Conventions: Time for the Last Hurrah

The cake of ice in the bathtub melted almost faster than the St. Francis bellmen could replace it. Diana Landeen and I were perched on the edge of the tub with our feet resting on the soothing ice cake. Diana and I were suffering from a malady almost universal in San Francisco that week in August, 1964: Convention feet.

The suite in which we were restoring ourselves belonged to Dr. Merle Boyce, a trauma surgeon of distinction and a rare human being. Knowing him is like receiving a shining present every day. He has an enthusiasm and the capacity to enjoy life to the brim every day. He likes music, conversation, surgery, boccie ball, good food, politics, in no particular order. He was a convention delegate that long-ago year.

We were all struggling out to the Cow Palace in Daly City every day to see what the Great Gray Elephants were doing at the Republican Party convention. It was a sight to strain your belief, hundreds of certifiably sane people crowded into an old hall built for cattle auctions, listening to dull, repetitious speeches, sitting in chairs which would increase the practices of orthopedists across the country, eating hot dogs. That was the unfortunate convention when the ultra-right booed Nelson Rockefeller and shouted down his followers.

It was also the year when the Daly City fire chief closed down the auditorium because of overcrowding and the danger of fire. Nothing ever really happens for the first time.

As at every convention, the cast always seems to be the same. Most of them are regulars in their party or they wouldn’t be delegates. They’re big contributors or they’ve spent hundreds of hours working in campaign headquarters or they know a party factotum, or their brother-in-law works for a congressman. Whatever, they’re there, the women wearing the dresses their saleswoman at the hometown mall told them would be just right, comfortable but becoming and, see, the spots sponge right out.

If you were to run film of convention-goers of both parties and look at every face, you would see most of them more than once. The woman in the red dress who has folded her placard into a fan, the man who squats a lot, the pretty, fresh-faced redhead whom the camera caresses lovingly, the man with a face like a sad horse, they’re all there.

An addiction to politics is virulent. A number of these people center their entire lives around their political involvement. They can get as excited over a change in an obscure bylaw as I can over a week in Cabo San Lucas or a collie pup. Parents, children, lovers, careers all slide into an unimportant gray morass.

There was once an elderly Republican couple who lived on a small, fixed income and they never missed a party function in the district, state or nationally. I am sure it was at a hurting sacrifice that they attended all these tribal powwows. But there they’d be, neatly dressed, eyes shining, enthusiasm bubbling as they greeted the other regulars. But I always felt sorry for them in spite of their smiles stretched wide over their mass-produced dentures. And they have their opposite numbers in the Democratic Party.

I honestly believe that the national convention is going the way of whistle-stop tours, campaigning from the front stoop and writing speeches on the backs of envelopes. They are as prefabricated and boring as the computerized fund-raising letter.

We are all so afraid of the image (terrible misuse of a word) we will present to our fellow Americans that we attempt to stamp out spontaneity as if it were a killing fever. What will the high priests of television and their acolytes select for prime time?

Here’s what’s going to happen. Some party will have a convention and no camera will be there. They will be rerunning Gilligan’s Island. And quite rightly.

They can’t skip this Republican convention because they covered the Democrats, although selectively. But fair’s fair. But this may well be the last year.

Conventions are empty, expensive exercises and have served us well as roistering, bellowing and heartfelt clan gatherings.

It’s too bad, but the world in its hurry has passed them by. Furl the flags. Put away the helium tank. There will be no more balloons. Let’s send down for one more cake of ice. We’ll use it for the farewell drinks. And tell them to hold the elevator. Once more for the good times. And, now, Madame Chairman, if you please.