“It has been said that the Appalachian is keenly interested in politics largely because it affords him a respite from boredom. Respite from boredom indeed!”
40 Acres and No Mule
WHEN MARRIED PEOPLE decide to go wading in political waters, it would be well if they made certain their partners are willing to advise and consent. We learned this the hard way.
When it was my time, I had perhaps a 25 percent grudging consent from my husband. When it was his, he had none from me. And each of us consistently refused to advise or consent!
Henry and I had never done more than vote until that fall of 1960 when John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the Democratic candidate for the presidency. We had lived here in the county, first up on what we hereabout call “Giles Ridge”; then we built our log home down in the valley. Conscientiously, we always voted. That was all.
But in 1960 John Kennedy caught my imagination and, though he dolefully shook his head over Kennedy’s chances, Henry was a loyal Democrat. When I was approached by Pete Walker, a young Adair County Democrat, and asked to do some writing for the state Democratic Committee, I was excited and willing and Henry was eventually persuaded.
We went to Louisville and checked into the hotel and I met with various and sundry people and I was told the women’s organization needed a pamphlet to be used as an organizational guide. Everybody seemed to have some ideas as to what should go into the pamphlet and they were kicked around considerably while I soaked them up, pooled them, began to sort them out, started choosing and selecting, began to envision a format.
A young commercial artist was assigned to the project the next day to do the illustrations. We secluded ourselves and went to work. She was remarkably quick on the draw and we worked well together. With that alertness of creative people everywhere she met my ideas with instant understanding, her facile pencil limning them in. Within three hours we had drawn up a skeleton of the desired pamphlet. There were cheers from everybody, and Henry and I came home where I could work more leisurely and lengthily on the written material. Inside of a week it was finished, and again we drove to Louisville to deliver it to the artist for complete drawings and to see it go from her to the printer. It was basic, simple and concise and to this day I am quite proud of it. I believe that it was used, with local variations, as a model by the Kennedy people in many other states besides Kentucky.
One thing led swiftly to another. This particular writing job done, Pete thought I should come into the campaign on a more active basis and on the state level. Barkis was willing but Henry felt rather joyless about it. “You don’t know,” he warned, “how hard they may work you. What about your high blood pressure?”
This is the bane of my existence, this constant battle with that dratted needle on Dr. Todd Jeffries’ little gauge. “I’ll take care of my high blood pressure,” I stated.
“You’ll see Todd Jeffries first,” Henry retorted. “If he says no, you won’t do it.”
To my delight, Todd grinned and said it probably wouldn’t kill me. Henry had no choice but to let me get into the campaign.
I was made one of three state vice-chairwomen. What it amounted to was regional chairwoman, for my job was to direct the women’s organization and work in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Congressional Districts. I was also to continue writing when there was need.
It was one of the most exciting, thrilling, most rewarding experiences of my life. It was tremendously exhilarating to be driving hundreds of miles each week, organizing, writing, exhorting, making speeches, driving on and doing the same thing over and over and over again, watching trends, checking and rechecking, conferring, deciding, the smoke of battle thick all about. The pace was relentless from the beginning but it went beyond that toward the end. The last two weeks of the campaign there was no real sleep, just snatches, no real food, just snacks, and never any real rest at all.
Always timid about making speeches when I or my books were the subject, I thought I might dread them in the campaign. To my delighted surprise I found I was a natural campaign orator, glib, poised, unshakable and intuitive about crowd responses. Never able to remember the name of a solitary person I meet in connection with my own work, I found I could instantly place politicians, that I rarely forgot a face or a name, and to this good day I believe I could travel through the counties I haunted most and recall immediately most of the people I met and worked with. I began to wonder if I wasn’t wasted as a writer. Perhaps my real calling was politics. After all, didn’t I have an aunt who had served two terms in the Arkansas legislature and hadn’t I listened to her tales of her own campaigns interminably and didn’t I take to campaigning as naturally as a duck takes to water? Henry paled at the implications and said, “Over my dead body!”
