16

MIKE,  MICHELOB  AND  YANKEE  BOY  LOOK  FOR  VOTES

            Every time Mike Kestner ordered beer from the 7-Eleven, he gave specific instructions to the man he called Yankee Boy.

            “Remember now.  A six-pack of Michelob.  Put it in a big paper sack.  Then get another paper sack--a small one--and put an extra bottle of Michelob in that one.  Understand?”

            Delivering yard signs in a political campaign was thirsty work.  Mike said he couldn’t understand how Yankee Boy managed to get along with only a couple of Michelobs a day, especially with him doing all that running.  Day after day, Mike would look in the rear view mirror and watch him, all smiles and bulging muscles, as he jogged along behind the pickup.  He always said Yankee Boy was too damn healthy and too damn good-looking to be a real person but all sorts of unusual people lived up North, especially around Washington, D.C. 

            Despite his misgivings, Mike had to admit that with Yankee Boy jogging behind the pickup, the two of them could deliver twice as many yard signs as any other team of volunteers working out of Jim Wright’s campaign headquarters.  

            Mike always drove the pickup.  This was one of the laws he laid down the day they started delivering signs together.  He said his 30 years as a Fort  Worth postman gave him the encyclopedic knowledge necessary to navigate the city’s streets. 

            “Besides,” Mike said, “I own the damn pickup.”

            He always steered with his left hand, with his elbow poking out the window.   In his right hand, he clutched the small paper sack and the day’s list of delivery addresses--the homes of Jim Wright supporters who had asked the campaign office to send them yard signs.  Chugging up one street and down another, Mike would stop the truck and point to a certain house.

            At this signal, Yankee Boy sprinted up to the pickup and grabbed a red, white and blue sign, Keep Jim Wright Working for Us, mounted on a sharp wooden stake. Then he jogged over to the house and deftly shoved the sign into at the lawn at a location easily visible from the street.   Average time for stop, signal, sign and shove: 90 seconds.   

            Every morning about half a dozen other yard sign crews gathered at Jim Wright headquarters to grab a cup of coffee and pick up their signs and the day’s delivery addresses.  They often marveled at the bristling efficiency Mike and Yankee Boy had achieved in making deliveries. 

            “How do you guys get ‘em out so fast?” one driver asked. 

            “Well, first you need a silly son of a bitch that likes to jog along behind the truck,” Mike growled.

            “Either that or a truck that runs on Michelob,” Yankee Boy shot back.

            The sign operation was an outstanding success.  By election day, 33,000 Tarrant County families were exhibiting Jim Wright signs in their yards.

            For the amusement of their fellow campaign workers, Mike Kestner and Yankee Boy pretended to be the odd couple of Jim Wright’s 1980 re-election campaign in Fort Worth.  The good-natured insults and curses they exchanged served only to put a sharper focus on their camaraderie.

            Their strongest common bond was loyalty to Jim Wright.  As a longtime postal union officer in Fort Worth, Mike Kestner had worked closely with the Congressman for a quarter century.  Now in his mid-fifties and having taken early retirement, Mike’s belly muscles sagged a little but his allegiance to Jim Wright was stronger than ever.

             Yankee Boy’s name was Mike Holland.  A fortyish bachelor who prided himself in keeping fit, he was a top-level officer in a security outfit in Washington.  His friendship with Jim Wright dated back to the 1960’s when they worked together on a government project,  and he was familiar figure around the office.  Even though he had come to Fort Worth to work for Jim Wright as an unpaid volunteer, it took him a while to establish his credentials with a fire-eating old loyalist like Mike Kestner.  Almost as soon as Mike Holland walked through the door of the campaign office, Mike Kestner decided this youngish, flat-bellied interloper from Washington was nothing but a Yankee Boy.  Later, after this newcomer proved his skill in fetching Michelob, Mike Kestner granted him his friendship but never an upgrade in name.             

            In late 1979 and the early the following year, these two friends of Jim Wright had watched--one from Fort Worth. the other from Washington--as the evidence grew that in November, 1980, the Fort Worth Congressman would face the toughest re-election battle of his career.

            Having been elected House Majority Leader four years earlier, Jim Wright now was in a far better position to render service to the home folks back in Fort Worth.  The flip side of this influential position, however, was that it made him a far juicier target to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.  Few political trophies would be prized more dearly by the Republican hired guns than the scalp of the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives.  

            Moreover, Republican strategists knew that in the 1980 elections they could count on significant behind-the-scenes help from right-wing outfits like the Moral Majority and NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee.  These reactionary organizations had begun crawling out of the political woodwork some years before, but now they were stronger and better heeled than ever before.  With what the law naively called “independent expenditures,” these tory mossbacks were free to funnel gobs of money into campaigns to blacken the reputation of moderate candidates without having the funds count as expenditures on the part of their own frothy-mouthed right-wing candidates.  Of the dozen Democratic leaders targeted by NCPAC that year, only two survived.  And if the Republicans, the Moral Majority and NCPAC weren’t enough, there was also Eddie Chiles. 

            Eddie Chiles was a Texas phenomenon.  Starting as a young drilling rig roustabout, Eddie Chiles hitchhiked out of the oil fields in 1930 to earn a petroleum engineering degree from Oklahoma University.  Then, in Great Depression year of 1939, he managed to buy two oil well service trucks and founded the Western Company.  As a shrewd businessman in a hard hat, he built this tiny Fort Worth enterprise into a diversified oil field empire whose sales hit $275 million in 1979.  But now, as a multimillionaire, Eddie began to focus on a sinister force that apparently had escaped his attention back in the days when he was just another hard-working roustabout.  More and more, he zeroed in on the wild spending, runaway regulation, tyrannical bureaucracy and manifold other sins committed by that dastardly organization, the United States Government.

            Other than providing $108 million in loan guarantees to help him build offshore drilling rigs, Eddie found it difficult to think of anything Washington did to benefit the nation.  From time to time, upon learning his Congressman, Jim Wright, was in town, he  began requesting--and later, virtually demanding--that the Congressman drop by for private chats in his office.  There, armed with dispatches from squeakily  conservative organizations like the United States Chamber of Commerce, Eddie would tick off one issue after another and demand to know why Jim Wright voted wrong on so many of them.  When Jim Wright explained that his job was to represent all the people and not just rich oil men, Eddie decided to defeat him at the polls.                

            In the two years before the 1980 election, Eddie ran nearly a dozen big display ads in the Star-Telegram reprimanding the Fort Worth Congressman for what he considered his irresponsible liberalism.  Among the grievous sins with which Eddie found fault were Jim Wright’s support of President Carter and his advocacy of a loan to keep New York City from going bankrupt.  And while he commended the Congressman’s vote to free domestic oil from price controls, he was infuriated by his gall in supporting a windfall profits tax on oil.  In one spectacular full-page ad, Eddie crowed that Jim Wright no longer represented his district.  “Come home, Jim,” he thundered.  This ad, like all the rest, were signed, “Your friend, Eddie.” 

            So enthralled was Eddie with his profound political insights that he decided to share them with a large part of the nation.  Twice a day on 465 radio stations in 14 Western and Midwestern states, an announcer would ask:  “Are you mad today, Eddie Chiles?”         

            “Yes, I’m mad,” Eddie would proclaim.  “I’m sad for the Americans who are trying to raise a family and trying to buy a home when the liberals in Washington are spending more and more to destroy the American dream.  You get mad, too.”

            Aside from whatever personal gratification Eddie got from these anti-government radio spots, they had another advantage.  Since they mentioned the Western Company, they were aired as “commercials” and thus tax deductible as a “business expense.”

            Not a man for half-way measures, Eddie began searching for a candidate to oppose Jim Wright in the 1980 election, reportedly promising to raise $500,000 for any challenger he deemed acceptable.  In his opinion, the Congressman who had served Fort Worth for 26 years and the House as Majority Leader for four years simply had to go. 

            “Jim Wright is a socialist,” Eddie told Time magazine. 

            In his quest for a challenger he came up with a surprising choice.  It was Jim Bradshaw, a personable sort of a guy who owned a chain of auto parts stores.  He had rendered creditable service as Mayor Pro Tem of Fort Worth but had never publicly expressed interest in running for Congress.  Nor had he ever been known to utter any criticism about Jim Wright’s service in Washington.  Yet now, in December, 1979, he announced he, as a Republican,  would devote the next 11 months to a full-time campaign to beat Jim Wright.

            Nobody was taken more aback than his intended victim.  At a country club dinner less than a year before, Jim Bradshaw had virtually gushed with gratitude to Jim Wright for his role in getting a federal grant to improve downtown Fort Worth.  More surprising still, only two months before announcing his candidacy, Jim Bradshaw had basked in the glow of the head table at a tremendous Fort Worth dinner in which the business community honored Jim Wright for his 25 years of service in Congress. 

