Biggest Land Slide Ever

I think I can make the claim that my father, Maurice W Conway,  was responsible for one of the greatest political landslides in the history of the Democratic Party.

It happened in New Buffalo Township, in Berrien County, Michigan, across Lake Michigan from Chicago. New Buffalo Township surrounds the town of New Buffalo, which was around 2,500 people when I went through K-12 there, but was down to 1,884 by 2,000, at which time 2,468 people lived in the township.

When I was there, people in that area, in the township and town of New Buffalo and the two unincorporated burgs that were included in the township, either worked at one of the small businesses in town or for the consolidated school district, but more worked across the state line in Michigan City, Indiana, or further along the lake toward Chicago at one of the big steel mills at Burns Harbor or Gary, Indiana.

We had moved there from Ohio when my Dad, who drove for a big trucking company, was transferred to Chicago. Dad was, and in may ways remains, a mystery figure to me. He was on the road most of the time and died when I was 19 and I never had many significant discussions with him. Dad had not quite graduated from high school, he told me once, but there was a book shelf in the hallway and I remember books showing up there now and then with impressive titles. The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck was one, and one was Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which I thought had a pretty catchy title, but it would be years later, decades really, before I found out what that book's significance is within the Left and in anti-coloinial and Civil Rights circles. It's not a widely read book, but it's a seminal, important book, and the fact that my Dad had it, the fact that he even knew about it, just deepens the mystery about him.

I know that he and Mom had named me after Franklin Roosevelt (except for the middle name, Delano, the story goes, "because Roosevelt had a lot of enemies, too.") I know that Dad had been in the Labor Movement when he and my mother started out, first in Miami, where he organized laundry workers and was the go-between between the segregated Black and White locals, then as some kind of an official in another union that represented some of the workers at big public works projects in the South. Those had been started by the Roosevelt Administration's WPA, the Works Progress Administration, and were still being built in the mid 1940s. Most were big hydroelectric projects where they dammed up rivers. (The Rural Electrification Administration, the REA, which financed the power lines that distributed that power to the entire rural American countryside, which the commercial power companies had always deemed not worth what it would cost them, came about in large part because of the efforts of a good New Mexico Democrat, US Senator Dennis Chavez.)

By the time I came along in 1952 my parents were back in Ohio and my Dad was driving a truck. He retired from that in the late 1960s, and was selling real estate part time when he and another guy decided to organize a Democratic Party in New Buffalo Township. There wasn't one before that, and all the township elected officials were Republicans. Southwest Michigan is a Republican area. I don't know the story of that, either, but it was, owing to being in the lee of Lake Michigan, a big fruit growing area -- apples, cherries, peaches, pears -- and the growers were locally powerful people who depended on migrant labor and low property taxes.

I can't say I know anything about Jim Keller, Dad's partner in organizing the New Buffalo Township Democratic Party, except that he was a retiree from Chicago who sat in a wheelchair and lived in one of the big houses along the lake. I also can't say I know much about their strategy or tactics, except that I remember that to me, they didn't seem very sophisticated, and the candidates they recruited were kind of surprising, too. They were just regular people, people from church and people whose kids I played baseball with and people who worked at the school, people I saw all the time. They didn't fit any image I had of politicians.

But when the election came, their entire slate won. I remember joy in the house that night, of course, and being proud of my Dad, who was, and still is, pretty much of a mystery to me, but who engineered a turnaround in one jurisdiction's governing body -- the Supervisor, the Clerk, the Treasurer and all the Trustees of New Buffalo Township -- of 100 percent, a rate of effectiveness that might be hard to beat.

Frank Conway

I will start our list of political stories with one of my favorite.

Many of us remember the 1980 New Mexico Prison Riot. 33 inmates died at the hands of other maniacal prisoners.  Prison guards were brutalized.  However, many of the prisoners wanted no part of the chaos and this is where weenies come into the story.

In 1980 I was serving as Director of the Alcohol Beverage Control Department.  We were in a battle to reform the state's corrupt liquor laws.  I  had been appointed to the post by Governor Bruce King.  I had served as his news secretary during his first term and worked in his campaign for a second term a few years later.

As I recall the riot started on a Friday evening.  Saturday the Governor called me in because his press secretary was on vacation and he needed me to help out with the army of press from all over the country.  It was a challenge.

Now, the prisoners who wanted to avoid the chaos and violence in the pen somehow worked their way into a large exercise yard.  There were hundreds of them there with no food, shelter or adequate clothing in the freezing February weather. Governor King called in the head of the National Guard and said he wanted blankets and food dropped to those prisoners.  Twenty four hours passed.  The prisoners were still unaided.  When we told the Governor he went ballistic....something he was never prone to do.  He called in General Franklin Miles to his office and we got to witness one of the few 'chewing outs' the Governor ever issued.  He told Miles that if every single inmate in that yard didn't have a bag of weenies, buns and a blanket with in two hours that Miles would be busted to KP duty.

About two hours later a Huey helicopter was raining weenies down upon the huddled prisoners.  That was a sight to see.

Let's Try This

All of us who are interested in politics have a favorite story about a politician or an event.  It could be historical or recent.  It might be humorous or very traumatic.  But most of these things are very entertaining and educational.

I propose in this new blog to publish from you, the reader, some of  your favorite stories.  I only ask that you mail them to me at NMPoliticalLore@gmail.com.  I will not edit them nor change them, but this process will allow for some discretion in keeping away some crazy stuff.  You may sign them or not but the comment page will be open for those who disagree with your view of history.