[W]hen former Vermont Gov. F. Ray Keyser Jr. died Saturday at age 87, the Associated Press summed up his political tenure a half-century ago as “a turning point in the state’s transition from one of the most conservative in the country to one of the most liberal.”
Friends, however, don’t remember Keyser as a historical figure, but instead as an unusually modest, common-ground-seeking person whose life story rivaled his sense of statesmanship and humor.
With his election in 1960, the 33-year-old Republican became the youngest person ever to be sworn in as the state’s chief executive. But two years later, Burlington lawyer Philip Hoff — a comparative oldster at age 38 — nonetheless was blonder, bolder and in the right place at the right time. He beat Keyser to become the first Democrat ever elected governor by Vermont voters.
“It is not that I mind becoming an ‘elder statesman,’” a 35-year-old Keyser said on the eve of Hoff’s inauguration in 1963. “It is just the age at which it occurs that bothers me.”
Watch this Chris Graff interview with F. Ray Keyser featured on Vermont PBS in 1989.
Keyser was one of only two Vermont governors ever to lose a race for re-election, after Mortimer Proctor in 1946. Moving on to a long career in law and business management, he sat down with this writer for an interview in 2004. The retired officeholder admitted he’d rather hunt ducks or deer than sit still as a reporter’s target. But by sharing his story, Keyser knew he had something to say about the state and its politics past, present and future.
Walk into Keyser’s single-floor 1957 house in the small Rutland County town of Proctor — home of the Vermont Marble Company he went on to lead — and you stepped onto a floor of Imperial Danby and Verde Antique stone before sitting down at a kitchen table made of marble just as polished. They were the only hints of past grandeur — and, like Keyser, rooted in Vermont.
“I was born over the IGA store in Chelsea Aug. 17, 1927,” Keyser began. “I’ve been hungry ever since.”
Keyser’s father, Frank Ray Keyser, was a prominent lawyer at one time in private practice with Stanley Wilson, former Vermont governor from 1931 to 1935. When F. Ray Sr. was a state legislator in 1939, F. Ray Jr. tagged along to Montpelier as a sixth-grade page. The schoolboys were supposed to deliver notes, not dally in the newfangled elevator in the state Supreme Court building.
“They shut off the electricity between floors and left us in there a couple of hours to stop us from doing it,” F. Ray Jr. recalled.
Not that all the grown-ups were so grown up. Keyser said that then Gov. George Aiken taking the pages to the movies, although he couldn’t recall the name of the film.
“All I remember was he bought us popcorn.”
Keyser went on to letter in high school football, basketball and baseball, then graduate in 1945, the climatic final year of World War II. He then went into the Navy.
“When I enlisted, Hitler and Japan found out and they quit.” (Watching a reporter write those words down, he added with a smile, “I’m not serious about that.”)
Keyser moved on to Tufts University and Boston University School of Law before joining his father firm’s in 1952. He won a seat in the state Legislature in 1954, his sole objective being “to get on the Judiciary Committee and be where the laws are made.” But he soon jumped from being a 27-year-old committee member to a 29-year-old committee chairman in 1957 to a 31-year-old Speaker of the House in 1959.
When the governor’s seat opened in 1960, Keyser had neither name recognition nor money. But those were the days when each Vermont city and town, regardless of size, had its own state legislator. Keyser’s fellow representatives sought local signatures to place his name on the ballot. Their collection effort doubled as a grassroots campaign, gathering Keyser enough support to win the GOP nomination.
Americans were about to elect Democrat John F. Kennedy as president, but a majority of Vermonters were still so Republican (in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln) that if you won the state party’s primary, you all but coasted to victory in the general election.
Keyser became the state’s chief executive in January 1961 — the same month he went to Washington to hear fellow Vermonter Robert Frost read a poem before President Kennedy recited the presidential oath of office.
“We had about 2 feet of snow,” Keyser remembered of Kennedy’s outdoor swearing-in. “Damn near froze to death!”
He had warmer memories of his own indoor inauguration: “It was a particularly special day because I’m probably the only governor who had his father swear him in.”
The chief justice who normally administered the oath had turned to Keyser’s father, who was a superior court judge.
“He asked Dad if he would like to swear in his son as governor.”
Dad said yes, and Keyser got to business — or, more accurately, went to get business.
Keyser faced the same roadblock Gov. Peter Shumlin does today: a state budget deficit.
“When I grew up in Chelsea, all but one of the boys on my basketball team moved out of state for jobs,” he said. “We needed to do something about getting some jobs.”
First, however, he learned about the burdens of bureaucracy. Keyser recalled having to sign individual certificates for almost 2,000 Vermont justices of the peace long before the advent of the autopen.
“I can remember sitting there an interminable amount of time,” he said. “I didn’t know that was a function of the governor before I ran.”
For Keyser, it was all about public service. But for others, it was cutthroat politics. The state Republican Party of the time was split into the warring Gibson-Aiken and Proctor factions, named after the last names of their respective leaders. Keyser didn’t consider himself exclusive to either. And many of his older, more-entrenched colleagues believed, if you’re not in, you’re out.
