National Affairs: Emma & the Birds

The event that might linger longest in the minds of the delegates, spectators, and television watchers of the Democratic Convention was neither Harry Truman's fighting speech nor the Southern schism. It was the pigeons.

President Truman and Senator Barkley had just come into the hall (see above) when Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller bustled up to the podium. The sister of Pennsylvania's ex-Senator Joseph Guffey, and a perennial committeewoman, Mrs. Miller calls herself the Old Grey Mare.

Plump, powdered and behatted, she briskly interrupted Chairman Sam Rayburn's introduction of Barkley, took over the microphone. On...

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