Nation: Running Mate's Mate

HOWEVER the political pollsters may rate them in the weeks ahead, the adventures of Spiro and Judy Agnew, if scripted for television, would rank high in the Nielsens as wholesome domestic fare in the style of Ozzie & Harriet or Hazel.

An early scene might show Spiro Agnew, then Republican county executive of Baltimore County, leaning across the pingpong table in the rec room of their suburban house in Chatterleigh, Md. "Judy," he says, "I'm going to run for Governor." They celebrate by calling out for a pepperoni pizza.

Then the director could dissolve to Miami Beach's Eden Roc Hotel and a suite decorated in Versailles schlock.

Agnew drops the princess phone and shouts to Judy in the next room, "I'm it!" Whereupon the camera would zoom in on Elinor Isobel Judefind Agnew, 47, plump, brunette wife of the Maryland Governor, as she registers the pride and terror of being transformed from a cheerful home body who "majored in marriage" (as she puts it) into the wife of a vice-presidential candidate.

The shock of Judy Agnew's suddenly expanded life has been little short of traumatic. Previously, her orbit had been limited, by her preference, to luncheons with the Kiwanis' Ki-Wives, the Women's Civic League and the Federation of Republican Women. Entertainment at the Governor's mansion in Annapolis often meant pocket billiards, pingpong, or an evening's placid TV watching in the basement club room.

Last week, at her first press conference back in the Governor's man sion, she bravely, if nervously, faced a battalion of reporters. "I'm not the speechmaker of the family," she said, "I'm the homemaker and mother." But she answered questions, some of them rude, with ingenuous spirit. To explicit queries about her weight (140 Ibs. at 5 ft. 4 in.) and dieting, she allowed: "I try to eat just sliced chicken at lunch, but I get sick of it: sometimes I think I'm going to start cackling myself." She tries to avoid snacks and used to work out at Y.M.C.A. "Swim and Slim" classes-exertions that have served more to re distribute her weight than to take it off. She is an enthusiastic amateur dec orator and refurbished the Governor's exquisite 19th century mansion at Annapolis in a style she calls "Victorian with chintz." Her husband, however, included an imported sauna bath in the restoration.

The daughter of a chemist and granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Judy was working as a 19-year-old file clerk for the Maryland Casualty Co. in Baltimore (which, as a native, she pronounces "Ballimer") when she met young Spiro Agnew, then a night student at the University of Baltimore Law School. She recalls their first date, when they went to the movies and later drank chocolate milkshakes at an A & W rootbeer stand. They were married 18 months later, in 1942, two days after he had graduated from Army Officers Candidate School as a second lieutenant.

Three of their four children are grown now, so that the Agnews have more leisure—or did until Nixon called. They enjoy Lawrence Welk and art," Judy says, although she did once relate to a painting depicting a forest of TV antennas. Her preferred reading is generally limited to newspapers and magazines.