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Names & Faces. In addition, the man has a rare talent that James A. Farley made famous in politics: almost total recall of names and faces. One day last week, as he was leaving his office in the State Capitol building in Columbus, the governor was approached by a visitor who stopped him with words that are familiar and frightening to every politician: "Governor, you don't remember me, but . . ." Lausche stopped in the corridor, looked the man over. Before he could complete his sentence, Lausche broke in: "Why, yes, I met you in Tiffin two years ago." Then, in a flood, he recalled details of the meeting, and, in a moment, the man's name came to him. When the governor left, the visitor was beaming.
Lausche's humility and sincerity register instantly with the average voter. Moving incessantly around Ohio, he hits his audiences with speeches that often are wholly unpolitical. "I do not ask you to vote for me," he said in Middletown in 1950. "I would like you to vote for me, but, above all, cast your vote for the good of the nation. Frank Lausche means nothing in the long scope of things as far as America is concerned. Only the nation and the state are important. Listen to the voice of the Americans who fell on the battlefield. Cast selfishness aside, and vote for the good of your state and your country." Such emotionalism sometimes moves cynics to laughter, political enemies to quivering rage ("He is a fraud and a lie," says Robert Reider, the Democratic candidate to succeed Lausche as governor). But it usually brings cheers from voters of the rank and file. And there can be little doubt of the governor's sincerity and deep patriotism.
Naturalize, Naturally. The governor's father, Louis Lausche, and his mother, Frances Milavec, teen-age immigrants from Slovenia (now part of Yugoslavia), met and married in a Cleveland steelworkers' district. The elder Lausches were passionately patriotic: they helped thousands of newly arrived Slovenes and other immigrants to put down roots in the U.S., gave them room and board until they were settled, and harangued them with patriotic speeches to get their citizenship papers. While Frances Lausche mothered the new arrivals, Louis helped them with their legal and naturalization problems, made good use of his knowledge of English, German, Croatian and Slovenian as an official interpreter. When he was needed as an interpreter, he often took Frank, the second of his ten children, to court with him. Once, when Frank was eleven, he substituted for his father in court.
After their modest fashion the Lausches prospered. On St. Clair Avenue, in the heart of a solid workingman's district, Louis Lausche built the Lausche Building, a two-story frame structure with store fronts below and flats above. Later he bought an adjoining apartment building. At various times the Lausche Building housed a bowling alley, a shop selling Catholic religious articles, the presses of Ameriska Domovina, a Slovenian-language weekly, a restaurant, and, until Prohibition, a wineshop, where the Lausches pressed their own wine from Ohio grapes and sold it to an eager Middle European clientele. The Lausche Building was the hub of neighborhood society, the local political forum, and a sanctuary for new arrivals from the old country.