The Man Who Pulled a Thread

Monday, Oct. 13, 1952

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A few months after he became a man, John got his feet out from under his father's table. He went to work in a brother-in-law's general store, and soon afterward decided to go in business for himself. Sussex County is chicken country, and John thought Millsboro needed a chicken-feed supplier. He and a brother borrowed a few hundred dollars, part from their father, part from a bank, and started the Millsboro Feed Co. It was no bonanza, but it grew steadily. At 19, John married Elsie Steele, a farm girl. In the early years, she raised broilers in the backyard to supplement the family income.

The Williamses are now very wealthy, by Sussex County (but not Wilmington) standards. He is not a millionaire but owns a large interest in a poultry farm (300,000 chickens and 6,000 turkeys a year) and a hatchery (105,000 chicks a week). All in all, Williams owns about 1,000 acres of Delaware farm land, some of it in partnership with relatives.

He is an enthusiastic Rotarian, and he and Elsie have traveled quite a bit in South America and Europe. At an international Rotary meeting in Nice, France, Williams became a hero to his fellow Americans by discovering a restaurant that served Maxwell House coffee.

That was the sum of his distinctions in 1946, when he decided to run for the Senate. His political qualifications seemed to be nil. His friends thought he must be joking or that he meant the Delaware state senate. He knew only one (retired) politician, had made only one speech in his life (to a Rotary Club). On that occasion, he could not be heard beyond the front row, and he was uneasy and ungrammatical. "It was just something I thought might could be done." he says.

It could. The retired Millsboro politician, an ex-Congressman named George Williams (no kin), looked over the field and found Republican candidates scarce because everybody thought the Democrats would win in Delaware.

Up to Wilmington went Williams & Williams. George called on Frank du Pont, gave him an impressive earful about John, persuaded Du Pont to call the Wilmington Journal and say that the next Senator from Delaware was going to stop in to see the editor. A word like that from a Du Pont (provided it's the right Du Pont) goes a long way in Delaware. That afternoon Williams & Williams convinced the editor that John was senatorial timber—or at least that he was good enough to take the inevitable beating.

If a candidate travels hard enough, he doesn't need to speak above a whisper to be heard the length (96 miles) and breadth (35 miles) of Delaware. It's the handshakes that count. John Williams shook hands hard and beat his lawyer, Senator James Tunnell, by 12,000 votes, a respectable margin in Delaware.

A Delinquent Account. Senator Williams went to Washington with nothing much on his mind, and settled down in the back row as one of the hard-shelled Republican conservatives.He'd been there a year when an accident happened. As he tells it: