No, not something I wrote; I wish. Instead, this month’s Missouri Times, the newsletter of the State Historical Society of Missouri (available in PDF form here) has an article on Carrie Francke, a woman in the state Republican Party who ran for a couple of offices and lost, before she died in an auto accident in 1989.
I helped on Ms. Francke’s campaign for Congress in 1984. It was the year we’d moved from Milwaukee into the basement of my oft-mentioned rich (that is, struggling middle class) relations in St. Charles. My uncle was politically active and volunteered for this particular campaign, which is why I found myself canvassing Augusta (I think), knocking on doors to tell people about Ms. Francke. I remember seeing a phone booth that only took a dime in that small town (Augusta, I think), which was something prevalent in the novels I was reading at the time (at age twelve, I was already reading pulp fiction from the 1940s and 1950s) but not so much in the real world (where phones were a quarter).
I thought about clipping the article for my uncle, one of the political lions I’ve referred to over the course of this blog, but he passed away in April. So the story from the historical society, that thing I remembered live, I’ve got no one to share it with except the uncaring Internet via this blog.
Now that I have, I’ll drop the clipped article into the recycling bin.
