First-Time Delegate at Age 55 : ‘Liking Ike’ Is Paying Off for an Indiana Cinderella

It was before 7:30 in the morning.

It was before breakfast.

It was even before coffee.

Nonetheless, the local jazz combo marched into the Gardenia Room relentlessly oom-pahing the kind of Delta melodies that somehow sound better on a night before, with mint juleps and moonlight, than on a morning after, with biscuits and bacon.

But the lady in the Indiana delegation--who hasn’t touched a drop since she renewed her commitment to Christ, and that was a good 25 years ago--was alert and ready to go. She had stayed up until midnight the night before, unpacking and ironing all her clothes, and now it was about to begin: this breakfast with a governor and senator, lunch with Nancy Reagan (and 2,999 friends), an interview with the BBC and seat 18, row 21, section 1, right on the aisle for the drear and the drama of the Republican National Convention.

For 30 years and more, since the day her mother-in-law enlisted her to nail up “I Like Ike” placards around Indianapolis, and then got her into San Francisco’s Cow Palace to witness the 1956 convention, Leatha Rhea has worked for the Indiana Republican Party, and worked hard.

This week comes the payoff--her first convention as a delegate. “You generally think that with all the candidates and officials, by the time they get down to the volunteers, you don’t think it’s anything that will ever happen to you, she said.”

And here she was, a tireless GOP volunteer, a popular figure in the Indiana delegation--and its only black delegate--now in New Orleans, a deserving Cinderella at age 55, in a new black and white floaty dress and with a rumbling Gray Line bus waiting to take her to her first national political ball.

Now--did she know how to do their dances?

She had watched the conventions on TV, and had even been down on the floor in San Francisco in 1956, and still she wondered what any random viewer must: what do all those people do down there?

“I thought it was like a big party, people talking and reading papers--that confused me more than anything else because I felt like if you were a delegate, you should be listening, and taking all this stuff in. That was the only part I thought was a little bit disappointing.”

So while Leatha Rhea--Boys’ Club patroness and veteran of a dozen state Republican conventions--may have left her camera at home and her umbrella in her husband’s car, she imported some weightier baggage: a sense of duty in the Big Easy, where parties alone could fill a delegate’s days .

Not a ‘Party Person’

“I intend to use my delegate privileges and attend every session,” the retired businesswoman pledged at her first-day breakfast. “I’m not much of a party person anyway.”

It took two steamy bus rides--with oozy humidity outside and air conditioning inside and rivulets of condensation dribbling down the bus windows--to get from the delegation’s distant airport hotel to the Superdome, where the Bush button on her belt promptly set off the security alarm.

By 9:20 Rhea was one of the first into a seat, settled onto the red plush cushion that she would not vacate for four hours--except to stand up and applaud.

On the cushion, waiting like a college blue book, she had found the 100-plus page party platform, and like a student, she read it all.

By noon Rhea came to realize just why all those people on TV were reading newspapers: some of the speakers were not exactly engrossing.

Listened Dutifully

She listened dutifully to almost everyone, including former candidate Alexander M. Haig Jr. (“he was not exactly my favorite”), and gave a startled double-take when a Young Republican chairman, Richard Jacobs, took the podium--with a decidedly elderly hairline.

“He’s sort of no longer a Young Republican,” she murmured.

A few phrases earned her nodding approval: New Orleans’ mayor’s noting “problems of hunger and the homeless,” Pierre S. (Pete)) Du Pont IV’s message to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, that “as long as you speak as a Democrat, you will never be a successful leader.”

Rhea beamed: “Didn’t I just say that? I must’ve written his speech!”

She had indeed said it. Although she may have come to the GOP casually, as the young daughter-in-law of an ardent black Republican, she has pledged herself thoroughly to it in the decades since, to the obvious embrace of her own state party. “The Republican Party is the best for me, not only as a black but as a person.”

She heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preach twice at her own Indianapolis church, she liked what Jackson did to awaken blacks to politics, she clucked her dismay over the platform’s refusal to put sanctions on South Africa.

But she believes in the GOP, and it is her great grief that blacks gravitate almost passively to the Democrats, who, unlike the Republicans, “who don’t talk about what they do,” instead “talk about what should be done and don’t do it.”

By noon, as more casual or more veteran conventioneers abandoned the red chairs to gossip or eat or buy souvenirs, Rhea stayed put.

Come 1:30 p.m., though, the call of the Nancy Reagan luncheon--at $50, part of the $2,000 she will plunk down for this convention--was too much. New Jersey Senate candidate Pete Dawkins may not have noticed, but Leatha Rhea was not among his audience.

Body and Soul

A mile away, Rhea took her seat in the convention hall. For her $50, at a table set with a white fiberboard elephant centerpiece Rhea fed her body and soul: a spinach-raspberry salad, dilled salmon and two plates of chocolate mousse (“Well, I didn’t eat my beef-- or my bread”).

For more than two hours, her soul took in the panorama of First Lady pictures along the walls, the laurels bestowed by a queue of speakers and finally, Nancy herself--whom Rhea had met twice, and “when I met her, it seemed like I was someone she always wanted to meet.”

This time, she had to peek from afar, under a sign on another table, to glimpse the First Lady in the flesh, and contented herself mostly with the huge video screen image, gasping with delight--like the other women at her table--when Ronald Reagan bounded boyishly on stage to sing his wife’s praises.

As she left the luncheon later, the Republican lady from Indiana would point at the rows and rows of security people and apparatus: “Boy, all that money that goes into this--they could balance the national debt if they abolished conventions.”

But inside, as Rhea’s vibrato soared past the last bars of “America the Beautiful” and the First Couple on stage hugged and waved, she sighed blissfully: “This is worth $50.”