Don't ask Paul Yost for some inside dirt on the Kennedys or the Nixons. You won't get any scandalous information about the Eisenhowers, Roosevelts or Johnsons out of him, either.

Well, there is one thing about LBJ. It seems the 35th president was a bit vain and secretive about one subject: His feet. They were two different sizes.

"His secretary told us his shoe size was in a safe," Yost said. "He didn't want people to know one size was bigger than the other."

As a Secret Service agent during five administrations, Yost often had access to such delicate information. These days, the retired Vista resident politely entertains some questions about his old career, but is tight-lipped when people try to find out a little too much. He's more at ease talking about his four decades as a competitive bowler in tournaments around the nation.

"I've been asked to write my memoirs," he said. "No way. It's (the First Family) a private family. They're supposed to have some privacy."

His loyalty to the oath he took as a Secret Service agent extends beyond repeating private stories about White House inhabitants. Asked how many agents worked with him, Yost makes a zipped motion across his lips.

"They get a good salary and a good retirement," he said as a way of explaining why Secret Service officers remain loyal to their oaths.

They're not called the Secret Service for nothing.

An opportunity

In his years in the White House, Yost's career spanned three wars, one assassination, one assassination attempt and one president who died of natural causes.

His working life began early. Yost was 13 when his father died, and at 15 he went to work in a North Carolina paper-box factory, where he stayed for 10 years.

"I got smart and taught myself how to take a civil service exam," he said. He took a job as a police officer in Washington, D.C., attended the University of Maryland at night to study police administration and worked for one year as a cop before learning of a job opportunity in the Secret Service in 1943.

"It was better than fighting these drunks in the street," he said. "A policeman's job is dangerous."

Not that being a uniformed Secret Service officer stationed outside the White House was the safest job in the world. Every tourist who approaches the gate is a potential threat, and with no special training for the job, Yost quickly learned to read people and listen for key words.

"Somebody came up to the gate and says, 'I've got to see the president,'" he said. "That's a trigger word, got to. He's got a shoe box. I say, 'What's in the shoe box? He says, 'Candy.' I say, 'Let me see,' because I've got to open it and see if it'll blow up."

In this case it wasn't a bomb; the visitor was a candy seller, and he wanted to ask the president for a federal appointment. Yost had him sent to a mental hospital.

Such is a day in the life of the guards who form a line between the most powerful seat in government and the sometimes sinister, often bizarre world on the other side.

Roosevelt

"Roosevelt, you might say, was an aristocrat," Yost said about FDR. While the class division between the president and the average person was tangible, Roosevelt was not one to lock himself away from the public, even during World War II.

Yost remembers standing at the south gate of the White House opposite Pennsylvania Avenue when the president would leave on Sunday-afternoon drives.

"People said, 'Is the president coming out?'" Yost said about tourists near the gate. "I'd say, 'I don't know.' You have to tell lies. You can't tell anyone the movement of the president."

Roosevelt would drive out in a convertible -- unthinkable in today's world -- with Secret Service agents in cars leading and following.

Eleanor Roosevelt was even more insistent on being free to venture out.

"She didn't want us to follow her when she went shopping downtown," Yost said. "So we didn't. She's the boss."

FDR died on April 12, 1945, two years and a day after Yost joined the Secret Service. It did not come as a surprise, he said.

"I saw him two weeks before he died, and he looked very bad. The ones closest to the White House knew he was a dying man."

Yost watched at the gate as helpers loaded Roosevelt into a Lincoln that would take him to a train station for a ride to Warm Springs, Ga. He and another officer on duty were among the last ones at the White House to see the president alive.

"The other Secret Service man there made the remark, 'We may not see him again,'" Yost recalled.

Truman

"He was the best president out of the six," Yost said about Truman. "He was a down-to-earth guy and he treated us fine, but he didn't appreciate us as much as after the Blair House shooting."

On Nov. 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attempted to kill Truman, which they thought would bring attention to the cause of Puerto Rican independence.

The Truman family was staying at the Blair House while the White House, just across the street, was being renovated from 1948 to 1952.

While Truman was napping upstairs, the two gunmen approached the house from opposite sides and opened fire, wounding three White House policemen but never entering the building.

Collazo was shot in the chest and collapsed on the house steps. Torresola was shot in the head and killed instantly. The officer who had shot Torresola later died of a gunshot wound. The other two officers recovered.

Yost was not part of the shootout, but among his duties that day were to collect the bloody clothes from the steps.

Things changed after the Blair House shooting. The sidewalk outside was closed -- as Yost said it should have been all along -- and Truman began to appreciate the Secret Service more.

