Wally Spiers: Election year oddities way back when

When you are looking for specific events in old newspaper files, you can’t help but be distracted by other stories you see.

While looking through the 1960 microfilm records of the Belleville News-Democrat for a traffic accident, I found some interesting stuff.

Like this year, that was an election year. In April, the newspaper reported that U.S. Rep. Melvin Price of East St. Louis easily won the Democratic nomination in the 24th Congressional District primary on April 12, 1960, which covered St. Clair and Madison counties.

He had no opponent, probably since he had been in Congress since 1944.

He was a Democrat, of course, but he nearly won the Republican nomination as well. He received four write-in votes in Madison County on the Republican ballot. The Republicans didn’t put up a candidate in the race but the paper noted that Illinois law would not allow Price to run on both tickets.

Anyway, he was beaten in the Republican primary by Phyllis Schlafly, noted Madison County Republican activist, who had run against Price in 1952 and was soundly defeated by 53,639 votes.

In the primary, “She received eight (write-in) votes, all in Madison County,” the paper noted, even though she wasn’t running in 1960. She declined to run again against Price.

“I appreciate the votes I received,” Mrs. Schlafly said, “but I will not accept the nomination,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.

The newspaper reported that Schlafly would have to file a withdrawal notice with the Secretary of State and then the chairmen of the Republican Party in the respective counties would have to pick a substitute candidate.

But a couple of weeks later the newspaper reported that Schlafly wasn’t withdrawing.

“She said she ‘didn’t intend to campaign but will not withdraw,’” the paper reported.

I couldn’t find any more stories about the non-race until the day before the election in November when the newspaper noted that Price was up for re-election and that Schlafly was still on the ballot but had been quoted as saying she knew she had no chance of winning.

Sure enough, in the general election she lost 75,855 to 28,277 in St. Clair County and 65,139 to 25,620 in Madison County — for a total of 140,994 to 53,897, proving, I guess, that some effort makes a closer race than none.

A spokeswoman at Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in St. Louis said they had no record of the 1960 race and no one remembered anything about it.

In other news, in Belleville, the (now defunct) Local 106 of the Barbers Union announced an increase in the price of haircuts. New prices would be $1.75 on Mondays through Fridays and $2 on Saturdays.

Also, the Belleville Chamber of Commerce was pushing a plan to build a second St. Louis airport northwest of Belleville. Chamber leaders would not reveal the exact location but there was much discussion of the idea, which came a good decade or so earlier than a similar effort to build a second airport at Columbia-Waterloo.

Interestingly enough, though, the chamber said it had rejected the idea of trying to put the second airport at Scott Air Force Base as “unworkable.”

This story was originally published March 19, 2016 at 10:15 AM with the headline "Wally Spiers: Election year oddities way back when."