LOUISIANA: The Winnfield Frog

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As governor of Louisiana, swaggering, shifty-eyed Earl Kemp Long has hardly been able to spit, scratch or take off his shoes without rousing a disconcerting ghost. During his 3½ months in office the legend of his brother Huey has dominated and overshadowed him almost as thoroughly as the live Kingfish did during the noisy years of the Great Louisiana Hayride.

Huey's roads, Huey's bridges, Huey's schools and Huey's friends & enemies are everywhere that Earl goes. Earl works in Huey's 34-story skyscraper capitol and lives in Huey's governor's mansion—an imitation White House which the Kingfish erected in Baton Rouge so he would "feel at home" when he became President. Back-parish voters eye Earl beadily to see that he acts "like Huey would have wanted."

At times it is almost more than Earl can bear. At a press conference held shortly after he was elected governor he cried: "Huey couldn't have been elected dogcatcher without my help . . ." But these honest outbursts of rage & envy have been infrequent. Earl has aped his brother with the beetle-browed assiduousness of a vaudeville baboon learning to roller-skate; he rubs himself with the legend of Huey's greatness like a voodoo worshiper using "Fast Dice Oil."

Old Earl. He has none of Huey's wild, magnetic appeal. At 53 he is a soft, dumpy man with a mushy voice, a flaccid handshake, a venomous temper and the general bearing of a small-town pool-hall operator. Crowds bother him and he cannot hide a furtive wariness when job seekers approach him. He is a dedicated horseplayer—who makes two dollar bets. But he has the "Long Look" and a shrewd insight into the mind of Louisiana's tobacco-chewing common man.

He calls himself "Old Earl," gets up as early as 5:30 in the morning to let visitors wander into the governor's mansion. He appoints "colonels" with a lavish hand (some 250 to date) and presents lesser fry with penknives—after first exacting a penny so "a friendship won't be cut." He enjoys the feel of clean white suits, but he never allows his interest in the finer things to interfere with a certain honest vulgarity. On the day after he was elected governor, he asked friends to his house, spread out a copy of the anti-Long New Orleans Item, and spent the afternoon spitting on it.

Champagne & Talcum. Last week he was genuflecting more vigorously than usual before his brother's memory. He was doing everything in his power to get Huey's 29-year-old son Russell elected to the U.S. Senate. He sent his big, tough-looking Lieut. Governor Bill Dodd out on the road to blast Russell's closest competitor, Judge Robert F. Kennon, who had also had the audacity to oppose Earl for governor last January.

"They tested Judge Kennon when he left the Army," Dodd bayed at country crossroads. "They tested his feet and said they were no good for running. They tested his blood and said it was 65% champagne and 35% talcum powder. They tested his ears and the doctor said: 'Judge, your ears are perfect. You can hear an election coming two years off.'"