Hobnobbing with the First Lady

Elena Volpert Mappus, a former student who is now a public relations executive with Southern Company in Atlanta, recently posted on her Facebook page, a photo of herself and a small group of other folks who had been interviewing former president Jimmy Carter about  energy matters for a documentary about the company.

As sometimes happens, the photo triggered a flashback for me, a memory of the night of April 6, 1976, the night of the Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin. I was teaching journalism at Marquette University then and moonlighting as a reporter for  WISN radio in the summers, on weekends and on election nights. I was out with my tape recorder that night. 

The contestants were Morris Udall, U.S. representative from Arizona and Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer and former governor of the state, who was traveling the country with his suit bag slung over his shoulder in an improbable quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had had successes in earlier state primaries, but the polls were showing him behind Udall, and the  returns that night consistently showed Udall leading.

I joined a horde of other journalists in a corridor leading to Udall’s suite at the Hotel Schroeder, on Sixth St., Udall did not come out to talk to us, but I vividly recall his wife pushing through the crowd to get into their suite. She talked, but only to say, “Let me through, please.”

My thought was “Let me out,” and I left the Udall watch and drove across town on Wisconsin Ave.  to the grand old Pfister Hotel on the east side of the Milwaukee. There, supporters and news people were gathered in a ballroom, and the supporters were glum. 

Someone at a desk near the door handed me a peel-off label my with “Carter Campaign News Media Wisconsin Election Night” typed on it. That’s up on a wall as I write, alongside the press card issued to me by the Chicago Police Dept. when I went to work on United Press International's national broadcast news desk 14 years earlier.

I stuck the label on my lapel, and almost immediately in the midst of that crowd, I came on an old friend and former boss from my UPI days, John Pelletreau, the broadcast news editor, chatting with UPI political reporter Arnold Sawislak. We talked for awhile, and at some point, I asked if either knew what floor Carter’s suite was on. Arnie told me the floor—whatever it was—and I went for an elevator ride.

The first person I saw when the doors opened was Roslyn Carter. She was in a housecoat studying a sheet of paper with returns on it. I introduced myself. Behind her was a giant of a Secret Service man who looked at me menacingly. “Shall I take care of this guy?” he asked her. “No,” Mrs. Carter said. “He’s o.k.” The Secret Service man backed away, but stayed close enough to deal with me in a hurry if it turned out I wasn’t o.k.

I switched on my tape recorder. “What do these numbers mean?”  “It looks to me like Jimmy’s pulling ahead. ”  she said. She had columns of figures on that sheet and was adding them up and down and across, and it appeared to me that what they were telling her was right.—her husband  had gained on Udall and had a slight lead.

I asked her a few questions, and she was generous in talking to me, but I didn’t keep her long. It was obvious she wanted to go get the latest numbers. I went back downstairs, got a drink from the bar, and found Pelletreau and Sawislak again to brag about my exclusive. 

I don’t know what it time it was that the returns gave Carter his victory, but he finally showed up in the ballroom to the cheers of his supporters. There’s nothing so boisterous as the cheering of a crowd whose team—or candidate—is  losing only to emerge with a victory. That one was raucus.

The volume rose even more when Carter held up a copy of the first edition of the next morning’s Milwaukee Sentinel with the banner headline “CARTER UPSET BY UDALL.”  The picture, of course, was reminiscent of the famous one of President Harry S Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune after his upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election.
 

While the crowd roared, I left the ballroom and drove back to the radio station to edit my tape and write stories for the late night and early morning newscasts. 

The victory helped Jimmy Carter secure the Democratic presidential nomination and, in the general election, beat the incumbent, Gerald Ford to become President of the United States.

As for me, I had four years when I could slip into conversations the line, “Well, when I interviewed Roslyn Carter….”