            While all this political intrigue bubbled in Fort Worth in late 1979 and most of 1980, my duties as Administrative Assistant kept me busy in Washington.  Our staff in Fort Worth kept me updated by phone and fax, but I seldom got a chance to acquire any first-hand information.  And then, one evening another staffer and I dropped into a Capitol Hill bar for a couple of vodkas.

            Back in my Army Air Force days I remember big posters warning us to keep our mouth shut about future operations.  This was easy for me, because nobody ever told me about future operations.  I was lucky to find out late the night before that we would be flying a bombing mission the next morning.  That never left me time to locate a seductive blonde Nazi spy who would ply me with expensive liquor and employ all her feminine charms to get me to talk.  But as I eavesdropped in a Washington bar that night 35 years later, I finally realized that, as silly as they seemed at the time, those old posters had a point about keeping your mouth shut.

            The people at the next table were not exactly seductive blondes.  They were more like two hairy-legged older guys who, exhausted after a day’s work, had stopped by for a belt on their way home.  Unexpectedly I heard one of them mention Jim Wright.  After that, I couldn’t help hearing what they said because I was listening very intently.  The longer I listened, the more obvious it became that they were worker bees in the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. 

            I didn’t know them, nor they me.  But they were talking shop, and it was quickly apparent that the subject under discussion at their office that day had been the Republican effort against Jim Wright in Fort Worth.  As a diversion I occasionally made small talk with the fellow staffer at my table, but I did get a few unvarnished insights into the priorities that our pals in the Grand Old Party were assigning to their forthcoming attack against my boss. 

            “We need to put some money in that race, sure,” one was saying.  “It’ll be an uphill fight, but that guy is going to be awful hard to beat.”

            “That’s not entirely the point.  We need to keep him so damn busy at home he can’t go around the country campaigning for other Democrats,” the other guy said.

            True, this and a few other shreds  of intelligence I picked up that night were not exactly the political equivalent of a smoking gun.  Even so, it was interesting to know that while the Republican pro’s wanted to prevent Jim Wright  from campaigning for his House colleagues, privately they held scant hope of defeating him on his own home turf.    

            Recognizing that the Republicans and their right-wing cohorts were out for blood, Jim Wright and our staff began to mobilize for the most comprehensive political campaign we had ever waged.  Craig Raupe, who in 1954 had accompanied the newly-elected Congressman to Washington to become his first Administrative Assistant, returned to Fort Worth and opened a campaign headquarters in Ridglea.  

            Just down the street, our longtime friend Carlos Moore set up a telephone boiler room and meticulously selected a crew of politically knowledgeable  and articulate people to begin calling the household of every voter in the 12th Congressional District.  From a computerized voter list, we began the immense job of identifying our friends and asking their help in specific ways--to display yard signs and bumper stickers, to work at campaign headquarters, to serve as block captains, and on and on.      

            We found a level of support that surprised even Jim Wright.  An astonishing number of people remembered specific instances in which the Congressman or his staff had gone to bat for them to straighten out a problem they personally had encountered with a government agency.  In our office, we called this “case work,” and the boss never let us forget how important it was to people back home.  Even today, in 1997, you can run across countless men and women in Fort Worth who fondly remember how Jim Wright stepped in and helped Aunt Mary get her social security or how the Congressman got the Army to send Willie home from Okinawa when his father was desperately ill.

            In previous campaigns I had gone around with a tape recorder and talked with scores of these people.  In some cases they would become emotional, even years later, when they recounted  in vivid detail how their home-town Congressman had fought and won a battle for them against a faceless government bureaucracy.

            So dramatic were some of these little stories that in previous campaigns we had used them as one-minute radio spots.  In their own words, constituents described how Jim Wright had given them personal help when nobody else seemed to care.  Never in any of these spots was there a request to vote for Jim Wright nor, for that matter, even any mention that an election was coming up.  Rather, these spots were simple little stories told by real people, using their real names, about the personal help they got from their home-town Congressman, period.

            Once again in the 1980 campaign we decided to use these spots. Looking through our files, I found a dozen or so fresh instances in which Jim Wright or his staff had resolved a genuine crisis for a Fort Worth citizen or family.  One of these persons was a prominent African-American minister.  Together with Kathy Mitchell, the Congressman’s personal secretary, I called his home and made an appointment. 

            When we arrived with our tape recorder, we went through our customary explanation.  To the minister we emphasized that if he had even the slightest reservation about describing the help he got from Jim Wright, we would certainly understand. There was no obligation at all. 

