Is This the Year?

When a pitcher seems well on the way toward hurling a no-hit game, players and fans go to outlandish lengths to avoid mentioning it. They keep fingers crossed and pretend nothing unusual is occurring. It is an old superstition; they are loth to do anything that might change luck.

Up in the 26th Congressional district of New York there were many crossed fingers this week. There was the dinkiest of dinky chances that Isolationist Congressman Hamilton Fish, Republican, might be defeated at the polls by Ferdinand A. Hoyt.

Backstopping their ethereal hopes were some concrete facts: Ferdinand Hoyt is the nominee of two parties (Democratic & American Labor); he has been endorsed by War Under Secretary Robert Patterson, Navy Under Secretary James Forrestal, both of whom vote in Fish's district; Fish won two years ago by only a 9,000-vote plurality (usually his plurality is 20 to 30 thousand); Fish has been publicly repudiated by his Party's gubernatorial candidate, Thomas E. Dewey.

To hook Fish in a district that has been Republican longer than the oldest oldsters can remember will take more than an angler's patience, more than luck. But this might well be the year. Ham Fish knows it. For the first time in his 22 years of political campaigning he has opened campaign headquarters, is working hard.

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