Political rancor has reached new heights in our country, but there have been traces of it around for a long time.
My dad and Uncle Buddy, my mother’s baby brother, loved each other but hollered and beat their fists on the Formic kitchen table when they talked politics.
I was junior high age when their intense disagreements about state and national government got my attention.
Teachers had been tossing us crumbs at school about political campaigns and other civics-related matters, but my real education on all that was at home.
The line between liberal and conservative political philosophy was not as clear then as it is now. Looking back, I think my dad leaned to the political left and Buddy veered right.
That was not surprising. They disagreed on a lot of things, including the best way to put a worm on a bream hook, the right angle to sharpen a knife on a whetstone and whether Ted Williams was a better hitter than Joe DiMaggio.
Some of their most spirited arguments were over Harry Truman. My dad liked him, and Buddy thought he was inept. I never grasped the rationale behind their opinions.
Party affiliation was not a factor then in these parts where Republicans were as rare as hens’ teeth. But Buddy thought we needed a Republican president, and my dad said he could never vote for anybody but a Democrat.
He changed his mind when both he and Buddy supported Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, but they fought that year about the governor’s election.
My dad backed Robert Kennon, and Buddy beat the drums for a little-known candidate named James McLemore.
Kennon finished behind Earl Long protégé Carlos Spaht in the first primary but became governor in a runoff. McLemore got just 15 percent of the vote.
I was too young to understand politics all those times my dad and uncle shook our little house with their boisterous disagreements. They told me often after I was grown, though, the details of their skirmishes about politics and other matters.
Dad supported Kennon because he was from Minden just 30 miles away, and they had run across each other and talked a few times at the barber shop and drug store.
Buddy liked McLemore because they shared the same last name. It didn’t matter that Buddy was from Bastrop and James McLemore grew up in Coushatta and that they were no kin and never met.
Then there was the Earl Long factor. Dad and Buddy told me in later years that they both fell under the spell of Uncle Earl’s charisma early on but were turned off when he ramrodded big tax increases through the legislature.
So they couldn’t support Spaht, a major cog in the powerful Long political machine. That’s when one of them lined up with Kennon and the other backed McLemore.
My interest in politics was intensified by their recollections, which included a politically-motivated brawl at The Friendly Bar.
Dad got a call one night from somebody at the bar, where customers were sometimes not as cordial as the name of the place implied. He floored his Plymouth on the one-mile trip to the saloon.
Buddy was being roughed up in the parking lot, and Dad jumped in to help him. They came home with mud and blood on their starched khaki paper mill work shirts.
The fight started when a mill hand criticized my dad, who was home watching boxing on television, for supporting Harry Truman. Buddy detested Truman but said nobody was going to condemn his brother-in-law for his politics and lit into the man.
Buddy should have avoided political discussions that night at the Friendly Bar. It would have been much less painful to talk about Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and the best way to sharpen knives and put worms on a bream hook.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES