Word: merriams
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Professor Charles E. Merriam, a political scientist who wanted to reform Chicago, ran for mayor in 1911 and lost. Years later, he was strolling with his wife Hilda in her home town, Constableville, N.Y., when they passed an old barn. She remarked casually: "My grandfather used to own a brewery in that building.'' The professor, who had been defeated by politicians weaned on beer, all but shouted: "A brewery! If I'd known that, I could have been mayor of Chicago!" This year the professor's son Robert could likewise have used a brewery...
Wrong Looks. Young Robert Merriam, 36, was handicapped by the fact that he looks like a South Side Chicago image of an Ivy Leaguer. He pleaded with reporters not to call him reformer, a prejudicial word in Chicago. "You know what the party workers say?" he complained. "They say to each other, 'Have you ever seen this Merriam take a drink? Does he ever drink? I mean, have you actually seen him take a drink?' " (Some people have...
...Democrat until last year, Merriam ran this year as a Republican, and ran hard. He put on a daily five-minute TV show, raced around in a Chevrolet equipped with radio-telephone for campaign calls and an electric razor for touch-up shaves. At endless campaign gatherings he breakfasted on bagels and lox, dined on corned beef and cabbage, sipped coffee late into the night. Once he walked into a South Side revival meeting just as a writhing, frenzied woman was carried out. "Say what you got to say," the minister told him. "Do it in five minutes...
...mayor. The contenders: two-term Mayor Martin Kennelly, who has been dumped by the city's Democratic machine; County Clerk Richard J. Daley, who appointed the committee that picked him and dumped Kennelly (and then commented, "I never dreamed it could happen to me"); and Robert E. Merriam, who won election in 1947 to the city council as a Democrat, but turned Republican to run for mayor...
Last week the Republican slate-making committee met and picked Merriam for mayor. The young (36) alderman wrote speeches for his friend Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 campaign, but broke with the city machine this year. Reformer Merriam, with great public show, avoided voting in the 1954 elections so that he would be eligible to run for mayor as a Republican in 1955. He has the support of Republican County Chairman Ed Moore and the tacit approval of Governor William...