THE CAMPAIGN: Fork in the Road

• Share

(4 of 6)

"Come On Out." Art Langlie attributes his strongest traits of character to his mother, Carrie Langlie. Eldest of her three sons, he was born July 25, 1900 at Lanesboro, Minn., where father Bjarne Alfred Langlie clerked in a grocery and bakery. When Art was five his father, anxious for a better job, made the first of a series of moves that took the family from one Minnesota town to another and eventually west to Washington, where Bjarne bought a genreal store on the Olympic Peninsula and wired his family waiting in Minnesota to "come on out."

Langlie describes the journey: "It was quite a trip. All three of us kids had the whooping cough, and I was worried about my dog, who was in the baggage car. When we got off the train in Seattle, I didn't see either the dog or my father. Then, all at once, we saw the dog tied to a telephone pole and my father coming to welcome us." With dog and father accounted for, Art Langlie looked around, announced, "I'm going to like it here, Mother. I like the trees and the water."

Amid trees and water, life was peaceful. Art finished high school with academic and athletic honors, found time to tootle a cornet in the school band at political rallies. ("It could have soured me for life.") At the University of Washington he studied law, played second base for a team that won three regional championships and toured Japan. After graduation he opened a law practice and met a Pittsburgh girl named Evelyn Baker, who, while visiting in Seattle, had spotted his picture in the university yearbook and remarked, "Look at that beautiful smile." One of Art's Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers arranged a blind date. Result (three years later): matrimony.

Petition to Run. Like all young lawyers, Art Langlie talked politics. But he had not seriously thought of a political career until the New Order of Cincinnatus tagged him for the city council. Once in office, he turned practical reformer with a vengeance. Langlie and his reform colleagues, though they were the minority, forced centralized city purchasing, establishment of a police training school, a shutdown of gambling halls and brothels, and a $2,000,000 slash in a fat budget. In 1936 the Cincinnatus decided to run one of their councilmen for mayor, picked Arthur Langlie. He lost to Dave Beck's friend, John Dore, by 5,000 votes, filed again two years later, won by 30,000. He was re-elected in 1940 without making a speech or spending a cent of campaign money. Soon afterward, he was visited by a delegation of eastern Washington Republicans bearing 25,000 names on a petition asking him to run for governor. Not for 40 years had the conservative eastern Washingtonians crossed the Cascades in search of a candidate. Aided by 27,000 volunteer workers, Langlie stumped the state, edged out Clarence Dill, locally famed for selling Franklin Roosevelt on the Grand Coulee Dam idea, by 5,816 votes, while Roosevelt was carrying Washington by 140,000.