I think I was good at organization but it’s difficult to know. I had written the blueprint for it but the personnel was chosen higher up. But I know I was a good speaker and that I campaigned well. I was so full of enthusiasm, so full of my own honest convictions about this man John F. Kennedy, that I never gave myself any thought at all. Introduced from the platform — and I must admit more people may have come to see and hear the writer than the campaigner, but they sure got the campaigner — I plunged straight into the message that had become all important to me. I passionately wanted Kentucky to go for Kennedy. It didn’t, and I was heartsick. Not even the knowledge that we had done our best and some of us had worked far beyond the call of duty, to the point of illness and exhaustion, was any consolation. I wept bitterly and my political mentor, young Pete Walker, seeing my tears that night when Kentucky went for Nixon, grinned and patted my arm and said, “You’re a real fighter. You lose hard.” I did. I sure did. It took me weeks to get over it.
We met so many wonderful people — all the county and district people, the state people and the national figures. I have so many wonderful memories of those hundreds of unwearying, dedicated women who could from somewhere always call up another spurt of energy, drive another hundred miles, arrange another rally, check their precincts one more time. I don’t know anything else that was quite like that sisterhood we formed during that campaign. It was immensely satisfying.
We came to be genuinely fond of Keen Johnson, our own candidate for the Senate that year, and his wonderful sister, Christine, who never seemed to grow tired or weary. If she spread herself as thin over the other two regions as she did in mine I don’t know how she survived. For there was never a rally, county or district, that she didn’t show up, her beautiful grayed hair in perfect order, her smile warm and friendly, her hand ready for a good grip, saying, “I’m Keen Johnson’s sister,” and offering her little box of Keen Johnson buttons. Keen Johnson lost because John Sherman Cooper is a magic name with Kentucky farmers. He has gone to bat for the tobacco program too many times.
I have never been able to decide which was the more thrilling for me, the day I met John Kennedy, or the day I sat on a platform beside Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. The Kennedys fought hard for Kentucky. We had the candidate himself in the state several times. On one of his visits he was scheduled to speak in my own region at Bowling Green. I was not that day invited to the platform. The candidate was too important for a vice-chairwoman. His prestige demanded the state chairwoman herself. But Joe Covington, one of our inner circle of friends, perched me directly above the platform in a window of the courthouse. Friends in the audience in the square kept waving at me and I waved back blithely. I didn’t know until later that I had leaned so far out they had feared for my safety. All their waves had been warnings — get back, get back, don’t fall! He was directly under me and if I had spit it would have dampened his auburn thatch.
My moment came backstage when I was introduced to him. The thrill was mine alone. His eyes were glazed with fatigue. He didn’t even see me. He said, “Thank you. Thank you very much,” and passed on. But I offered touches to my friends for a dollar each for a week and promised to keep my hand unwashed until they had all had a chance!
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., was in closer contact for a longer period, at any rate. It was a district rally and it was held at Glasgow. This time I was on the platform. He was to be the principal speaker, but he was late and we had to begin without him. It was an outdoor rally and the platform was the bed of an outsize truck swathed in bunting. Some minor speaker was exhorting when suddenly there was a stir behind me, then a huge, broad-shouldered man clambered up the ladder and sank into the next chair. I knew him instantly because he looked so like his father. He mopped his brow and straightened his shoulders, checked the crowd for size, settled himself and whispered to me — my presence on the platform meant “official,” of course — “How’s it going in Kentucky?”
I hissed back at him, “Religious issue.”
He was explosive. “Damn!”
That was the extent of my conversation with him and I didn’t ever really meet him, but probably for twenty minutes I sat jammed next to him, so close our shoulders touched all the time. He was restless during that twenty minutes. None of us ever really listened to speeches. Among our own state speakers who spoke so often and so valiantly we knew all the variations on the theme. We had heard them so many times we could have given them ourselves word for word. During speeches we watched the crowd responses. We knew instantly when a speaker was missing. Sometimes he could be signaled and if he was one of the more alert ones he could shift and switch and bring the crowd’s interest back. But if he was one of the stolid ones, and there were a few, there was nothing to do but sit agonizingly while he plowed stonily on and lost the crowd. We had one of the stolid ones ahead of Franklin, Junior. He should have wound up quickly once young Roosevelt was on the platform. Instead, he continued to the bitter end.
