photo #9460231

History with Jacob This was the inside of the White House in 1950.Two years earlier, the leg of Margaret Truman’s piano broke through the floor and into the the dining room below.The house had been falling apart for years. Floors heaved. Walls creaked at night, and President Truman joked that he could hear ghosts in the halls. An inspector checked the beams holding up the second floor. They were split and gouged. He reported they were “staying up there from force of habit only.”At one point, the president’s bathtub started sinking into the floor. Truman pictured himself crashing through the ceiling into a formal tea.The day after he won the 1948 election, engineers told Truman it was time. So he moved out.Workers gutted the White House down to its outer walls and spent three years building a new house inside the old one.The Trumans moved back in 1952.