Fire Drill Gets Captive Crowd For FDR Jr.
April 29, 1960
A Boone County school principal confirmed today that he called a fire drill this week to get students outside to hear an address by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., stumping this state for Sen. John Kennedy.
Averley Brown of Sherman High at Seth described it as "a good civics project for anyone, Republican or Democrat" and "I'm willing to let any public official come in."
He said the school is required to have two fire drills a month and "this was just one way of getting them outside."
According to the principal, Roosevelt's visit "was as good a time as any" to have one of the required drills.
He added that notice of Roosevelt's scheduled appearance near the school come to him through one of his teachers who asked that Roosevelt be permitted to speak a few minutes at the school.
Brown insisted Roosevelt's speech "was in no way political," and "I don't play politics in school."
Earlier in this campaign, young Roosevelt complained because his car was held up by a West Virginia funeral procession.
Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn) was legging it down a St. Albans street today almost before the city had stirred.
As he left his Charleston hotel to begin a campaign swing to Huntington and Logan with many stops en route, he told reporters, "I want to tell you you're in for trouble:I got a full night's sleep."
He wasn't exaggerating. He was setting a fast pace in another day's campaign against Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass) for the May 10 West Virginia primary.
Humphrey ran into a dozen or so youngsters on their way to school. After asking them about their homework, he told them, "We're going to have to run somebody to best Mr. Nixon. Tell your mommies and poppies I want your help."
He gave each of them a Humphrey button.
At an insurance company office, Humphrey asked Mrs. Elizabeth Hutchinson, the assistant bookkeeper:
"Mind if I go back and meet these people?"
She assured him he was welcome.
"Girls," the senator said as he marched from desk to desk with a fistful of campaign buttons. "I'd like to pin these on. It gives me a little more time with you."
Last night, on a campaign television program, he said that even though it might appear justified for the government to buy and stockpile coal as it does grain, "It's not wise to take one evil and make two evils."
"The present farm program is a miserable failure."
He said the farm surplus program had proved a dismal and expensive failure for the government and a headache to the farmers.
"Agriculture Secretary Benson has no conception of farm management or economics," he added. "President Eisenhower has spent more money in seven and a half years on the disastrous farm program than all the presidents before him:clear though to Washington."
Humphrey also challenged a White House statement issued Thursday in which he related what money and foodstuffs the present administration had provided to distressed areas, such as in parts of West Virginia.
"I couldn't believe it when I read it," Humphrey said.
He said he went to a food market Thursday afternoon and purchased the actual commodities and amounts the government distributes as the monthly allotment to unemployed and welfare cases in West Virginia.
"Here's what they are," he said. "Ten pounds of flour, five pounds of corn meal, one pound of lard, one pound of rice, 13 ounces of dry eggs and four and a half pounds of dry milk.
"I'll let the people themselves judge how adequate a diet that is for a month."
The total retail cost for that monthly allotment, he said, was $3.89.
"That is what the President calls 'very material assistance'," he said.
"I am amazed that the President would have the effrontery to boast about cash distribution for food purchases under the National School Lunch Program when he and his administration constantly opposed my efforts to increase these appropriations.
"I am even more amazed that he would boast about the special milk program:which I sponsored and his administration has opposed."
By Bob Mellace
Daily Mail Political Editor
Gov. Orville L. Freeman of Minnesota told a State College audience this morning there is no excuse for unemployment, hardship, hunger, crowded schools and crowded hospitals in the United States.
"Our economic system simply isn't functioning at capacity," according to Freeman, who came here today from Washington to campaign for Sen. Hubert Humphrey.
Accompanied by his wife, Freeman drew a good crowd of college students. The 41-year-old chief executive was Humphrey's assistant when the senator was mayor of Minneapolis. Now serving his third term, he was elected on the Democratic-Farmer-Labor ticket.
Freeman acknowledged that his state has had economic distress in the northern iron ore regions, just as this state now has in the coal fields. But he said the nation as a whole is not producing at capacity.
"Here are people who need things and here are stores loaded with things to sell. But some kind of economic law says production and need cannot come together. I say that law is a lot of nonsense," Freeman declared.
This country cannot permit this to continue, the governor added, "and we stand indicted in our failure to use the knowledge and the power he have, and to use it to serve people."
Humphrey has "the creative and imaginative thinking that can translate to action and build the kind of world we can build," Freeman continued.
With this action, he added, the next 25 years can be the most wonderful in the history of mankind, and Americans will look back with disgust on the present as they now look back with disgust on the depression, he said.
Freeman was to have talked at 10:30 a.m., but because of a mixup in schedules he arrived during a college Fine Arts Festival. Addressing the students then was a representative of the German vice-consul in Cleveland, Dr. A. Frank.
The German official told of the problems of West Berlin and Russian plans to make it a free city, after which he believed they would take it over.
Freeman took a cue from this to put in a plug for Humphrey. When the Berlin crisis was hot, Freeman said the senator flew to that city and went on television and radio with Mayor Willie Brandt.
Freeman said Humphrey tried to assure the Berliners, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the United States would not leave them at the mercy of the USSR.
Freeman called this "an example of the kind of creative thinking and action that have characterized his whole life."
At 2:30 p.m. he was to attend a coffee-reception at the home of Mrs. Maggie Belcher in Dunbar, accompanied by Mayor Averil Ramsey of St. Albans.
Two appearances by the governor are planned tonight. At 8 p.m. he is to attend a Cabin Creek Democratic club rally in Chelyan Junior High School, and at 9 p.m. a meeting at the B'nai Jacob Synagogue.
Muriel Humphrey Meets City "Friend"; Recital Covered
By Claudette Rashid, Of the Daily Mail Staff
Mrs. Hubert Humphrey arrived in Charleston late Wednesday evening from an early week schedule of "coffees" and receptions in Wheeling, Wellsburg and New Cumberland.
Yesterday her itinerary:a boast to her husband's presidential campaigning:had her appearing "on-the-street" with Senator Humphrey at the Federal Building shortly after noon.
It's new faces, new questions, new curiosities everywhere she goes but she handles everything beautifully. She recognizes an occasional newsman or a photograph in the crowd and beams her smile at them.
Yesterday, she met a "friend" of the family.
Mrs. I. E. Buff had met her sister-in-law, Mrs. Frances Howard, who told the Charlestonian that when the Humphreys came to town "be sure to introduce yourself." She did. The photographer caught them chatting away like two old friends.
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