But young Roosevelt certainly didn’t miss. Amazed, awed and at one point a little frightened, I watched as the crowd surged forward when he had finished speaking to hold up their children for him to touch, to reach out themselves and shake his hand, to murmur, “God love you, you’re just like him.” They crowded so close and in such numbers that once the old truck bed tilted and I thought God help us all if they turn this thing over! Seeing the danger he clambered down and delivered himself to them, let them maul him, went among them. I remember thinking jubilantly, he’s done it. We’ve got this county sewed up. One of my bitterest memories is looking at the tabulation from that county on election night and seeing the majority Nixon ran up. Those people who mauled Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., voted for Nixon in November. They couldn’t overcome their mortal fear of a Catholic in the White House. It was so easy to misjudge crowd enthusiasm and count it in the credit column. We did it over and over again, I’m afraid.
We had most of the Kennedy sisters in Kentucky at one time or another, and the mother and even the mother-in-law. We had five of the fabulous Kennedy teas. We had Lyndon Johnson and his wife, and it was pleasant to meet them all. But of all the new people I met, among those I enjoyed the most were some very close to home.
It is said that in Kentucky there are not two major political parties, but three . . . the two factions of the Democrats and the Republicans. For thirty years the Democrats have been split, former Senator and Governor Earle C. Clements leading one faction, former Senator and Governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler leading the other. It is said that only each can beat the other and that any political candidate must have the nod of one or the other to win. There are those who say this split goes back much further than thirty or forty years. It goes, they say, clear back to the days of William Jennings Bryan and his cross of gold, the followers of Clements being the natural inheritors of the gold standard and the followers of Chandler being the natural inheritors of the crusade for silver.
I wouldn’t know. I only know that Henry and I had usually voted for Clements candidates without knowing they were Clements candidates. We knew almost nothing about factions or in-party fighting. We were the kind of voters who read the newspapers, try honestly to sort the truth from the trash and try intelligently to make a choice between candidates. I have since learned that this is impossible, but since we can’t all get into the “smoke-filled” rooms where the decisions are made, it must suffice for many of us.
We did certainly know that Pete Walker was a Chandler man. But he was the Adair County Democratic Chairman. We assumed all good Democrats worked with him.
We certainly learned in a hurry that they didn’t and we learned in a hurry that they wouldn’t work with me in Adair County because I was sponsored by Pete Walker.
Pete gave me no instructions at all. He didn’t mention the factional strife. Either he believed it better for me to learn it for myself or he had no idea how unbelievably ignorant I was. An office was set up for me in Columbia, a telephone was installed and I was in business for Keen Johnson and John Kennedy, ably assisted by Henry and a marvelously capable secretary, Martha Barnes Burris.
Practical politics is really the art of knowing the right people . . . whom to see, who is in control, who can deliver. From the top right down through the precincts it works that way. And a good politician sees not a chaotic, conglomerate mass of individual workers; he sees blocks of votes and he sees the man or men who can control and deliver them. He makes it his business to know those men and to grapple them to him, if possible, with hooks of steel.
The first time I heard those magic words, “See so and so,” Pete Walker said them to me.
We were progressing rapidly with county organizations but there was no county campaign chairwoman in my own county. It seemed obvious the state chairman was leaving that appointment to Pete. “What shall I do?” I asked him, which seemed natural enough to me.
“See Cornelia Hughes,” he said. “You can trust her.”
I knew Cornelia Hughes and her husband ran a motel and restaurant. Henry and I had eaten at their place a few times but I had never met her and to the best of my knowledge had never even seen her. When I went to see her I was met by a small, trim-figured, high-breasted, frowning, rather bristling little fortyish woman. “Are you Mrs. Hughes?” I asked.
She admitted she was. I told her Pete had suggested I talk with her about the campaign in Adair County.
She sat down and in less than thirty minutes she gave me a blunt, plain, salty lesson in practical politics. I learned from Cornelia Hughes, not Pete Walker, precisely what the situation was in Adair County. The Chandlerites were out and though Pete would continue to be county chairman until December he was in a lame duck situation. The Combs faction were in. There was deep and undying bitterness between the two factions. Pete had not told me to ask her to take any active part in the campaign but I was beginning to pick up a few nuances for myself. I knew he wanted her to play some part and it was probably county campaign chairwoman. I never got a chance to ask her because she told me bluntly before I could that she wouldn’t touch the job with a ten-foot pole. “That crowd downtown would cut me up in little pieces,” she said. She continued, “If they’ll accept her, your best bet would be Nannie Willis.”
I was so fantastically ignorant I had to ask her who “that crowd downtown” were! I shall never forget the way she looked at me. She must have thought Pete was out of his mind to be using me on the state level. As I left she called to me, “See Mrs. Bolin. She’s one of the cochairwomen in the regular organization. She’ll probably help you.” Again she grinned. “She’s Chandler.”
I had determined, however, to see a few men of that crowd on the square. They were businessmen with whom I had had some dealings. Loyal to Adair County, we had always bought as much clothing, shoes, food in Columbia as possible.
So I called on several of the key men and was as frank and honest as I knew how to be with them. I got nowhere. Their distrust of Pete Walker was too great. And I was now tagged Pete Walker, willy-nilly. When I asked for suggestions for campaign chairwoman, they seemed to have no one to suggest. I mentioned Nannie Willis. She’d be fine, they said. I thanked them and then I invited them to make use of my headquarters in any way they liked. It was, I told them, much too big for me. They could have the entire front for their county headquarters and since the state committee was paying the rent it would cost them nothing. Gravely, they agreed to consider it. For all I know they are still considering it. Somebody moved Pete Walker’s desk in, I had the telephone installed and an extension for their use, and they could have been in business. The only drawback was that twice, only twice, one of them darkened my door. I finally used Pete’s desk as a display counter for literature and the extension telephone was never lifted off the hook except when I, caught in the front of the building, used it instead of racing to my own desk.
I called on Mrs. Bolin and found her delightfully willing and evidently competent. She had little time to give to campaigning, however, for she was her doctor-husband’s receptionist, but she did procure the voting lists for me and she did have a list of precinct committeewomen, essential in our organizational plan.
I did not ignore Adair County because there was so little cooperation and such marked coolness toward me, but I did decide to concentrate most of my efforts and time on the other forty-eight counties in my region. There was no point wasting valuable time butting my head against a stone wall. But I must admit their attitude puzzled me considerably. I wasn’t Pete Walker. I was pure and simply John Kennedy. If Pete Walker, whose shrewd mind files away every voting fact and retains it and who knew beyond doubt I had consistently voted against every candidate of his, had the good sense to latch on to me in this campaign, I thought it pretty silly of these people to oppose me. I had voted with their candidates and they knew it. And I would have done a good job in their county if they had let me. I take a little credit, also, that I did not allow their enmity to drive me from further dealings with them. I could easily have never bought another nickel’s worth from any of them. Instead, even during the campaign when I needed new dresses and shoes, I bought from them just the same. They should have bowed in shame.
Their indifference caused me to turn more and more often to Pete’s people for my needs. I would come up needing five cars to take a group of women to a rally, ten cars to take my young collegians to another rally, a committee to do this or that, some funds for newspaper advertising. I had no place to turn for these small favors and gratuities but to Pete’s people. They were the only ones willing and they never failed me.
The Rose Kennedy tea, however, was so important that while I didn’t have full cooperation from the administration people I had more than I expected — especially from the women.
That tea really hit us smack in the face. It was, of course, Pete Walker’s doing. The opportunity at hand, the native son wanted his hometown honored. Mrs. Kennedy was in Kentucky to address the Democratic Women’s Club in convention. She agreed to stay over one day and appear in our town. Pete was so wistful about it that I fought even Grover Gilpin, Pete’s chief aide, and Cornelia about it. They shook their heads over it. “You can’t do it. They’ll kill you.” Meaning, of course, the administration people.
I got on the phone to Pete. “Grover and Cornelia say we can’t handle it.”
He hesitated. “Well, all right.”
But he sounded so little-boy disappointed my heart smote me and impulsively I said, “You want this pretty bad, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Quickly I decided. “All right. I’ll ram it through for you. What’s the minimum crowd we have to have for it to be a success?”
Over the telephone I could see his grin. “For the newspapers, call it a thousand. If you can string three hundred out I’ll be satisfied.”
Columbia at the last census listed 2164 souls. It has no bakery. We had to have the usual display of silver and linens, tea and coffee, mints, salted nuts and cookies. The cookies must all be homemade. If I do say so myself I have a flair for this kind of thing. I dug in my toes and began organizing and I just plain organized the willing to death.
