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These days, Salida seems blessedly remote from the traumas and spectacles of presidential politics. But Salida was once a division point on a transcontinental rail route, so things were different in 1948.
That was the last year that presidential candidates
routinely traveled by train, rather than airplane. Their
rail trips since then, such as President Clinton's
Twenty-First Century
trip last week, have been
publicity stunts, not the day-in and day-out stuff of
hustling votes.
Chaffee County Democrats used to hold a Give 'em
Hell, Harry
dinner every year, and they'd always
mention that it was named for the last president to visit
Chaffee County.
But I seldom heard more, so I finally ventured to the local library and looked through the microfilmed copies of The Salida Daily Mail-Record.
While scanning for a Truman will visit
headline
during September or October of 1948, I hit a big surprise:
Gov. Warren Will Speak In Salida September 17th.
Frances E. Warren? Perhaps governor of Wyoming then?
No, it was Earl Warren, governor of California, and Republican nominee for vice-president on the ticket headed by Thomas E. Dewey.
I've heard Republicans rail against the liberal
criminal-coddling Warren Court
for so many years that I
had forgotten that Earl Warren was a Republican governor of
California, just like Ronald Reagan, and that Warren was
appointed chief justice of the United States by a
Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Warren's eastbound GOP Victory Special
reached
Salida at 1 p.m that Friday. School was dismissed, and the
band led a parade to the depot, where about 5,000 people
gathered.
(I wondered whether that was an exaggeration, since there's not much room down by where the depot stood before Phil Anschutz had it torn down in 1985. But you can stand 5,000 people on half an acre without suffocating them, and Salida's population, then as now, was about 5,000.)
Warren's train stopped for 20 minutes, and he spoke from the observation car at the rear.
He promoted development. The western states have the
natural resources to be an empire: the minerals, the lands.
And if we can conserve this water, if we can conserve our
minerals for all of the purposes that minerals can be used
for, if we can develop the industry here in the west that
will process those minerals and make them useful for the
people who will be here, then this western country has a
great destiny.
He also promised that California would never take one
drop of water
that belonged to Colorado, and his train
pulled out for Cañon City.
At 9:40 p.m. on the following Monday, Sept. 20, the 17-car Truman re-election special rolled into Salida, following stops in Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Cañon City. His train had crossed Kansas the day before, but with no stops for speeches, because Truman refrained from campaigning on Sundays when he thought people should be in church.
Salida security was tighter for a president -- no parking was allowed within a block of the depot that day. He drew only 2,500 people, but the high-school band played again, and, judging by the newspaper account, the crowd cheered with more zest that Warren's.
(Civic pride compels me to note that Salida was not a
whistle stop
on Truman's whistle stop
campaign.
A whistle stop is a place where a train does
not stop regularly. Salida was a division point, and every
train stopped here.)
As he did at every opportunity, Truman attacked the
do-nothing 80th Congress.
The Republicans were for
the man who has $1000 or more in his pocket,
and
I'm trying to look after the man who has to work for a
living.
Sometimes I fantasize that it would be good for this country if campaigns were still conducted by train. Candidates and the national media would be exposed to industrial zones, rural backwaters and other places not seen from jets and tarmacs. The opinion-molders might see an America other than their two coasts connected by United Airlines. And how wonderful it would be to just stroll down to the depot on a pleasant fall day, to see and hear the living, breathing candidate, not some electronic simulacrum.
But then I remember a conversation with the late Harold Thonhoff, former county sheriff. I asked if remembered the Truman visit. He did, then frowned.
I'm sure glad they don't campaign that way any
more,
the sheriff said. We couldn't handle all the
Secret Service, advance people and media types that they'd
have now if a president rolled through here. It would be
like an invasion.
So maybe it's just as well that we're in flyover country now, and presidential campaigns seem to happen on a different planet.
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