I woke up in the middle of the night with a start.
Someone had asked me a question of political procedure on Gatemouth’s Facebook page yesterday. The question happened to be a matter of some personal expertise. Suddenly it occurred to me that many people might soon be asking this same unfortunate question, and I had to be the first to answer it.
The question brought out a name from the recesses of my memory, a name, long forgotten outside of Prince George’s (PG) County, Maryland, where I‘m sure there is a school and perhaps even a Federal Office building bearing its moniker.
It was a name almost from the world of Kurt Vonnegut:
Gladys Noon Spellman.
It is a name we may soon be hearing again, though I hope not.
A quick Google search of “Gabrielle Giffords” + “Gladys Noon Spellman” indicates that nearly every entry which contained both names concerned “Women Who Served In Congress,” “Jews Who Served In Congress” and “Jewish Women Who Served In Congress.”
In January 1981, I was a part time student trying to finish up my last three credits at GWU in DC. The previous summer, I’d done my first campaign in Brooklyn.
It was not a good time to be a budding Democratic operative. Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated. It was morning in America and mourning for Democrats.
My parents had finally figured out I’d faked my college graduation (a very neat trick, since I was up on the podium with the Deans, getting an award for service) and had sent me back to DC with two checks; one made out to the registrar and one to the book store. I was otherwise broke. Since they already believed the worst about me, I signed up for nine credits, and immediately dropped two courses and took the refund. I also went on a shopping spree at the bookstore and started hawking textbooks and sundries at a 50% discount.
I was starving to death, taking unspeakable part times jobs driving for messengers services and doing data entry for an organization whose name I still will not admit to thirty years later.
My life revolved around two people; my best friend, a gay man named Rich Lazarnick (Alev Ha-Sholem) , who rented me half his apartment, and promptly moved out, and a bi-sexual woman named Elizabeth Carlo (Alev Ha-Sholem) who deigned to share my bed when she was not throwing things at me and screaming.
Rich had been the one who brought me to the politics of the city of homes and churches the previous summer, and would do so again later that year. In the summer of 1981, he managed a race for City Council in Sheephead Bay, which probably would have been won, but for the fact that the Federal Courts threw out the District lines a week before the election.
When the dust settled, our candidate was drawn into Borough Park, but I hung around and eventually our candidate got me a job at semi-subsistence wages on the payroll of the State Senate Minority Leader (one of two I eventually worked for) Manfred Ohrenstein, as a staffer for a Temporary State Commission (nothing was more permanent). Eventually, I was promoted to a job called Local Government Coordinator, a position best described in Judge Rothwax’s dissent in a case called The People of The State of New York v Manfred Ohrenstein, et al.
In exchange for the job, I was allowed to double in indentured servitude for my "patron," which once even included yard work.
But my "patron's" tale, also embodied in legal precedents, is another story for another day.
Today’s story concerns a poll Richie and I were subcontracted to conduct, on behalf of a very rich young man we’d helped elect to the Maryland Legislature in 1978 named Stewart Bainum, Jr.
The poll concerned Congresswoman Spellman. She was a powerhouse in PG; a former public employee in a district full of them. While others in Congress attacked Civil Servants, Gladys Spellman gave out “Beautiful Bureaucrat” Awards, and tended carefully to the specialized casework and issues common to a district where everyone received their health care from the Feds.
I’ve conducted some coarse polls in my time, but none were so chilling as the money question from this one:
“Your member of Congress, Gladys Noon Spellman is in a persistent vegetative state. If the election to fill her seat were held today, would you support her husband Ruben or….”
On October 31, 1980, three days before the November 1980 elections, Gladys Spellman had collapsed and suffered a severe heart attack, and went into a coma from which the only exit was death; an exit she stubbornly refused to take. She was re-elected on election day 1980, but could not take her oath of office.
(On October 3, 1980, another Maryland Congressman, Robert Bauman, a far right-wing moralist who had nominated Jesse Helms for Vice President at the 1976 Republican Convention, was arrested trying to solicit a 16 year old male prostitute, giving wags the opportunity to comment tastefully upon how the State's delegation contained both a fruit and a vegetable, although only the female piece of produce had been re-elected by her constituents).
Figuring out how to deal with the Spellman situation was amongst the tasks of the new Congress
Meanwhile, our poll was a disaster, and Richie, Elizabeth and I spent many hours trying to fake the results, which turned out to be even more difficult than getting done our quota of calls.
It did not matter. Stewart had lover’s nuts. The District was almost entirely in PG County, but overlapped into the Montgomery County portion of Takoma Park, which Stewart represented. Stewart kept an eye on the medical charts in the local weeklies and rented an apartment in the small place where the two Districts overlapped; he may even have moved there.
In February 1981, the House approved a resolution to vacate the seat after receiving a medical analysis that Spellman was in a "trance-like state" and unable to take the oath of office. She never regained consciousness and died in 1988.
It was the first and only time in our history Congress has ever taken such a step.
To date.
We all got jobs in the campaign, though Elizabeth, a hourly employee, was billing at twice her rate of work and kicking back half the extra proceeds to Richard.
Stewart Bainum was a hard and innovative campaigner. While Ruben Spellman ran a Rose Garden campaign capitalizing on voter sympathy, and his other main opponent, a former State Senate President who‘d had the misfortune of taking the LG slot on ticket of a prohibitive Gubernatorial front runner who wasn’t, let the local machine do their thing in their usual manner, Stewart followed the then virtually unheard of strategy which Richie had developed in his race for the legislature, putting together a prime voter’s list and knocking on doors. His entire extended family joined him, and we followed up every visit and attempt at such with a personalized letter.
No one in PG had ever seen anything like it.
But the time frame was too short. The locals were too hostile (The PG Post ran a headline saying “Wealthy Interloper Enters Race”) and the laws turned out to be to perilous. Unbeknownst to us, in a multi-county race, Maryland law requires that each candidate have his county of residence under his name on the ballot. PG always had an inferiority complex concerning the wealthy interlopers of Montgomery; it was somewhat akin to running in Michael Grimm’s district with the word “Brooklyn” under one’s name.
Only worse; it was like being Rated X in a PG County.
Ironically, the former Senate President, who did live in PG County, lived outside the Congressional District. During a debate, he snarkily welcomed Stewart to PG County, and Stewart won the headlines by graciously thanking him and welcoming him to the Congressional District.
We lost the primary to the former Senate President, who went on to win the general. Stewart eventually won a seat in the State Senate and came close to winning one in Congress, this time from Montgomery.
The name of the gentleman who won was Steny Hoyer.
I suspect that, should the (near) worst occur, the process undertaken during the period before Hoyer’s election will be begun again and that Steny and the rest of the leadership of both parties will act with dignity while trying to figure out whether the rest of those steps need to be taken again.
Meanwhile, let us pray that the name of Gabrielle Giffords does not join that of Gladys Noon Spellman on one more list.