There were committees for flowers, for cookies, for silver, for linens, for hostesses, and for myself I reserved the job of working up the crowd. Over the telephone I called twenty county chairwomen and I didn’t ask, I commanded, that they send five cars full to this tea. I didn’t brook any argument and I didn’t say please. I said, in effect, this is an order from high command. This is John Kennedy’s mother. You be here! And I gave them times to arrive so there wouldn’t be any dreadful gaps. I wanted people arriving constantly, no great mob or rush, but no embarrassing lulls either.
Because I had been so brutally ignored by the administration people, one of whom ran a restaurant also, I calmly decided the tea should be held in Cornelia’s private dining room. Cornelia Hughes was such a loyal follower of Pete Walker’s that nobody could mistake the move. But my dander was up. I was tired of all this factionalism. We had a president to elect. If the only people who would work with me were Pete Walker’s people, then I was jolly well going to work with them.
Pete’s loyal aide was Grover Gilpin, a roly-poly, deep-eyed, jolly and genial man I liked very much. In my lowest dumps he could always make me laugh. There was also Ed Janes, a big, hulking bruiser of a man. His wife was Thyra, platinum-haired, ample-hipped, a broad, laughing woman who owned a flower shop and in her spare time worked in ceramics. They were all interesting to me. The administration people wrote to headquarters: “We might be more active here if the Pete Walker clique weren’t so active. They are the roughneck element of the county.”
The state campaign director, a man of unimpeachable honor, grinned when the letter came to his desk and tossed it to Pete. Pete grinned and tossed it into the wastebasket. The thrust may not have included me but I was highly intrigued. It was the first time in my life I had ever been called a roughneck!
We put on the Kennedy tea and we put it on in high style. We had the loveliest of the sterling tea and coffee services and the sweetest of our older women to pour. How pretty they were that day, and how gracious, and what unmistakable ladies they were. We had exquisite flowers from home gardens, some of the most beautiful arrangements from the hands of Ilene Jeffries, my doctor’s wife. And we had the best homemade cookies in Kentucky. Mrs. Kennedy so liked them she asked for a box to take home with her, which we were so pleased to give her. When her famous son did his spot interviews in north Kentucky later that month and was given coffee and cookies in a Gold Star mother’s home he asked if the cookies were homemade. “My mother tells me,” he said, “Kentucky women make delicious cookies.” We swelled with pride. She could only have meant our cookies.
We had a goodly crowd. It fell short of the thousand I had aimed at but it well exceeded the three hundred Pete had said he would be satisfied with. I have forgotten now the exact figure but it was around seven hundred. The administration boycotted us except for the women who had rallied round and a few brave men. One or two of the state barn boys — highway employees — even showed up though most of them stayed away. Several of the businessmen on the square showed up, too. I felt nothing but contempt for them.
Henry and I were coming to like the Pete Walker people immensely. They played the best bridge in the county and they were witty, clever and interesting. During the campaign, in spare moments, we began playing bridge with them and enjoying them enormously. We did not find them roughnecks at all. On the contrary, Pete Walker had as good a library as my own and was very well read. His library was weighty with political history, naturally, while mine leans to the classics and biography. Cornelia was also a discriminating reader, and Thyra’s slim white fingers did wonders with flowers and tubes of paint. We found them blunt, candid, perhaps a little rough, especially on the administration people, but roughnecks, no! We also found them quickly warm and loyal and sympathetic, to each other and to anyone whom they trusted and liked.
About midway through the campaign the Adair County chairwoman, Mrs. Bolin, died. Her death came suddenly and unexpectedly although she had not been well for a week. None of us, however, had thought she was so ill. I was called in the middle of the night. Early the next morning I called Cornelia. “My God,” she said, “I’ve got to get down to Thyra’s. There’ll be hundreds of flower pieces to make up. She’ll need all the help she can get.”
