Chicago sidelights stick to tradition
Convention’s ferment produces usual characters and banalities
By Meyer Berger
Chicago, Illinois – (June 25)
The Republican Convention Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing wishes all room-hunters might approach the scramble for quarters as cheerfully as a woman delegate from Connecticut did.
After considerable fuss and fret the subcommittee located a room on the Hotel Stevens’ 22nd floor and sent the delegate – chirrupy middle-aged lady – happily on her way.
She came back in about 20 minutes, still cheerful, but without the room. She told the committee:
Couldn’t take it. When I opened the door, I disturbed a gentleman in shorts who was shaving.
The subcommittee apologized singly and as a body, but the lady explained she wasn’t embarrassed or frustrated. She confided:
When I was assigned to a room at the 1940 convention, I found two men in shorts shaving in it.
The subcommittee has her wait around until they located another room and until they had checked and made sure it contained no men and no shorts.
Some of the elevator girls in Chicago’s hotels don’t seem to have quite caught the hang of stopping the cars in the right places nor of making them go up when they want to go the other way.
An irritable old gentleman tried to “tell off” one operator who took him right up into the Stevens Hotel Tower, beyond the last floor. After the girl had backed the car to the 25th, where he wanted to get off, he said, “Thanks for the ride, Miss One-Way Corrigan.”
The girl didn’t seem to mind a bit of poisonous criticism. She said, “No extra charge, sir, and thank you just the same.” She closed the door on his last comment, which started off explosively and as if it might not have been polite.
You run into some strange paradoxes in a convention city. Through the deviousness of political trumpery, you find the hotel lobbies screaming with all sorts of signs and banners announcing “Dewey Headquarters,” although Dewey workers keep reminding you that Mr. Dewey is not officially an aspirant for the Presidency.
On the other hand, you run into aspirants who have no headquarters, and can’t find any. The Subcommittee on Housing was faced with this problem when a Mr. Bowers of Georgia turned up and announced he was entering the field for the Republican presidential nomination. Last they heard of Mr. Bowers, he was still roaming Chicago for a place to hang his hat and stack his campaign literature.
An animated young lady wriggled her way into the “Bricker for President” room at Mrs. Bricker’s reception there for her husband and made the rounds, being introduced to all the notables. Finally, she reached a dignified, gray-haired gentleman who seemed to be getting a lot of attention, and managed to get an introduction to him to. She wriggled out again. “Who is that man,” she wanted to know.” “I didn’t catch the name?” “That’s Mr. Bricker,” she was told. “Who’s he?” she asked brightly. “I’m so interested in all this politics and everything.”
The first true signs of animation developed in this convention when photographers posed 15 models on the lobby staircase in the Hotel Stevens just after breakfast this morning. The girls wore Dewey sashes and were told off to different posts to hand “Draft Dewey” signs on customers.
An affable gentleman who seemed to be handling this department for the Dewey division assured reporters that “This show is spontaneous.” He said, “These girls are volunteers. They’re high schoolgirls and working girls, who are giving their own time for Mr. Dewey.” He said they just wanted political education.
One of the newspapermen spontaneously took one of the girls aside. “Where do you work, Miss?” he asked her. “I’m one of Vera Jane’s models,” she told him. “We all are.” It seems all the girls were spontaneously hired for the day from the Vera Jane Studio of Fashion Modeling in East Jackson Boulevard. And that their interest in political education was somewhat on the thin side.
The “Stassen for President” workers in the Stevens, all simple, friendly folk, got nowhere trying to tack their signs on one of the downstairs walls this morning. They gave up when they finally caught on that the wall was marble. Ingenious folk, they finally found some scotch tape that worked all right.
“Uncle Joe” Tolbert showed up today as delegate from Ninety-Six, which is the name of a cotton-farming community in South Carolina. “Uncle Joe” has been attending Republican conventions since around 1880, when he used to travel with his daddy, who was a delegate from Ninety-Six, before him. He voted for Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and likes to tell about the time Russell Alger “got beat” for the nomination in Chicago that year. “Uncle Joe” is around 75 or 76 now – he isn’t quite sure of the sum of his years – and he misses faces he used to see around. “Cain’t get used to not seein’ fellers like Elihu Root an’ Chauncey DePew an’ ‘Uncle Joe’ Cannon,” he tells listeners sadly. He’s a Bricker man this year, but seems a little befuddled by the way conventions are run nowadays. “Got a passel of young bucks up here who think they know more’n anybody, and blessed if I think they really do.” “Uncle Joe” wears all black, including a sombrero, favors his cane and makes quite a bit out of the fact that he never wore a necktie. “Never did like to fool with no tie,” he says fiercely.
Wendell Willkie’s ghost seems to haunt this convention. Dozing delegates started right out of their bobby chairs last night when a bellboy passed through shrilly calling “Mr. Will-kie, Mr. Will-kie.” Nobody found out what this was all about, but the general guess was that the call was for Mr. Willkie’s brother who lives out in Wheaton, Illinois. Other delegates were startled this morning by a grim-faced fellow who stood outside the Michigan Boulevard entrance to the Stevens for hours and glared at them as they entered. He wore a pie-plate-size campaign button with the single word – “Willkie.” And down in the bar in late afternoon, when shoulders and spirits seemed sunk pretty low by the heat and by general dullness, another gentleman unsteadily shoved his glass back for a refill: “Willkie and soda,” he ordered.