The Rave for Ave

While an Indian quintet wailed the rhythm, a squaw named Evening Star one afternoon last week led a new brave named Eagle Chief arm-in-arm through a dance in the Great Falls, Mont. airport lobby. Eagle Chief, off the reservation, is New York's Governor Averell Harriman; the shuffles and wails were convincing demonstration that Harriman had sloughed off his "not active" role to hit the campaign warpath with all its handshaking, speechmaking, political backslapping and Indian ceremonials.

Working for Support. On a six-day, 6,780-mile junket through seven western states, Harriman moved fast and campaigned hard. He ranged across Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Nevada in a chartered DC-3. Before he turned homeward, he had made 14 speeches, held ten press conferences, worked a backbreaking 17-hour day that sapped staff members and newsmen. On the 64-year-old New Yorker, the crushing schedule seemed to work like a tonic.

Wherever his plane touched down, Ave had a handshake for those nearest him in the sign-bearing ("We Rave for Ave") crowds mustered to meet him. He preached a single, hard theme: Dwight Eisenhower's Administration has betrayed the farmers, surrendered to big business, destroyed the U.S. position in the world.

He asked a single favor: "I need your support and help." This was not the request of a favorite son. Said Harriman at Billings, Mont.: "My name will be before the convention as a candidate."

The western audiences generally reacted warmly, thought they saw in Harriman some hints of another New Yorker they remembered. There was the same highbred pronunciation and frequent use of the phrase "My friends." At a Spokane breakfast meeting, Harriman was introduced as "another Franklin Roosevelt."

"Workin' on the Railroad." For Squire Harriman, the swing through the west was educational as well as profitable. Without valet, in towns where tailor shops were locked for the night, the governor used an old technique of traveling salesmen: to ease out the wrinkles, he hung his suit in hotel bathrooms, turned on the hot water, let the room fill with wrinkle-removing steam.

He reacted to good news with boyish enthusiasm. When a midnight conference at the Rogers Hotel in Idaho Falls produced all twelve Idaho convention votes for him, he roamed the corridors searching for newsmen so they could telephone their papers. He found only one of his caravan's traveling reporters, who explained that the others were asleep, a call to New York where it was 3 a.m. would reach only the janitors. Harriman insisted the others be routed out. Said he: "This is the time they can get the story."

It was not coincidence that led Harriman to the land served by his family's Union Pacific Railroad. Good railroading makes the Harriman name respected throughout the territory. When Ave landed at Pocatello, Idaho, the Idaho Falls High School band blared out with "I've been workin' on the railroad."

By week's end, when he boarded an airliner at San Francisco to return to New York for a ten-day hospital stay (prostate operation), Harriman had turned a slow start into a fast finish, capped by an announcement from Oklahoma that the state's 28 votes were his. The firm Harriman box score:

New York....................94* Oklahoma...................28 Idaho............................12 Wyoming.......................5 1/2 Utah...............................3

Another half dozen votes from Colorado, Nevada and Washington brought his total close to 150. The count was far short of the 687 votes that will nominate a Democratic candidate. But in one week Campaigner Harriman had made remarkable progress.

*About four of New York's 98 votes are expected to go for Stevenson. However, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., who has supported Stevenson, said this week he will vote for Harriman on the first ballot if the governor is presented as a favorite son.

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