Thursday Ramble: On the Political Campaign Trail

The fall of 1976 was the first Presidential Election I was eligible to vote in. Gerald Ford was president, taking over from Richard Nixon, when Nixon resigned. Jimmy Carter was the Democratic nominee, and in the end won the election. 

Early in the year, there was competition for the Republican nomination, George Wallace the racist, segregationist former governor of Alabama ran. Racism is nothing new in the Republican party, especially in the south. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, and long ago actor who once co-starred with a chimpanzee, also ran for the nomination that year. Ultimately the party nominated Gerald Ford, it is hard to unseat a sitting president who is eligible for reelection. Ultimately, his decision to pardon Richard Nixon to bring political peace to the country, likely cost him the election.  

My family was spending winters in Florida. Both Wallace and Reagan campaigned heavily in the primaries in Florida that spring, including stops in Brevard County, landing at what was then known as TICO airport about 3 miles south of the home my parents had bought to retire and die in. Wallace visited on a weekday, and his comings and goings overlapped with me being in school. Reagan visited on a weekend and went to a fund raiser at Fox Lake Park. 

I was there, standing along the waist high chain link fence when his campaign jet landed and taxied up. He worked the fence like the politician he was, shaking hands and exchanging words with the gathered crowd.  I was there with a my camera and a 135mm short telephoto lens. In the archive is a single print of a photograph of him, standing not five feet away. Deeper in the archive is all of the film I use that day. I remarked, "President Reagan has a nice ring to it" he replied, "I hadn't thought of it, but yes it does."(I am sure he had thought of it, Nancy probably had it embroidered on his underwear.) 

Little did I know that when he was elected four years later, he would try to destroy much of the social safety net in the country, and gut mental health care in ways that have never been restored - evil bastard.  

Thinking about this, motivated me to search in my archive of negatives from the 1970s, I have about 3,000 mostly black and white negatives in a three ring binder, in archival storage pages most from the mid 1970s. I was buying film in 100 foot rolls, and rolling my own (bulk loading as it was known.) I processed all of my black and white film and color positive film for several years. I knew this was late spring of 1976, and most of the pages are dated, I was able to locate the two pages from that day in just a few minutes. I have a film scanner (actually two of them) I scanned what appeared to be the best of the negatives.