Vaudeville was almost dead in 1938 when Wilbert Lee O'Daniel, flour salesman, radio entertainer, composer of hymns and hillbilly songs, revived it in Texas to dramatize his campaign for Governor. In a sound truck with a speaker's stand on top, with a hillbilly band and singers, and an old-age pension slogan lifted from one of his songs ("Please pass the biscuits, Pappy!"), Lee O'Daniel won the Democratic nomination for Governor over eleven other hopefuls.
"Pappy's" pensions are dead in Texas, but vaudeville boomed again last week as six 1940 candidates for Governor, including Pappy O'Daniel, wound up their primary campaigns. This year, from Lee O'Daniel's troupe, two star attractions were weaned away: crooning Banjo Player Leon Huff and Steel Guitarist Kermit ("Horace the Love Bird") Whalen. They joined the company of snuff-dipping, wisecracking Candidate Gerald Anthony ("Jerry") Sadler, 32, onetime bellhop, now a member of the Texas Railroad Commission. The other four candidates were:
¶ Miriam A. ("Ma") Ferguson, twice Governor of Texas (1925-27, 1933-35), now at 65 a fond grandmother. Ma Ferguson left the management of her campaign to her husband, 69-year-old Jim Ferguson, Governor of Texas from 1915 until he was impeached in 1917.
¶ Full-bearded Candidate Arlon B. ("Cyclone") Davis, son of the late, famed Populist Leader Cyclone Davis, who campaigned in an Uncle Sam suit of red-&-white striped pants, blue jacket, with a tall beaver bonnet, and told Texans he would "eat earthworms, drink branch water, and sleep on Johnson grass hay" to get Lee O'Daniel out of office.
¶ Ernest Othmer Thompson, a Colonel in World War I, runner-up to O'Daniel two years ago.
¶ Harry Hines, a churchgoing member of the Texas Highway Department. Pappy O'Daniel got out his sound truck (with a replica of the Capitol dome on top), hired some more entertainers (including Texas Rose, a girl ballad singer), and put on a two-week whirlwind campaign. In his wake he left a trail of fainting girls and women—sometimes as many as a dozen would be laid out on the truck, prostrated by the crush of O'Daniel handshakers. On Saturday night, after the polls closed, he threw a mammoth party in the Governor's Mansion to celebrate his impending victory. Son "Nickey Wickey" O'Daniel sang Old-Fashioned Love in My Heart; Texas Rose sang I Want to Be a Cowboy. On the Governor's lawn 2,500 citizens, including nursing mothers, children and adolescents trampled on flower beds and littered the grass.
It was worth it. At last count, 53% of the votes were for Lee O'Daniel (making a run-off primary unlikely). Also-rans in order: Colonel Thompson, Commissioner Hines, Ma Ferguson, Jerry Sadler, "Cyclone" Davis.
Safely returned to Congress were Senator Tom Connally, Representatives Martin Dies, Wright Patman, Richard Kleberg, Sam Rayburn and Lindley Beckworth, 27-year-old "Baby of Congress."