DEMOCRATS: Whistle While You Work

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Aboard the Southern Pacific's New Frontier Special, the mood varied from convivial nostalgia in the bar and press cars, as oldtimers recalled the whistle-stop campaigns of the past, to steadily rising spirits in the blue-carpeted observation car, where Jack Kennedy and his aides mulled over the speeches and counted noses at every stop. "This train is headed not only south," Kennedy shouted from the rear platform to a crowd in Marysville, Calif., "but it's headed toward Washington!"

As the three big diesels hauled the 15-car campaign train through the Cascade Mountains into California at the beginning of the two-day trip, Kennedy—and the trackside crowds—warmed to the oldfashioned whistle-stop idea. In tiny Dunsmuir, deep in the shadows of 14,000-ft. Mount Shasta, 500 chilly citizens and a tiny burro greeted the candidate and the new day with a rousing cheer that echoed up the canyon. At Redding the sun was warmer, and 1,500 citizens lined up under a fringe of trees along the siding while Kennedy trotted out the old nostalgia ("I follow here in 1960 the same trail Harry Truman took in 1948 when he came down this valley and carried California in the 1948 election"). At Sacramento, 5,000 massed in the station to hear Kennedy invoke the shade of a famous Republican: "Abraham Lincoln said, T know there is a God and he hates injustice. I see the storm coming and I see his hand in it. If he has a place and part for me, I am ready.' And I say in this campaign as the storm breaks around the great Republic, that there is a place for us and we are ready."

Adlai & Mother. All through the hot day the train clacked through the almond groves and peach orchards of the Central Valley, and Kennedy pulled the stops, one by one. In Richmond, introducing his sister, Pat Lawford, it was American motherhood ("My wife is home, and we are having a baby—a boy—in November"). A reference to Adlai Stevenson drew loud cheers in Richmond, deep in Stevenson heartland. There were the in evitable home-grown beauties bearing gifts: olives and peaches in Red Bluff, a jug of water in Dunsmuir, a camellia plant in Sacramento (earlier in the week there were Shoshoni war bonnets in Pocatello). And in Roseville the surprise package was California's Governor Pat Brown, who had joined the trackside audience, clung to the rear-platform railing when the train started off unexpectedly, was finally hauled aboard by Kennedy.

Pulling into Oakland, the New Frontier Special was as gay as a football train, and Campaign Schedule Manager Kenny O'Donnell was busy revamping Kennedy's schedule to include more and longer whistle stops. In Oakland, the gloomy forecasts of local politicos came to nothing: the civic auditorium brimmed over with 6,000 yelling Democrats, and 500 others shuffled in the street outside.

Easing into Bakersfield for the whistle-stop windup the next day, the Kennedy train looked like a rolling fruit stand, jammed with the offerings of a dozen Central Valley towns.