The rest of the story is Thyra’s. Cornelia didn’t wash her face, comb her hair or even dress. Over her nightgown, which was long to her ankles, she threw on a housecoat whose hem was sagging, crawled into the truck and took off. She worked all day and into the night making the floral pieces and then she went with Thyra to the funeral home to help arrange them. “There she was,” Thyra told me, “nightgown dragging, duster with its hem loose, every hair on her head declaring its independence, barefooted except for those disreputable mules she wears. People were calling and signing the register and milling around. If she’d had on a Dior original Cornelia couldn’t have been more at ease. She stalked around placing pieces and when we got through she flopped in a chair and blew the hair out of her eyes and said, ‘God, what a day!’ ”
That was Cornelia. Eighteen hours by the clock to help a friend in a crisis. That was the woman that the wife of one of the administration men said, “What makes Cornelia go around looking like she does? She could surely comb her hair!”
When the election was over and we had sadly lost Kentucky we continued to see much of these people. I was personally devoted to Pete Walker. I had not been converted to his brand of politics and he knew it but as far as I was concerned his brand of politics made no difference to friendship. I didn’t think I would ever be called on to clash with him for Henry and I had decided we would never ever again campaign actively. I had been made ill, we had spent far too much of our own money and I was thrown dreadfully behind in finishing a book I had laid aside. Politics and writing, we told each other, didn’t mix. Besides, my blood pressure wouldn’t stand any more campaigning. Next time, Todd Jeffries said, he wouldn’t answer for the consequences. So, prosit, skoal and goodbye to politicking.
Came 1962 and the in-party fighting over the Senate race in the Democratic primary. The administration had a candidate and Chandler had a candidate. Pete was organizational chairman for the Chandler candidate. It was of only rhetorical interest to us. We had begun the writing of A Little Better Than Plumb and were deeply involved in it and had committed ourselves to a June 1 deadline. We were not personally concerned. We meant to, and did, vote for the administration candidate.
Suddenly and before I could blink an eye, we were spang in the middle of it. Henry came home from Columbia one day and confessed that he had agreed to be campaign chairman in our county for the administration candidate!
I stood on my hind legs and did considerable roaring. “Have you lost your mind?” I shrieked. “Have you any idea what you’ve let us in for?”
“I haven’t let us in for anything,” he snapped back. “You aren’t involved in this at all. Nobody has asked you.”
He didn’t heave any furniture around but the inference was clear. I was to mind my own business. I was, in other words, to shut up. The man of the family was about his own affairs.
I shut up but I did a lot of silent fuming. I thought I knew that nobody wanted one member of the firm without the other. I couldn’t have campaigned for Kennedy in 1960 without Henry. I didn’t much believe he could campaign now without me. I didn’t much think they wanted him without me. What they wanted, I believed, was the team — the Gileses. But if my role was to be the silent little woman, so be it. It was a new role for me but I was loyal. If Henry wanted me to stay home and fry potatoes while he campaigned for the administration candidate, I certainly had a lot of potatoes to fry.
His chairmanship lasted precisely forty-eight hours. The first thing suggested to him, as chairman, was that I be installed in the county headquarters, full-time, to keep it open and run it. That rocked him considerably. At home I was given my orders again. “You are to stay out of this!”
I assured him that was precisely what I meant to do. And I meant it. I wanted no part of this campaign.
This was all on a Thursday. On Friday we were invited to attend the reception for the administration candidate and the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Louisville as guests of a man and his wife who were quite prominent in the campaign. Henry hesitated. I felt some sympathy for him, but not much. In the 1960 campaign he had particularly detested the rat-race pace, the eternal driving, the endless conferences, the pressures and tensions building up. Henry is not geared to smoke-filled rooms nor does his basal metabolism lend itself kindly to rat-racing. Henry wins the race eventually but he does it like the tortoise, not the hare. He must now have had his first uneasy feeling of here-we-go-again.
To save time and space, the administration couple asked us to go to Louisville with them in their car. We accepted and off we went early that Friday morning.
The reception for the administration candidate was actually the opening of his official headquarters. They were in the same old suite we had used in 1960. We had only to walk through those familiar doors again, into the smoke and the hubbub, into the milling groups of the same people we had seen so often in this place, for him to realize sickeningly what he had committed himself to. Worse than that, with old campaign friends and compatriots pulling and tugging at me, gleefully welcoming me into the fray again, he had to face the brutal fact. There was no way under the sun he could keep me out of it short of putting me in a dungeon. His involvement meant my involvement and there was no way out of it.
We hadn’t been at the reception thirty minutes, he told me later, before he decided he had been naive and that he must get out and get out before things got cracking. But he had no opportunity to tell me for we were kept on the move all afternoon and had no private moments. I only knew that he didn’t seem to be having much fun. His face was white and grim-looking.
