The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
When political types had gift for laughter
The old oak tree, with its huge trunk and classic soaring, spreading shape, is majestic as it hangs, dripping, over the tiny, historic cemetery on the side of a hill in Bethel.
The rain is coming down in sheets and the big splats from the leaves are thwacking the car windshield as I wait for a break on what is an old, gravel carriage lane, above the modern roadway where the water is flowing in a shallow stream, below the wrought-iron fence on my side of the graveyard, among the currently living.
Inside the fence, down toward the back, is a double headstone with the name of a nearly forgotten political legend who I expect would get great joy from this current Connecticut bumper-car race for governor.
It’s the time of the election cycle where we start to bid adieu to candidates and the flaks they employ, such as Dwain Schenck, who shepherded Guy Smith of Greenwich in his thoughtful (No tolls; retail marijuana OK) outsider bid to make the Democratic primary for governor, falling short by a few thousand petition signatures.
So what better place to apply some seasonal mojo than here in suburbia, and commune at the gravesite that Debs Myers shares with his wife, Nellie?
Myers was an unlikely political operative, a former newspaperman who kind of fell into politics, then found himself working for Adlai Stevenson, Bobby Kennedy when he ran as a carpetbagger for a U.S. Senate seat in New York and, finally, New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner who served 11 years ending in 1965. Discrete, humorous, helpful and behindthe-scenes, Debs Myers, who died of hepatitis in 1971 at 59 in Yale New Haven Hospital, was total old-school.
When you’re named for Socialist icon Eugene Debs (who was friends with Debs’ father), as Myers was upon his birth in Wichita, Kansas, in 1911, there’s a heavy load to carry. But the cigar-chomping PR man, executive secretary and confidante set a standard for professionalism from which the current generation of whining, combative flaks could learn.
Not that I want to get along with candidates and their hired guns.
No single moment during the governor’s race of 2014 was more fun than when I publicly confronted Greenwich millionaire Tom Foley about his past as a jetsetting union buster in the Southern textile mills that gave him enough cash to buy a Hogwarts-style mansion. Foley’s henchman, whose name totally escapes me at this moment, came after me in the parking lot of a Rocky Hill plant nursery with blood in his eye and who knows what in his mind, as their path to victory became even lesslikely and more overgrown with thorns.
At age 15, just before the Depression hit in the late-1920s, Debs Myers covered sports for the Wichita Eagle newspaper and went on to become city editor, then took over the coverage of Oklahoma for the old United Press wire service. During World War II, Myers, an admittedly indifferent soldier ,worked on the famous Army magazine called “Yank.” After the war he migrated to New York, becoming the managing editor of Newsweek magazine, eventually finding Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, who lost the party nomination in 1960 to John F. Kennedy.
When Myers announced he was leaving Wagner in 1964, newspaper accounts led by the New York Times chronicled a receiving line of pols, department heads and borough presidents descending on City Hall to wish him well. When he died, a 12-foot weeping crab apple tree was planted next to city hall outside the window where he worked, and a plaque was sunk in the ground that reads: “DO THE RIGHT THING / AND NINE TIMES OUT / OF TEN IT TURNS OUT / TO BE THE RIGHT / THING POLITICALLY.” / — / DEBS MYERS / CITIZEN/
So yeah, on this July 4th week, there’s a U.S. flag planted next to Debs and Nellie. Few things are more American than our messy, weird, hyperbolic political process. Debs Myers took it all in with humor, a twinkle in his eyes, the cigar in his teeth.
The green lichen is starting to take hold of the stone, but up there on Wolfpits Road in Bethel, you can still read it, with the first line of the novel “Scaramouche” by Rafael Sabatini: “DEBS MYERS/ CITIZEN/HE WAS BORN WITH A GIFT/ FOR LAUGHTER AND A SENSE/ THAT THE WORLD WAS MAD.”