Nominee's Daughter

Well on her way to becoming the best publicized young woman in the U. S. last week was Peggy Anne Landon, 19, Alf Landon's daughter by his late first wife.

Vacationing on his rented ranch in Colorado's Roosevelt National Forest, the Republican nominee had to attend to some campaign business in which his daughter could take no part. A stream of big & little Republican wigs, including Oregon's Representative William Ekwall, Wyoming's Senator Robert Carey and National Finance Committee Chairman William B. Bell of Manhattan, stopped in to shake his hand, talk shop, tell him how bright his prospects looked.

Three members of his "brain trust"--Charles P. Taft, Ralph Robey and Earl Taylor--arrived from Topeka, to help polish up his July 23 acceptance speech. Senator Carey announced that, though they had not discussed any other solution to the farm problem, he and Nominee Landon had agreed that a permanent system of Federal bounties was to be deplored.

Alf Landon himself once made significant news when for the first time in the 1936 campaign he played the politician's trick of picking up a rival's catch phrase, giving it an ironic twist. Planning to stop at a Greeley, Colo. rodeo on his way back to Topeka for a special session of Kansas' Legislature this week, the Republican nominee was told that he would be driven around Greeley in a landau once owned by Mrs. Horace ("Baby Doe") Tabor. "A landau," smiled he, "just a horse & buggy for a horse & buggy candidate."

Most of the time Alf Landon was simply having fun and, except when he was having fun in a trout stream, Daughter Peggy Anne was never far from his side or from a camera. Even an illiterate could have learned, by following last week's news pictures (see cuts), that Peggy Anne Landon: 1) sat by a campfire with her father; 2) posed on a porch rail with her father; 3) ate a picnic supper with her father; 4) tossed snowballs with her father; 5) rode horseback with her father; 6) walked out on a jutting mountain ledge with her father. With quiet, handsome Mrs. Theo Cobb Landon fully occupied by her bouncing babies, Nancy Jo and Jack, it was plain that by autumn Peggy Anne Landon's face would be even more familiar to the U. S. public than Daughter Anna Roosevelt Dall's became in the summer of 1932.

Except for a fleeting appearance in 1933 when she was threatened with kidnapping, slender, brown-eyed, olive-skinned Peggy Anne first stepped into the national spot-light when she went with 79-year-old Grandfather John Manuel Landon to the Cleveland Convention last month, kept breathless cameramen, radio announcers, feminine newshawks and lady politicians on the run for three days. But she has long been well-known to Kansans. Left motherless at 13 months and reared by a soft-voiced, Irish nurse named Theresa Cahill, she was only 6 when her father began taking her on some of his oil-prospecting trips around the State. Ever since then they have been close companions. On his frequent nights away from home he always telephoned her at bedtime, and when he was home he would always hear her prayers, finish off with a rousing pillow-fight.

Later on, when Alf Landon's swings around the State became political trips, Peggy Anne often went along on those, too. Except for a year at the Madeira School in Virginia, she attended public schools in Independence and Topeka, was not very good at her studies, arithmetic especially.

Peggy Anne never had dates until she went to the University of Kansas two years ago. She has grown up to be a wholesome, affable, unspectacular Midwestern co-ed who likes swimming, tennis, horseback riding, boys, bridge, and bright colors, lives at her Pi Beta Phi sorority house, smokes occasionally, sips Coca-Colas, inclines to be gabby with girl friends, takes no part in extracurricular activities, is not overfond of her books. Newshawks covering her father universally admire her because she has not changed despite her sudden fame. As thoroughly normal a U. S. citizen as Alf Landon. she proved herself a worthy daughter when a reporter in Cleveland asked her what kind of President she thought he would make. "Well," parried Peggy Anne, "it's rather hard to think of your own father in that capacity."

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