I wasn’t having much fun, either. The day before I had had a slight sore throat and a low fever. Henry had seized upon it joyously as an excuse not to make the trip. Alas, I had wakened minus the sore throat and minus the fever and his excuse had gone with the wind. Now, both were returning. My throat felt increasingly dry and painful and I knew I had fever again. There were aches and pains all over my body, especially down my back and legs.
Furthermore, on the seventh floor of the old Seelbach Hotel, now the Sheraton, that Louisville hotel that is so old and historical and so associated with Democratic politics, so gracious and comfortable and charming, in which we had stayed so often in 1960, in which we had had so much fun, one figure was missing. Every time we had ever checked into the Seelbach Pete Walker had been there. I kept expecting to see him come lunging out one of the inner doors, his face split with his wide grin, his hand outstretched in his habitual politician’s handshake. But he was across the street in another hotel, in another man’s headquarters. It wasn’t right and I couldn’t make it right.
It was a bibulous afternoon. The hospitality room was flowing and Henry imbibed deeply. Stuffed with antihistamines, I had to refrain except for a couple of screwdrivers. I could not anesthetize a single one of my painful memories.
We went to the dinner, couldn’t hear a word of the speeches and left early. By this time I was very nearly irrational with fever and so full of aches I could no longer conceal my misery. I went to bed fairly early, praying for morning and my own bed where I could be as sick as I pleased and be no bother to anybody.
Pete and Grover descended upon us in the wee hours not knowing Henry had decided to abdicate. I could have killed them both. They knocked on the door and awakened us. Henry dressed and bade me stay in bed. He joined forces with them in the room of the people we had come with. I have never been able to make heads or tails of what went on in there for two hours. It’s certain that Henry was made angry all over again and it’s certain that he did not announce his decision to get out of the campaign. For all I know he may even have reversed his decision. Already giddy with bourbon when he left our room, he came back at three o’clock the most totally soused I had ever seen him in all the years of our marriage. When I asked him drowsily what had happened, he snapped at me, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Well, fine, I didn’t particularly want to talk about it, either.
I composed myself, and Henry went to bed.
What happened next was sheer farce. It was worthy of a playwright. It was bedroom comedy at its best. It belongs on Broadway. Henry suddenly sat bolt upright in his bed. “This room gives me claustrophobia. I can’t stand it. I’m going home.”
I sat bolt upright, too. Neither of us liked the room assigned to us. It was a little box in the annex. At the Seelbach we had been accustomed to the best. Because we often worked in our room Pete Walker had seen to it that we had the best, space and quiet for comfort and the luxury of a suite. We couldn’t help comparing. “How,” I asked, “do you think you’re going home?”
Henry blinked at me in the dim light of his bed lamp. “In the car, of course.”
“We don’t have our car with us. Have you forgotten? We came with those people.”
He was pulling on his pants. Even in the dim light I could see how stubbornly his jaw was set. “I’ll wake them and tell ’em we’ve got to go home. You’re sick.”
I yelped. “I’m sick, all right. But you’ll do no such thing. I won’t let you be so rude.”
He was tucking in his shirttail. “I am going home!”
I tried to reason with him. All he would say, obstinately and mulishly and repetitively, was, “I am going home.”
I crawled out of bed and began struggling into my own clothes. For all I knew he meant us to hitchhike.
Suddenly he had an inspiration. “The bus!”
He called the bus station and learned the first bus to Columbia didn’t leave until morning. He banged the receiver down and sat on the side of the bed. Then he had another inspiration. “A taxi!”
This sent me into hysteria as I tried swiftly to calculate what a taxi from Louisville to Spout Springs would cost. Henry was weaving toward the telephone again. Suddenly I had had enough of all this nonsense. There was one person and one person only who could help me get this sweet but sodden and determined husband of mine home. “Call Pete,” I said.
In his alcoholic haze and misery Henry made no objections. He rang the Watterson but got no answer from Pete’s room. “Try Grover,” I commanded.
We had seen Grover at various intervals through the day and vaguely I remembered he had said he meant to drive home after the dinner. As he waited for the connection I reminded Henry of this and I prayed Grover hadn’t left yet. Maybe we could hitch a ride with him.
