Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [161]
Somehow, having people read what he said in black and white was not something Hamm had counted on. Hamm had assumed that no one was listening. The reporter with the love beads had assumed that printing the speech would damage Hamm even further. However, in Akron, Ohio, the reporter’s father, a World War II vet like Hamm, picked up the paper his son had wrapped his dirty clothes in when sending them home for his mother to wash. After he read the speech, the man said to himself, “Yeah, buddy.” And sent mimeographed copies to all his friends, who sent them to their friends. Instead of the article doing damage to Hamm Sparks, as the reporter had hoped, his father stopped paying his college tuition, making him suddenly eligible for the draft. Love Beads had to hitchhike all the way to Canada.
Soon, copies of Hamm’s speech were slowly but surely making the rounds of every VFW and American Legion hall. Police stations, firehouses, and union halls across the country stuck it up on their billboards and Hamm started to receive hundreds of letters of support and contributions from every state. A month later the headline in one major magazine read: HAMM VS. EGGHEADS: HAMM 10, EGGHEADS 0.
This set off a number of other articles. Soon, a spokesman from the NRA called and asked if they could name a gun after him, and when the sale of LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT bumper stickers almost doubled in a week, the printing company sent him a thank-you note with a nice donation.
People thought this sudden groundswell of support was what gave Hamm the misguided notion that he should run for president.
The day Hamm made his surprise announcement, Cecil Figgs was delighted, and went weak in the knees just thinking about all the wonderful parties and entertainments he could plan at the White House. Vita was more ambivalent. She would never stand in the way of anything he wanted, of course, but she was deeply uneasy about this decision. Politics was no longer just a bunch of men in a back room making deals. It was lethal business. People were getting killed. And Hamm already had a lot of political enemies. But for Hamm not to run would almost be the same thing as killing him.
Later that night she glanced down and beheld the sight of the de facto governor of the state and perhaps even the next president of the United States asleep at her breast and thought to herself, “God help us all.”
Hamm’s unexpected and rash decision to run for president had caught everyone off guard, but no one more so than Betty Raye. He had not discussed anything with her. As usual, she had no idea he was going to do it until he did it. And almost overnight, it seemed, Hamm was off and running, starting to campaign all over the country, and she was really left in the lurch. Her number one “assistant” was no longer there. Before he left he promised a panicked Betty Raye she had nothing to worry about, that nothing would really change, they could handle everything over the phone. This worked for a while but as the days went by Hamm was becoming less interested in the state and more interested in lining up his campaign; in fact, he was becoming harder and harder to get in touch with.
When Hamm was out of the state, Wendell helped her as much as possible but more and more Hamm was dragging Wendell and the rest of the staff off with him, leaving her alone for days at a time. Consequently, Betty Raye wound up trying to run the state by herself, a job she’d never wanted, did not know how to do, and had not been trained for.
For the first time since she had been elected governor, Betty Raye was forced to start reading what she was to sign and even to make decisions by herself. Terrified that she would make a mistake, she stayed up until three and four o’clock in the morning, poring through books, trying desperately to learn