Write a commentHere is another excerpt from my upcoming autobiography/memoir which will be published in January of 2017. This article deals with my run for the assembly in 1974. I lost. But I learned a great deal in the process. Here is a shortened version of the account:
In my senior year of law school, I had a chance to run for an open seat in the New York State Assembly, so I took it, all the while, still commuting to law school as my day job. That was particularly challenging, but somehow I did it. Former Oswego mayor Ralph Shapiro had been elected to the Assembly from Oswego County’s 117th district in the fall of 1973. He was the first Democrat ever to win that seat. Unfortunately, he died in February of that year, shortly after taking office. That left a vacancy, and a much-sought-after seat. The Republican Party named Joe Chalifoux, a fellow county legislator from Fulton, as their candidate.
Joe was a nice guy, but no leading light. He would smile and do what he was told, and made as few waves as possible. On the other hand, I was a higher profile, reformer type, and, as a result, caught the attention of the Democratic leadership in Albany, and they agreed to help me run for office, and contribute money to the cause. I was able to recruit a young insurance salesman from Fulton, Dick Farfaglia, to run my campaign, and we had a headquarters, and a full-time staff person in the form of Naomi LaFave from Scriba. Our headquarters was on the second floor over Wayne’s Drugs in Oswego, and we conducted a spirited campaign.
I actually took a page out of Florida Senator Lawton Chiles’s (dubbed “Walkin’ Lawton”) book, and walked the length of the district, from Oswego to Rome. Lawton Chiles became my hero at the time, and I actually met him in later life, and that in itself is a great story I will share in a later chapter of this book. I said I was walking to highlight the high cost of a loaf of bread, and the high cost of gasoline, and for the need to have New York State government on the side of the average person. I was a bit thinner then, and we did actually walk the entire seventy-five-mile length of the district from Oswego to Rome, with a beat-up 1965 Chevy station wagon trailing behind, one of those with fake wooden sidewalls and a foghorn-type sound system that blared the music of Joe South continually from a tape machine, "Walk a mile in my shoes."
I donned construction boots for the walk, and Charlotte, pregnant as she was in the early stages, walked with me as well. I have to confess that there was one segment of the trail that I did not fully walk through––the Cicero swamp on Rt. 31. There were no houses, so I rode on the station wagon's tailgate through most of the swamp.
When I finally arrived in Rome, in a shopping center parking lot, lots of local media and TV were there to greet me, and I explained that, "unlike Col. Barry St. Leger, who was stopped at Oriskany battlefield on his way to Saratoga from Oswego during the American Revolution, I intended to march from Oswego to Rome, and then on to Albany!" I am not sure how many people got the historical context, but I thought it was a good line, except, I never made it to Albany.
We had lots of fun during the campaign, and several of my law school classmates volunteered to help me go door to door to distribute leaflets. One time we were campaigning in Verona on a late chilly October night, and Charlotte, who was several months pregnant at the time, was chased off someone’s porch by a mean barking dog, and she knocked on the next-door neighbor’s door, crying, and they let her in and comforted her. I finally located her, and it turned out she had been taken in by the town Republican chairman. People were very kind to candidates and their wives back then.
I probably would have won the election, were it not for the fact that a young Republican upstart by the name of John Zagame, who was a couple of years younger than me (I was twenty-seven, he was twenty-three), won the Republican primary, defeating the machine-backed Joe Chalifoux by 125 votes. Voters then had a choice between two young and actively ardent candidates, and there were many more Republican voters than Democrats in the district, so I lost by about 2,000 votes, which was considered a close election considering the political complexion of the district.
I was most proud that I carried the city of Oswego, my home base, 75-25 percent. I got clobbered in the rural northeast of the county, though, and there were not enough votes in Oswego and Fulton to offset the losses in the outlying Republican strongholds. I actually carried the cities of Oswego, Fulton, and Rome, and the town of Minetto in Oswego County, and the towns of Vernon and Verona in Oneida County.
The day after the election, the Palladium Times ran an editorial congratulating me on a hard-fought campaign, and suggesting I should run for district attorney that fall. It was gratifying to receive those kind of plaudits after being defeated, and, although I did not take them up on their suggestion, I did eventually run for mayor, and my 75-25 showing in the city of Oswego was a big factor in that decision, thirteen years later.
I remember the victory party that night at our headquarters, which turned out to be a defeat party. I got up on a chair and told the packed room, "John F. Kennedy once said, 'Victory has one hundred fathers, while defeat is an orphan.' Well, I don’t feel like an orphan at all tonight. I am buoyed by your support and confidence, and we will live to fight another day”...(and we did). That was the only defeat I ever suffered for elective public office, but in many ways, I was a winner. My life would have been very different had I won, so I do think that things work out for the best.
