P.S. Read Free Page A

who work all week as shoe dogs, secretaries, shipping clerks, and telephone operators—even nurses—come to dance, make dates, and, they hope, make love. My brother, a popular shoe dog at the Boston Store, usually does very well here. He is a natural-born dancer, tells funny stories, and has a way with the girls. He is seventeen.
    It is 1924. I remember the year quite well. Fighting Bob La Follette ran for president. There were two other candidates, one of whom won. It made no difference which. It might have made a considerable difference had Bob won. That’s why he didn’t have a ghost of a chance. He did poll five million votes, and that was something—he being neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Nineteen twenty-four. And where have all the flowers gone?
    Oh, I shocked and grievously disappointed Miss Henrietta Boone. She was my seventh-grade teacher at McLaren. I was her favorite. I sat in the front row, not merely because I was short. “Louis,” she purred (not Louis as in the Sun King; she pronounced it as in Lewis Stone, the Prisoner of Zenda), “are you for Calvin Coolidge or John W. Davis?” Innocently—or was I damnably perverse even then?—I piped, “Fightin’ Bob La Follette.” She was startled, poor dear. Her wig went slightly askew. I could see the terrible hurt in her eyes. Why have I upset such gentle hearts? Why couldn’t I have been my cute little button self and said the right thing: “Keep
Cool with Coolidge”? It didn’t take much to make her day. I failed her.

    In the autumn of 1960, at the reunion of the University of Chicago Law School, class of ’34, a straw vote was taken. Kennedy versus Nixon. The luncheon at the Loop Club wasn’t bad. The drinks were OK. A nice fat feeling of self-satisfaction all around. Those attending were lawyers who, from appearances, had done not too badly. Slight paunches and jowls closely shaven. The vote was something like: Nixon, 45; Kennedy, 41; Fighting Bob La Follette, 1. A few uncertain laughs. That was all. Several of my fellow alumni looked toward me. They smiled benignly. He’s a card, that one. I smiled, too. Charlie Chaplin.
    I realize Bob has been dead many years. And yet it is a vote I was too young to cast in 1924. I did tell one luncheon companion, of raised eyebrows, that Bob La Follette, dead, had more blood to him than the two young make-out artists, who were more machine than human. His eyebrows shot up even higher. He turned to another to discuss real estate. I went for another drink. The bar was closed. Oh, the Midway, the Midway, where burning Veblen loved and sang . . .
    Miss Boone did forgive me. On inaugural morning, the following March, she allowed me to listen on the school’s crystal set as President Coolidge took the oath of office on the front porch of his Vermont home. It was difficult to make out what he said. Perhaps it was because I had only one earphone; the other was being used by Dorothy, another favorite of Miss Boone. Perhaps he had nothing to say.
    I could easily make out what Burton K. Wheeler said. During
the previous fall, the Montana senator, Fighting Bob’s running mate, spoke at Ashland Auditorium. It was only two blocks from my mother’s rooming house. (Two years later, she sold it and leased a men’s hotel near the Loop.) And one block from Dreamland. My father arose from his sickbed and took me there. He liked Bob La Follette. My mother sniffed. She liked only sure winners. Wheeler was damning the malefactors of great wealth, loud and raspy and clear.
    The vigor of his voice forty-five years later astonished me. I had visited his Washington law office in 1969. I was interested in his memories of the Great Depression. The rasp was still there, and the bite. He told of a trembling little senator from Missouri who considered resigning because “they’ve indicted the old man. He made me everything I am.” Tom Pendergast, political boss of Kansas City, was Harry’s boss, too. Wheeler had talked Truman