Editor’s note: This article is by Rod Clarke, a former longtime resident of Vermont and bureau manager and Vermont state news editor for United Press International in Montpelier.
It was Phil Hoff who first got me involved in politics, and ultimately in journalism. Or maybe it was Dick Snelling. I’m not sure which. Here’s why.
It was 1966. Hoff, the first Democratic governor in more than a century, was running for a third term. He was challenged by a brash, young businessman from Shelburne named Richard Snelling. (The late reporter Mavis Doyle used to get Snelling’s goat by constantly referring to him in her stories as a “wealthy Shelburne industrialist.”)
I had moved to Vermont a year earlier when my wife, my mother and I opened a small restaurant, motel and cabin court in Randolph. At that time, I was totally apolitical. I could care less who ran for what, or who got elected to which office. In 1960, when I hit the legal voting age of 21, I cast my first ballot for John F. Kennedy. At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer. I didn’t know anything about politics; I just didn’t like that Nixon guy. And I guess to a young man like me, Kennedy seemed pretty cool.
Vermont’s ’66 gubernatorial race wasn’t that different. Hoff looked to me like a pretty nice guy, young and energetic, even though I didn’t have a clue as to what he – or Snelling, for that matter – stood for. And Snelling came across as an arrogant, self-inflated hothead, an image problem that would shadow him for years, although I have to admit I came to have immense respect for him after I got to know and cover him as governor.
But still, I wasn’t at all excited about the 1966 campaign. That began to change when a young labor organizer named Herb checked into one of our rooms. He worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), and he’d come to town to organize employees at the local plastic factories. And because organized labor was, and still is, so heavily Democratic, he was involved in politics as well. Herbie started holding meetings in our dining room. Labor people and political figures would sit around and plan strategies, and Herb, with whom I’d gotten friendly, invited me to sit in on some of the meetings.
The local newspaper, the staunchly Republican White River Valley Herald, showed up at one of them and shot some photos. That week’s edition featured shots of cars in my parking lot with New York license plates, three flatlanders sitting at a table and an article about how out-of-staters were taking over Vermont politics. It failed to mention that there were also five Vermonters sitting at that table who were conveniently cropped out of the photo. I was so ticked that I fired off a rebuttal letter to the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
About that same time, I’d joined the Jaycees. I wasn’t much of a joiner, but I figured it might be good for business, which was tottering on the brink of ruin. So I was being bombarded with the concept of “civic involvement” from two sides. I guess that was when the first spark of youthful idealism began to ignite inside me, and I was slowly sucked in.
The clincher came when I was invited to attend a Hoff strategy session up in Morrisville. There I was, sitting around in a smoke-filled room with some of the state’s top politicos, discussing ways to re-elect a governor. Pretty heady stuff. I was hooked. So when someone asked if I’d be interested in being the Orange County Democratic campaign coordinator, I jumped at the chance like a hungry trout at a mayfly, even though I didn’t even officially consider myself a Democrat. As it turned out, I think I got the offer because Randolph Dems held their meetings in a phone booth back then, and none of THEM wanted the job.
That didn’t set too well with my neighbors in Randolph, at that time one of the most conservative Republican enclaves in the state. Eventually, it is probably what drove me out of business (along with my own business ineptitude).
On the final weekend of the ’66 campaign, Hoff planned a whirlwind helicopter tour of Vermont. It fell to me to organize his stopover in Randolph, where he wasn’t especially popular among the rock-ribbed Republican citizenry. I approached Randolph High School to ask the band to play for the governor, and was summarily rebuffed. So I took my case to neighboring Bethel, which considered it an honor to play for the First Couple.
Close to a thousand people were on hand that Saturday afternoon as Phil and Joan Hoff climbed down from the chopper and the local Girl Scout troop handed them a picnic lunch basket.
Later, he asked me, “Rod, how did you get so many people here? You had a bigger turnout than Winooski!” (which at the time was the state’s Democratic stronghold).
“Aw, the people here love you, governor,” I replied.
What I didn’t tell him was that for three days before the tour, I’d hired kids to run around town, posting and handing out fliers that said something like: “COME TO THE BALLPARK AT NOON SATURDAY – SEE THE HELICOPTER LAND!” Remember, this was 1966, and choppers weren’t that common, except on the nightly TV news clips from the war in Vietnam.
Election Day came and went and Hoff was re-elected. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from Doris Jones, the venerable editor of the Times Argus. She said she was impressed with my letter and my writing and asked if I was interested in being the Randolph correspondent – stringer – for the paper. Thus was launched my career as a journalist.
My first toe-dip into political waters also gave me an epiphany: “I can do this politics stuff!” Years later, I became a political consultant.
Snelling died unexpectedly in 1991. Ironically, I was on the air hosting a live call-in talk program on a Barre radio station when I got a tip and broke the story.
The history books will treat both Hoff and Snelling kindly. I think they are among the best governors Vermont has ever had, even if they were poles apart politically and philosophically.
As for me, I live in Florida now, where I still practice my crafts. For which I will be eternally grateful to Dick Snelling and Phil Hoff.