"Truman was a real nice man," Yost said. "He liked to walk in the morning and tried to get away from us. I guess he thought no one would bother him."

Yost still is amused by memories of Truman trying to slip out for morning walks. Once while taking the trolley to work, Yost looked out and saw the president walking alone, unrecognized. Yost recognized two watchful undercover agents, however, keeping an eye on their unsuspecting boss.

Yost began his longtime interest in bowling during the Truman administration, taking up the sport to relax at the end of his stressful day. Maj. Gen. Harry Vaughn, a World War I friend and military aide of Truman, suggested a two-lane bowling alley be built in the White House basement, and some Missouri supporters commissioned its construction in 1947 for the president's birthday.

"He inaugurated it, but he never played again that I know," Yost said about Truman. "He played poker."

Yost was the founding president of the White House Bowling League in 1950. His team, The White House Five, played in tournaments around the country.

Eisenhower

Though it took an assassination attempt to convince Truman of the Secret Service's importance, Dwight Eisenhower came to appreciate it after an Easter Egg roll in 1953.

"Five thousand kids mobbed him" on the White House lawn, Yost recalled. "We had to make a human chain. We couldn't get him back to the White House." The president was brought back inside through a side entrance.

"He had to learn the hard way that people idolized him," he said.

Most people had no idea that Eisenhower suffered a serious illness at one time during his tenure, and that Vice President Richard Nixon filled in for him while he recuperated in Denver, Yost said. Ike's health conditions since have been brought to light.

"The public didn't know that he was seriously ill at one time, but we knew it," Yost said. "We were paid to keep our eyes and ears open and our mouths shut."

Yost said Eisenhower loved watching John Wayne movies in an East Wing theater, where he sometimes joined the president as his guard.

"He delegated things," Yost said, thinking back on his impressions of Eisenhower. Leaning forward, he whispered, "And he had a short temper."

Yost remembers Eisenhower practicing golf on the lawn and sometimes returning home displeased with his performance. "He'd come in with spiked shoes, clippity-clop, on the marble floor," he said. When Ike arrived at an elevator and had to wait, he kicked the door and Yost had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing.

"So that was Ike," Yost said. "Nice fellow, though."

In 1955, Eisenhower had the bowling lanes moved across the street to the Old Executive Office Building, now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Yost and the White House Bowling League continued to use it.

Kennedy

In one of the Secret Service's darkest days, John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Yost was on duty at the White House.

He doesn't recall where he was when he heard Kennedy had been killed, but said the Secret Service knew about a half hour before the public.

"I was in charge of a detail of a bunch of officers. We had to rush over to the house of the new president. We could almost touch hands around Johnson's house."

The officers and agents circled the house, unsure whether the assassin had acted alone or whether more might be waiting to strike. From their vantage outside Johnson's home, Yost said the Secret Service men could see the new president.

"He was scared looking," Yost said. "I wouldn't blame him. I'd be, too."

He has had requests for behind-the-scenes information about Kennedy, but Yost said he has no interest in filling them.

Johnson

Yost was bowling with the White House Bowling League one day in 1968 when word came that Lyndon Johnson wanted to bowl.

"We got the word, 'Scatter, the president's coming to bowl,'" he said.

Johnson asked Yost to put his shoes on for him and to stick around to keep score. While Lady Bird Johnson was a regular bowler, the president was not, and Yost said he could tell LBJ's form needed some work. Still, he waited to be asked before offering advice.

"Mr. President," Yost finally told LBJ. "Keep your elbow straight and your wrist straight, and the ball will go down naturally." What he couldn't say then, he admits, was that people built like the president often put an unintentional spin on the ball because they must swing it past their ample backsides.

With Johnson suddenly interested in bowling, Yost said the White House league decided to encourage him by surprising him with new bowling shoes. Finding the president's shoe size took some investigative work, however, and they finally learned the secret of his two sizes from his secretary.

Yost retired from the Secret Service in 1967 at age 53, before fellow bowler Richard Nixon took office, but he did see him later in San Clemente, where Yost moved in 1973.

"He was a nice man," Yost said about Nixon, who still remembered him from the Eisenhower administration. "He didn't seem like he was in a hurry just because he was an ex-president. He came and shook hands and said, 'How are you, Mr. Yost?'"

At 89, Yost still is an active bowler. His personal best is a 254, and in 1981 he was inducted into the Nation's Capital Area Bowling Association Hall of Fame.

"I had a 178 game Wednesday," he said recently. "Pretty good for an old fellow."

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.