Can one election change a man's life?

By John P. Rossi

My earliest election memory is of the 1948 presidential campaign. My relatives were all Republicans, and they were looking forward to New York Gov. Thomas Dewey's recapturing the presidency after 16 years of what they called Democratic "misrule." But I was pulling for President Harry Truman, because the word around my middle school was that a Dewey victory would mean school on Saturday. That was too horrible to contemplate.

My most vivid election memory, however, dates to the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960. It revolves around a local character, one of the most fanatically loyal Democrats in our otherwise Republican neighborhood in Lower Olney, the 13th District of the 42d Ward.

This most stalwart of Kennedy supporters was our neighbor Dan O'Reilly, a rawboned, ruddy-complected Irishman of about 65 who had a rolling gait and the powerful body of a man who had worked all his life.

Dan was born in Pennsylvania's coal region. As a boy, he had labored in the mines, where he learned the hard lessons of anti-Catholic prejudice. When he moved to Philadelphia, he found work at a gear company in Kensington, where his employers were also bigoted. His entire life had been defined by his Catholicism, his "Irishness," and his faith in the Democratic Party.

For about a month before the 1960 election, my friends and I would see Dan returning from daily Mass. He told us he was praying for a Kennedy victory. When we teased him and said he should be praying for the right man to be elected, his answer was abrupt: "No. It must be Kennedy."

We all had fun at Dan's expense, often relaying poll numbers that looked bad for Kennedy or, better yet, rumors that the election would be stolen by the Nixon campaign. Dan didn't find this hard to believe: He told us that Al Smith, the first Catholic major-party nominee for president, had actually won the 1928 election, only to have it stolen by corrupt Republicans.

As the election approached, Dan was a nervous wreck. On his way home from Mass, he would stop and ask us for the latest political news. Even though the Gallup poll showed Kennedy with a slight lead, we always told him that things looked grim for the Democrats.

On Election Day nearly 50 years ago - Nov. 8, 1960 - my aunt Mary Rose, a Republican judge of elections, was ill and in the hospital. Although this was my first presidential election, I was chosen to take her place at the polls.

Election officials normally voted first. But at 7 a.m., as the polls were about to open, I spotted Dan outside the window of the polling place, pacing nervously. We decided to give him the honor of casting the first vote.

He was behind the curtain for about 10 seconds - as long as it took to pull the lever for a straight Democratic vote. As he left, one of the election officials said, "Dan, are you sure you voted right? That sounded like the Republican lever to me." Dan just grunted, "You bet I voted right."

Later, as the polls were about to close, I noticed Dan skulking around the polling place. He was talking to everyone, trying to find out how things were going.

By closing time, at 8 p.m., turnout at our polling place was near 90 percent - a remarkable figure by any standard. It was clear that Kennedy had connected with the neighborhood's voters. Hell, I voted for him even though I was a registered Republican, as did two of the Republican poll watchers.

After the polls closed, the parties' representatives and I began recording the results from our two voting machines. It was a landslide for Kennedy. Four years earlier, Eisenhower had carried the district by a handful of votes; that year, Kennedy won it 4-1. The final tallies showed he had carried Philadelphia by more than 320,000 votes - 170,000 more than Adlai Stevenson's margin in 1956.

As we wrapped things up, Dan poked his head into the polling place. "How did Kennedy do?" he asked.

We had expected this question from him and planned our answer. "Not good, Dan. It looks like Nixon is winning everywhere."

Did you ever see anyone's jaw literally drop? Well, Dan's did at that moment. His eyes took on such a worried look and we felt so sorry for him that we couldn't keep up the ruse.

When we told Dan the real results, he turned and, without saying a word, almost danced out of the polling place.

I saw him the next afternoon, when the national result had become clear: a narrow Kennedy victory. He didn't care that there were rumors of Democrats' stealing the election in Chicago and Texas. There was a Catholic president, and all the abuse he had taken over the course of a lifetime was wiped away.

Dan moved away from Lower Olney a year later, and I heard that he died of cancer in early 1963. Later that year, when Kennedy was assassinated, I often thought it was better that Dan had died first. He didn't live to see his dream destroyed.