Old time political campaigning looks positively archaic by today’s standards.
Running for office today is largely a matter of having or raising enough money to buy television time and hire a large enough staff to use social media to one’s best advantage. Well, it also helps to look good on nationally broadcast debates.
Ah, but in the good old days, standing for election to public office, at least at the local level, was much simpler. However, that doesn’t mean it was easy. Case in point is a typewritten document on the travails of the country campaign trail found last summer in San Marcos among the papers of the late Dudley Dobie, book selling cousin of Texas writer-historian-academic J. Frank Dobie.
Whether Dudley Dobie wrote it (he did run unsuccessfully for the Hays County school board back in the 1950s) or whether it is an example of pre-internet hand-distributed, hand-typed anonymous humor isn’t known. But whatever its origin, it’s a fun artifact of times past.
“The life of a candidate,” the piece begins, “especially one who is defeated, is not exactly a ‘bed of roses’, according to the following report made by one candidate…:
It’s as much loss inventory as report:
-Lost four months and 23 days canvassing
-Lost 1439 hours sleep thinking about the election
-Lost 43 acres of corn and a whole sweet potato crop [Presumably from lack of attention on the part of the agriculturist candidate]
-Lost two front teeth and a whole lot of hair in a personal argument with…opponent
-Donated four beeves, five shoats, seven sheep, and nine goats to a county barbecue
-Gave away two pairs of suspenders, four calico dresses, $5 in cash and 13 baby rattlers [Presumably he meant “rattles,” not baby rattlesnakes]
-Kissed 126 babies
-Kindled 14 fires in kitchen stoves
-Cut 14 cords of wood, and carried 24 buckets of water
-Picked 9 bales of cotton, gathered 7 loads of corn, and pulled 476 bundles of top fodder
-Walked 4076 miles, shook hands with 9,596 citizens, told 10,101 lies; and talked enough to make [and] print 1000 volumes the size of a patent office record
-Attended 16 revival meetings, was baptized 4 different times, joined the church by confession of faith 3 times and twice some other way.
-Contributed $50 to foreign missions, made love to 9 grass widows, got dog bit 39 times
And then got defeated.
At least he didn’t have to pay for focus groups and opinion polls.
(An elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Mike Cox is the award-winning author of more than 40 nonfiction books. He and his wife Beverly escaped Austin for Wimberley in 2016.)
