a huge baseball fan, especially happy.)

In Memphis that summer, a greasy-haired, 18-year-old truck driver walked into a storefront recording studio to record a song for his mother as a birthday gift. The studio’s owner, Sam Phillips, had been looking for a white kid who could sing black rhythm and blues. Barely 18 months later, Elvis Presley hit the top of the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel.” The crooners he dethroned – Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett – barely knew what hit them. (Harry cared for neither crooners nor rockers. He enjoyed “real music, not noise.” “Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, Straus waltzes, Chopin waltzes…. They are not noise. It is music.”)

1953 was also a pivotal year in the baby boom. The generation born after 1953 has been nicknamed “Generation Jones,” because it supposedly has a “Jones,” or longing, for its own identity. Unlike their older brothers and sisters, members of Generation Jones came of age in the ‘70s, not the ‘60s. They were too young to remember Boomer touchstones from Howdy Doody to Vietnam. Many don’t even consider themselves Baby Boomers at all.

1953 was a year of transition in another way: Nobody knew it at the time, but Harry and Bess Truman’s road trip would mark the last time a former president would move so freely among the people who had put him in office (and among those who wished he’d never been put there).

Said the New York Times of Harry and Bess’s trip, “It is … as it should be that an American ex-president, accompanied only by his wife, with no retinue and no ceremony, can drive his own car around the country and no one think it unusual. It cheers one up, somehow.”

(Photo courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library)