Grover answered immediately. The one-sided and very slurred conversation I overheard seemed to indicate that Grover had changed his mind about going home. He had, in fact, gone to bed though not to sleep. Suddenly Henry faced about, puzzled. “Pete’s on the phone, now.”
Galvanized, I leaped to the phone and grabbed it. I said just two things. “Pete, come over here. I need you.”
Never in my life have I heard anything more reassuring than his calm and unexcited reply, “I’ll be right there.”
I frankly admit that at that moment I couldn’t have cared less what the political implications were of turning to the “opposition.” Pete Walker was to me the only stable, staunch, reliable person in the whole situation and I knew that outside of myself he was probably the only sober one. His voice, quiet and calm and full of affection — and nothing or nobody will ever convince me that Pete Walker doesn’t have great affection for both Henry and me — quieted me instantly.
He came, big and rumpled and barely dressed, his shirttail hanging out and his big grin beautiful to see. I flew to him and he took me in his arms and patted my shoulder. “We’ve got to go home,” I said.
Grover had come right behind Pete.
Pete asked only one question. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve got the flu,” I said, “but otherwise I’m fine. I’m a little hysterical because Henry wanted to call a taxi.”
“Fine,” Grover said. “We’ll leave as soon as I can have the car brought around.”
“Wait,” I yelped suddenly as we were about to leave. “Those people! We have to leave a message.”
His hat on the side of his head, Henry peered at me. “I’ve already written a note and stuck it in their door.”
I didn’t ask what he had said. I was too lightheaded to care but I imagine that, written in a sprawly, barely controlled hand, it was virtually incoherent. Tiptoing past their room I got the giggles. “This is going to be the biggest scandal in the county!”
It was! I went to bed with my fever and flu and saw nobody for nearly a week, but the furor swirled about us. The next day a car full of administration people came out to the house and Henry went out to the car to talk to them. He told them honestly and candidly that he had to get out of the campaign because of my health. That I was sick in bed right then and the doctor had warned me about my blood pressure. That he had not expected me to have to help, so he would have to ask them to let him off the hook.
They had no alternative but to accept his resignation, but it was said all over town we had been kidnapped. It was said we had been tucked back under Pete Walker’s wings. It was said that we had sold out. It was even said that Pete Walker had something on us big enough to compel Henry to withdraw and force us to leave Louisville. None of it was true, but Grover would have been less than human if he hadn’t boasted around the square that the administration people had taken us up to Louisville but he had brought us home.
We didn’t see the last of that little political foray until 1963, when without warning the bookmobile librarian suddenly had to resign. To help out Bob Allender, our good friend, Henry agreed to drive the bookmobile until he could find another driver and librarian. It is to Bob’s eternal credit that he never told us of the threatening letters he had from Governor Edward Breathitt. But we finally got one ourselves. It said, in effect, “Get right with the party or get fired!”
The administration people had never believed us and had taken the matter to Frankfort, the state capital, and had told the governor a Pete Walker man was driving the bookmobile. Henry himself had to give it up about that time because he had a small hemorrhage from an irritated esophageal ring, and the constant bouncing around in the big van over the rough country roads to the little one-room schools did it no good. We were afraid it would return.
But I am certain that to this good day the administration people think they got him fired. When Henry resigned, then, and not until then, did Bob Allender tell us what pressure had been brought to bear on him. He had actually been threatened with his own job, but he had remained loyal.
Thus we have viewed with considerable alarm the confusions politics can involve one in and we point with very little pride to that particular campaign. I might add one more thing. The administration candidate lost!
But you learn a few things and you forget much. This happens and you muddle through. I shall have a hard time, however, forgetting the people who meddled, misinterpreted, wouldn’t believe us and in one way or another caused us much vexation. The scars are still there and I do not see or speak to the particular couple who caused us the most trouble. I have long forgiven the others and we think they finally realized their mistakes. But I have felt called upon to ponder a philosophical saying: “This world may one day perish through the evil professional do-gooders wreak upon it.”
I don’t much like do-gooders. I am like the Appalachian. I do my good in my own personal way, by being a good neighbor, by lending a helping hand, or loaning money to a trusted person in temporary trouble, by not gossiping and above all by not meddling.