In the excitement of choosing Tom Dewey over Harold Stassen (see Republicans), Portland voters did not forget that they were also electing a mayor. Last week they rose up against flashy, cigar-chewing Earl Riley, who had been picked by the OWI as a "typical U.S. mayor" and sent on a wartime mission to Britain (TIME, Sept. 13, 1943). In Riley's place they named—for the first time in the city's history—a woman.
She was grey-haired, 47-year-old Mrs. Dorothy McCullough Lee, a lawyer, onetime state legislator, the city's first Councilwoman and its public-utilities commissioner.
Riley, who has been mayor for eight years, had been charged by Portland's influential City Club with negligence in stamping out vice in the Rose City. Mrs. Lee had promised: "I will enforce the law."
Mrs. Lee has two adopted children; her husband is an oil company sales representative. She had maintained stubbornly that "sex, as such, has no place in politics." When photographers came to take victory pictures of her, she said: "There'll be no cheesecake."