            The minister, a scholarly-looking fellow with close-cropped gray hair, listened patiently.  I didn’t realize it, but he was thinking far, far ahead of me.

            “Mr. Lynam,” he said, “if your purpose is to make a recording of my voice that you can broadcast on the radio, I will certainly be delighted to do that for you.”

            “Fine,” I said.

            “If, on the other hand,” he said,  “your purpose is to encourage people to vote for Mr. Wright,  I can accomplish that in a far more efficient manner.  Next Sunday, I will merely instruct members of my congregation to vote for Mr. Wright, and they will do so.  My congregation always heeds my advice on such matters.”       

            Kathy, the minister and I all burst into laughter.  “Wonderful!  We would like to take you up on both offers,” I said. 

            As it turned out, this minister had lots of company, thanks in large measure to one of Jim Wright’s good friends in the House, Congressman Bill Gray of Pennsylvania.  Tall, soft-spoken and articulate, Gray was himself a Baptist minister who headed a large African-American church in Philadelphia.  Elected to the House in 1979, he promptly was named secretary of the Congressional Black Caucus.  In 1980 he came to Fort Worth specifically to organize his ministerial colleagues to rally support for the Majority Leader. Two dozen African-American ministers promised him they would help turn out the vote for Jim Wright.      

            Meanwhile, in campaign speeches all across the district, Bradshaw pounded tirelessly on his claim that Jim Wright was a hopeless liberal who squandered hard-earned tax money.  Whether voters were buying this story or not, Republican campaign poobahs in Washington probably were happy that Bradshaw at least was having some success in keeping Jim Wright tied up at home.  Although he managed to make three out-of-state trips to campaign for Democratic colleagues in other parts of the country, this was far fewer than in previous election years. 

            At the urging of fellow House members, Jim Wright gave top priority to his own campaign, accepting even more invitations than usual to speak to local groups.  While most of these appearances have faded into the mists of passing years, one speaking engagement stands out vividly, even today, in the memory of our friend and campaign staffer Carlos Moore.

            The audience that day was a group of real estate dealers.  They had gathered at a Mid-Cities hotel for an early breakfast meeting.  Let it be noted here that to Jim Wright, the desirability of such early-morning gatherings ranks only slightly ahead of root canals.  He is one of the millions of Americans who prefer to saunter, rather than leap, into the day’s activities--preferably after a good night’s sleep followed by copious quantities of black coffee.  Having been denied the sleep by a late night strategy meeting and the coffee by a traffic tie-up, his eyelids hung limply at half-mast when he and Carlos Moore walked into the hotel that morning.  Even so, he gave a lively greeting to the first fellow he met walking toward the meeting room.           

            “Good morning, Red!” he cried.  “Great to see you.”

            I don’t think that guy’s name is Red, Carlos thought to himself.

            At the door of the meeting room, Jim Wright met another man.

            “Good morning, Red!” he bubbled.  “How’ve you been?”           

            I know damn well that fellow’s name is not Red, Carlos thought.

            Only after entering the room and being seated did Carlos and Jim Wright discover the truth.  Each of the fifty or so real estate dealers gathered at the tables wore a name tag, imprinted with big, box letters:  “RED CARPET.”  Below that, in much smaller type, was the word, “Breakfast.”  And below that, in still smaller letters, was the name of the wearer.

            “I didn’t really get into trouble until I called that first woman Mrs. Carpet,” Jim Wright joked later.

            Even so, a few days later, he issued a strict order that our staff, in preparing name tags, should always to put the name of the person at the very top, in block letters at least half an inch high.  

            With election day now only weeks away, Bradshaw steadily increased the drumbeat of anti-Jim Wright television spots he had begun many months before.  Using half-truths and dark innuendoes, these spots accused Jim Wright of voting to give away the Panama Canal to the Communists, of frittering away tax dollars to keep a wasteful New York City afloat, and of supporting a devastating windfall profits tax on oil and a 10-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline.  These attack ads even claimed the Fort Worth Congressman was soft of defense--an accusation which must have sounded ridiculous to his friends at the Fort Worth General Dynamics plant.  Thousands of GD executives, engineers and production workers personally remembered his efforts in behalf of the B-58, the F-111 and the F-16.      

