Neal Tillotson, 102; Voted 1st in Presidential Races

Neal Tillotson, who for 40 years cast the first ballot in U.S. presidential elections, died Wednesday in Dixville Notch, N.H. He was 102 and the cause of death was pneumonia.

A lifelong Republican, Tillotson was a high school dropout and served in the U.S. Cavalry during World War I. After the war, he went to business school in Lowell, Mass., and later worked as a chemist at a rubber company in Watertown, Mass.

Tillotson went on to make a fortune by founding the Tillotson Corp., which makes latex balloons and surgical gloves.

In the early 1950s, he moved to Dixville Notch and bought the Balsams, one of the state’s last grand hotels, and began restoring it to elegance. It is now a 15,000-acre resort.

In 1960, Tillotson, who then held a position equivalent to mayor, hit on an idea to get some publicity for the area. With no nearby place to vote, Tillotson and several other local residents incorporated Dixville Notch--basically the hotel and nearby rubber plant--and decided to open voting booths at midnight on primary day.

Employees of Tillotson’s enterprises constituted the electorate, and the results of the staff’s ballots were reported to the local wire service. Every four years since, the media have turned to Dixville Notch for the nation’s first votes.

By tradition, Tillotson was always the first to cast a vote in what the Balsams calls the Ballot Room, a wood-paneled study decorated with campaign posters and pictures of the contenders.

Tillotson was regularly courted by presidential aspirants. During Arizona Sen. John McCain’s campaign last year to be the Republican candidate, Tillotson told him his favorite campaigner was Roosevelt.

McCain said Franklin Roosevelt was a fine man. “No,” Tillotson corrected. “Teddy Roosevelt.” That would have been in 1904 when Tillotson was a child.