When Keyser became governor a half-century ago, Interstates 89 and 91 were under construction and Vermont wasn’t yet a destination state for back to the landers and tourists. But Keyser faced the same roadblock Gov. Peter Shumlin does today: a state budget deficit.
In hindsight, a gap of a few million dollars on Vermont’s nearly $100 million in expenditures in 1961 may seem minuscule compared with a projected $110 million to $126 million shortfall on a coming spending plan of more than $5 billion. Nevertheless, Keyser’s challenge was mammoth.
“We had been in a period of deficits in the late 1950s,” he said. “It’s not an easy proposition when the economy falls down on you. I took the time to go over every budget with every department head. As I studied it, I felt we could have a balanced budget.”
Keyser’s budget proposal was the largest in Vermont’s history at the time. The Legislature, although led by fellow Republicans, fought internally for a record seven months before adopting a spending plan on Aug. 1, 1961.
The former governor chose not to remember the obstacles, just the outcome: “It was a welcome relief.” He balanced the state budget without new taxes and saw the start of the Vermont Industrial Development Authority and expansion of the state park system. But headlines about a string of legislative battles during the 210-day 1961 General Assembly — “the longest and costliest to date,” the press liked to repeat — overshadowed his achievements when he announced a re-election bid.
Keyser faced problems right and left. Democrats, for example, although still a minority party in Vermont at the time, had reaped more and more votes over the previous decade. Republican Robert Stafford’s 1958 gubernatorial election was so close it required a recount.
“The Democratic Party ran on the theme ‘Time for a change,’” Keyser recalled. “I was carrying 104 years of Republicanism on my back.”
That helped Hoff make history in 1962, although he had to wait until lawmakers recounted ballots to confirm his election over Keyser by 1,348 votes. Vermonters traded the state’s youngest governor for an older man (by three years) more associated with the promise of President Kennedy and his New Frontier.
(A footnote: Hoff was Vermont’s first popularly elected Democratic governor. Democrat John Robinson lost the 1853 gubernatorial election but won a one-year term from the Legislature after no candidate received 50 percent of the state’s vote.)
Keyser often found himself relegated to similar fine-print status. But he said he wasn’t bitter about his defeat. He remembered driving back to Chelsea after Hoff’s inauguration to see a “Welcome Home Ray” sign strung over a street.
“My poker group was still playing Tuesday nights, so you just go on,” he said. “You have more time to hunt, to be with your family. I hate to say this, but it was the best thing to happen.”
Keyser never considered running again. He instead went on to lead the Vermont Marble Company before returning to private law practice. Even so, he continued to follow politics until his death Saturday at his daughter’s home in Brandon.
He didn’t always like what he saw. Keyser campaigned door to door, handshake to handshake, when candidates couldn’t throw money into television because the state’s mountains thwarted antennas, and cable and satellite dishes had yet to take root. He spent less on either one of his gubernatorial races — $14,410 in 1960 and only $2,267 in 1962 — than most candidates for county office do now.
“I could not run for governor today because I couldn’t afford it,” he said in 2004. “Even at the local level, it’s getting to be so expensive that good candidates can’t run.”
A bigger problem, he believed, is the polarization of politics.
“There doesn’t seem to be a sense of balance,” he said. “It’s ‘you’re either for me or against me.’ Most of the campaigns are so mean-spirited, and there are a plethora of special interest groups on all sides. I wish there were more organizations that looked at a candidate as a total person.”
Keyser also was wary of constant campaigning.
“To run against someone who has just been elected — it’s never over.”
And the same people, he added, constantly win.
“It’s important to get fresh ideas and fresh blood, but it’s almost impossible to run against an incumbent.”
Well, not always impossible. Keyser acknowledged with a smile.
“People didn’t realize at the time the political change that was happening in Vermont,” he said of his 1962 defeat. “We have moved from moderate to liberal to the point we have elected a socialist to Congress. Talk about a shift! But for all of the problems with politics, we still have the fundamental principles of democracy. And the system that we have is so far superior to any other that has been developed.”
Keyser lost his wife of more than a half century, the former Joan Friedgen, to cancer in 2002. Two years later, an electrical surge from a wire across the street sparked a freak fire that gutted his home. Some people would be left ashen. Not Keyser. His spirit remained as resilient as a phoenix.
“I don’t recommend remodeling this way,” he said with a laugh.
Keyser spent his later years enjoying his three children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, as well as meeting and marrying the former Mary Lou Underhill in 2005. His family will hold a service for its patriarch sometime this spring.
Until then, Shumlin has ordered flags statewide be flown at half-staff through March 16. People can make memorial donations to the United Church of Chelsea, the Chelsea Fish & Game Club, Ducks Unlimited or the Rutland Area Visiting Nurse Association and Hospice and offer private messages of sympathy on the Boardway & Cilley Funeral Home website www.boardwayandcilley.com.
“Family’s where it is — that’s what life’s all about,” Keyser said. “You can do a lot of things, but what you leave behind is important.”
Kevin O’Connor is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
CORRECTION: F. Ray Keyser died at age 87, not 88, as originally reported.
