Gone Again Faherty

Month ago Illinois's kinky-haired Senator C. Wayland ("Curly") Brooks and Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick's Chicago Tribune dredged up out of oblivion a ready-made Republican candidate for Mayor of Chicago: jovial, burly Roger Faherty (TIME, Jan. 4). His hour was brief: last week Roger Faherty was back in oblivion again.

Chicagoans had muttered about the way Roger Faherty's nomination had been announced in advance by the Tribune; some hinted that the Tribune had made a deal with its onetime friend--shrewd Democratic Mayor Edward J. Kelly. (A more likely explanation was current in Chicago newspaper circles: that Tribune Managing Editor James L. Maloney had broken some confidential information from "Curly" Brooks.) Faherty had turned out to be a poor campaigner; there was nothing to do but give him the sack.

To the State capital at Springfield one day went Illinois's G.O.P. National Committeeman Werner W. Schroeder and Cook County G.O.P. Chairman John T. Dempsey. From early afternoon until midnight they conferred with ambitious Governor Dwight H. Green in the old, rambling Governor's mansion. Roger Faherty was in Springfield, too; but except for a brief visit to the mansion he spent his time fending off reporters at the Leland Hotel. Next day he was eating lunch at the hotel when he got a telephone call. Not stopping to finish his meal, he rushed to the Governor's home. There he was introduced to tall (6 ft. 4), heavy (225 lb.), white-maned George Baldwin McKibbin, State Director of Finance. It was the first time the two had met. Mr. Faherty was politely told that he was being replaced by Mr. McKibbin. (There had, in the meantime, been an all-important telephone call to Colonel McCormick, who apparently approved.) Said George McKibbin later: "Mr. Faherty was a perfect peach."

Dopesters thought that the change would make but little difference in the April election. Same day, standing in front of a huge, nude painting of the birth of Venus in the Morrison Hotel's Mural Room, Ed Kelly had been handed a 6-ft. stack of petitions by his ward heelers re-nominating him as Democratic candidate for Mayor. Ed Kelly had said: "There comes a time in every man's life when he says, 'I've been in long enough, let's give someone else a chance.' But that time is not now. I'm ducking nothing."

Ed Kelly seemed on his way to Term IV. When he heard of the Republican antics he cracked: "They've even been changing horses before they got to the stream."

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