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A New Life Style. Agnew is a prideful and successful self-made man who is still insecure about certain things. In some ways, he is like the younger Richard Nixon, before Nixon moved to New York City and achieved the serenity of a lucrative six-figure law practice. Like Nixon, Agnew grew up in somewhat straitened circumstances. His father, Theodore Spiro Anagnostopoulos, came to the U.S. from Greece in 1897 and shortened the family name. He became the owner of two Baltimore restaurants (the Brighton, the Piccadilly), but eventually wound up selling groceries from the back of a truck during the Depression. After young Agnew graduated from Forest Park High School, he studied chemistry for three years at Johns Hopkins, then switched to the University of Baltimore. Having interrupted his education to serve four years in the Army during World War II, he received a night-school law degree from Baltimore in 1947.
In 1946, under the influence of a senior partner at the law firm where he was working, Agnew changed his registration from Democratic to Republican. He had his earliest experience in practical politics working during the '50s in the four successful U.S. House races of Congressman James Devereux, a conservative Marine war hero. By then, Agnew had adopted a life style that has influenced his personality and political views ever since. He had moved from the city of Baltimore to Baltimore County and become a suburbanite.
Sodded Lawns. Ted Agnew, now 49, and his wife Judy, 47, were exemplars of the postwar generation of married couples who settled in the suburbs to raise their families in an environment of newly laid asphalt, freshly planted saplings, water sprinklers on sodded lawns and prefabricated houses. The Governor prefers evenings in the recreation room of the 19th century Governor's mansion, which Judy has remodeled in what she calls "Victorian with chintz." There, Agnew shoots billiards, listens to stereo (Lawrence Welk is the family favorite) or plays a furious game of pingpong. One good-natured rumor has it that Agnew's squint, which all but hides his eyes in hooded crescents, is the result of watching too much football on television. One of the special advantages of his office is that various Baltimore Colt linebackers and defensive ends can accept invitations to dinner at the mansion.
In 1957, with a civic-minded interest in the progress of the prospering horseshoe-shaped county that rings the city of Baltimore, Agnew accepted an appointment to the county board of zoning appeals. Three years later, he made his first attempt at elective office, but ran dead last in a five-way race for judge of Baltimore County circuit court.
Apotheosis. Nixon has designated Agnew as the ticket's urban authority, but in fact his expertise is somewhat more specialized. In 1962—thanks mainly to the bitterly divided Democrats —he was elected to a four-year term as Baltimore County Executive. As the apotheosis of the new suburban man, Agnew learned not the problems of the ghetto but those of the subdivisions outside the city's scabrous core. Still, Agnew backed and signed an ordinance barring discrimination in some public accommodations—one of the first such ordinances in the nation.