On the Trail

"I just can't understand what all these fellas are so worked up about," said an old man in overalls. He was listening to Harold Stassen on the green courthouse lawn at Dallas, Ore. "This man and Governor Dewey come all the way out here and wear themselves out. We ain't got that much voice in the convention--we only got six electoral votes."

There were a lot of Oregonians who felt just like the old man. They had never had so much attention from a candidate for state office, let alone from a presidential aspirant. But Harold Stassen desperately needed Oregon's twelve convention delegates to get his bandwagon, slowed down in Ohio, rolling again. And Tom Dewey wanted to prove his ability as a vote-getter.

As this week's election neared, the candidates crisscrossed the state, shaking hands, endorsing reclamation and irrigation, belaboring each other over the Communist issue, posing for pictures without number. They agreed to a full-dress debate this week. In Pendleton, Dewey got a ten-gallon hat and talked to Chief Sunset on the Mountain. In The Dalles, Dewey posed in a regulation feather headdress, last worn by Rumania's Queen Marie on a visit in the '20s. At the same town the next day, Stassen shook hands with Chief Tommy Thompson, but balked at donning his war bonnet.

Stassen's rugged physique gave him the advantage in this man-killing itinerary; in a single day, traveling by plane and bus, he covered 823 miles, made eight full-length speeches in seven cities.

The candidates' paths met at Cascade Locks, where Mayor Russel Nichols, a Dewey rooter, had arranged a turnout for his man. But Dewey arrived to find that Harold Stassen had boldly stolen his meeting. Stassen was busily autographing campaign leaflets. Newsreel cameramen, hoping for shots of the candidates together, had backed a truck across the road to make sure that Dewey would stop.

The Dewey bus approached cautiously. Then, on orders from Dewey, it squeezed through between curb and truck and zoomed on past as the disappointed crowd booed. Mayor Nichols ripped the Dewey button from his lapel and replaced it with two Stassen buttons. "This burns me up," he declaimed. "Dewey was pretty small." Gloated Stassen: "Many interesting things have happened on the old Oregon Trail." One interesting fact: the odds on the primary results had dropped from 2-1 in Stassen's favor to even money.

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