            While many Jim Wright supporters brushed aside Bradshaw’s charges as ludicrous campaign rhetoric, not everybody found them amusing.  Yankee Boy, for one, itched for an opportunity to strike back.  Late one night, tired after a long day of delivering yard signs, he and Mike Kestner were relaxing at our campaign headquarters.  Mike was taking nourishment from his customary small paper sack, and even Yankee Boy was sipping a Michelob, albeit a naked one.  Leaning back with their feet on a desk, the two demon delivery men were watching television.  When one of Bradshaw’s attack ads came on, Yankee Boy watched in silence.  Then, sitting his beer on the desk, he got up and said he wanted to talk to me privately.

            “I wonder what you would think,” he said, “if I took a few days off to work in the Bradshaw campaign.”

            “Do you know something I don’t?” I asked, laughing.

            “No, I’m serious,” he said.  “I’m sick of  the crap they’ve been putting out on Jim Wright.  I would like to do a little work on their communications.”

            “Their communications?  What are you talking about?”

            “I thought it would be nice to get into their headquarters and glue all their phones together.”

            “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

            “Not at all.  All it takes is a couple of drops of crazy glue in the cradles of their telephones.  The next morning they couldn’t pick up the receivers.  They couldn’t make any calls or answer any calls.”

            From his expression I could see he wasn’t joking.  “Are you nuts?” I demanded.  “That’s the looniest idea I ever heard of.”

            “I’ve seen it done.  It really works.  I think it would be pretty funny.”

            “No, absolutely not.  Do you have any idea what Jim Wright would say about a harebrained idea like that?  He’s always run clean campaigns.  A dirty trick like that would make Bradshaw’s people furious--with good reason.  What’s more, the newspapers would have a field day.  Everybody would know we did it.  Can you imagine Jim Wright having to explain that?  No--hell, no.  Forget it.  We’re not going to do anything like that.”

            Even though I was astonished that Yankee Boy had even toyed with such an  idea, I was kind of proud that I had rejected the idea so forcefully.  I had made it abundantly clear that nobody in our campaign was ever to engage in this kind of campaign shenanigans.  At least I thought I had.

            Three weeks before the election, things were looking good.  Our block-captain organization was in place, our spot telephone polling looked good, and Jim Wright was drawing warm, enthusiastic crowds wherever he spoke.  The only bad news was that hundreds of our yard signs were being stolen or vandalized.  Our sign crews, headed by Mike Kestner and Yankee Boy, had long since finished distributing signs to the thousands of Jim Wright supporters who had requested them.  But in the dead of night many of these were being uprooted, defaced or stolen.  In the River Oaks section alone, 200 signs had to be replaced in one week.  It seemed obvious that this was an organized effort.

             While I suspected that such vandalism might once again stir thoughts of revenge in Yankee Boy’s mind, I took comfort in the fact that he never again brought up the subject to me.  I was smugly confident that my stern lecture against gluing phones together had cured him once and for all of even thinking about such stunts.  From now on, he surely would not dream of undertaking any campaign mischief, even in retribution for the methodical theft and destruction of our yard signs.  After all, hadn’t I made it clear that Jim Wright simply would not tolerate any dirty tricks by his campaign staff?  Surely neither Yankee Boy nor Mike Kestner would ever ignore my clear warning.  Ha.

            Not until several months after the election did Yankee Boy break down and tell me about two escapades that, even up to now, I have not dared to disclose to Jim Wright. 

            Still gloating with satisfaction, Yankee Boy finally admitted what he and Mike did to a fund-raising barbecue that Bradshaw supporters were planning at an elegant ranch home  west of  Fort Worth.  The day before the event, the two of them decided to climb in their infamous red pickup and drive out to check the location.  Upon reaching the area, they saw that in order to enter the driveway to the ranch home, Bradshaw’s campaign contributors would have to pass through an impressive arched gate just off the main highway.  They also noticed one other thing.

            Beside the gate stood a steel tower perhaps 60 feet in height.  As a stranger to Texas, Yankee Boy had no idea what purpose the tower served, but of one thing he was sure.

            “What a great place for a Jim Wright sign!” he cried.

            “You bet!  A real big one--right at the top!” whooped Mike.

            That night, as an occasional car whizzed by on the highway, Yankee Boy made a sign delivery unlike any he had ever made before.  This one wasn’t simply a matter of jogging up in the bright sunshine and thrusting a sign into a lush green lawn.  Instead it was a matter of climbing nervously up a cold steel ladder in the darkness with a few tools and a rope.  In the gloom below he could barely make out the figure of Mike.

            “It didn’t look this high from the ground,” Yankee Boy said weakly. 

            “What’s the matter--no guts?” Mike snickered.

            “Shut up, you bastard!  Have you got the sign tied onto the rope?”

            “It’s all set on my end.  Just pull your end of the rope and haul it up.” 

            Clinging onto the tower ladder with one hand while struggling in the darkness with the other hand to work the sign into position, Yankee Boy finally got it securely fixed in place.  Then began the most delicate, dangerous part.  Carefully, slowly, he began working his way down, stopping to unbolt the ladder, section by section, and remove it from the tower.  After going to this much trouble to get the sign up there, he damn sure didn’t want anybody climbing up to take it down. 

            It was, Yankee Boy admitted, a foolish, perilous stunt.  But the next day, when he and Mike drove back out to the scene, he decided it was almost worth the risk.

            “A big bunch of fat cats  had come out to the fund raiser, and they  were standing around, looking at the Jim Wright sign and talking and laughing,” Yankee Boy recounted.  “Somebody had brought up a big steam shovel, and one poor guy was standing in the bucket, way up in the air, trying to reach that big Jim Wright sign on the tower.”                                                           

            And if that little episode wasn’t bad enough to give Jim Wright nervous indigestion, Yankee Boy’s next story certainly was. 

            The way he remembered it, one day about three weeks before the election, he and Mike were on their way to lunch and decided to drive past Bradshaw headquarters.  “They look pretty busy,” Yankee Boy observed.  “I think I’ll ask if they need any help.”      

            From a pay phone, he called and identified himself as a dedicated Republican who wanted to help Jim Bradshaw beat that worthless scalawag Jim Wright.  He asked if he could do anything to help.  

            Yes, by all means, he was told.  The Bradshaw people were running late in getting out their yard signs, and a large number of volunteers were being mobilized. At 8 o’clock Saturday morning, they were to report to a warehouse where the signs were stored.  There would be coffee and doughnuts, and volunteers would be given a number of signs to distribute.  Yankee Boy jotted down the address of the warehouse and promised that he and a friend would be delighted to help.

            On Friday night the notorious red pickup, occupied by these two unlikely Jim Bradshaw volunteers, pulled up to the warehouse.  Located in an isolated industrial area, it was a corrugated metal building with only one entrance.  The two swinging doors were fastened by a chain and a small lock.

            “That looks like a mighty puny little lock,” observed Mike Kestner.

            “Just what I was thinking,” said Yankee Boy.  “Suppose a thief wanted to break in.  No way that little bitty lock would stop him.”

            “And if he got inside, he might steal all those yard signs.”

            “And we wouldn’t have anything to deliver tomorrow morning.”

            “That’d be awful.  We can’t let that happen.”

            “Hell, no.  It’s our duty to put a stronger lock on this chain.”

            “Right.  And I know exactly where I can find one.”

            Within an hour or so, the additional lock was in place.  Where it came from is uncertain, but from its size it would have been suitable for the Fort Knox Gold Vault.

            “There--that ought to keep all those yard signs safe from thieves,” said Yankee Boy.

            “Not so fast,” Mike cautioned.  “If it’s a professional thief, he might pick the lock.”

            “You’re right.  How can we keep that from happening, I wonder.”

            “Maybe if we broke the key off in the lock, a thief couldn’t pick it.”

            “Great idea.  You got any pliers in the pickup?”

            True to their word, Mike and Yankee Boy showed up as scheduled at the warehouse Saturday morning.  The Bradshaw people were serving coffee and doughnuts to the volunteers.

            “How long before we can get our signs?” Yankee boy asked.

            “Not long.  We’re trying to find out who has the key to the warehouse,” replied a Bradshaw aide.  “Go ahead and have another cup of coffee while you’re waiting.”

            Almost an hour passed. 

            Walking up to the Bradshaw aide, Yankee Boy made a show of looking at his watch.  “We can’t wait any longer.  We’ve got some other chores this morning.”

            “Sorry about this,” said the Bradshaw aide, “but we’re going to have to reschedule the sign deliveries for another day.  There’s been some kind of a mix-up about getting into the warehouse.”

            “Some kind of a mix-up?” Yankee Boy demanded.  “Well, if you people aren’t any better organized than that, we’re leaving--and we won’t be back!”

            On election day, Jim Wright scored a spectacular victory, receiving 61 per cent of the votes in an overwhelming endorsement of his work as Congressman for the 12th District of Texas.

            Despite the assistance of Eddie Chiles, NCPAC, the Repblican Congressional Campaign Committee and his own vigorous efforts, Bradshaw wound up the race with 38 per cent of the votes and a campaign debt of  $126,500.

            But it could have been worse.  At least I kept Yankee Boy from gluing his phones together.