I paid for it

The governor and his staff came into the auditorium just as we were setting up the microphones and audio system. We all looked at each other nervously. The preppy Texas congressman had arrived with his overweight, white-haired wife ten minutes earlier. They were all in their receiving room, but hadn't gone there until the wife had given them all a piece of her mind, ordering them about, making sure that her husband's podium was set to the right level, acting like the patrician New Englander she thought she was. And the former Texas governor whose ego matched the size of his state, he had made a grand entrance in the last half hour. So what if he was sitting in the car when Kennedy had been shot and had taken a bullet in the leg? That had been nearly twenty years ago.

The California governor looked far younger than they thought, certainly far younger than his real age -- or so they thought, as they whispered asides to each other, wondering where his glamour-puss wife was at the moment. He came up the stairs and introduced himself, as if that were in the least bit necessary. Really a friendly guy, and his politics were no one's cup of tea here in northern New Hampshire. And movie star handsome, even four decades afer his hey day in B movies. But the people who came in with him! Such a collection of stuffy business suits we'd never seen. And they handled him in the worst of all possible ways. We guessed that he could make up his mind when he wanted to, but these people handled the hell out of him.

So we got him set up. In came the preppy congressman and his wife. She looked like George Washington after the Battle of Trenton to me. So did the big-ego Texas governor. Why did all their politicians come from California and Texas? This political party of Boring Old White People seemed to produce nothing but Texans and Californians. We'd just gotten rid of Nixon, who like this one came from California. No, give us a president from the Northeast ... or the Midwest. But there the three big egos stood, California in the middle and flanked by Texas on either side.

Then came for the sound check, and none of the microphones worked.

"Nellie, come on over here and see if you can fix this contraption. It's broke as a widow from Corpus Christi!" cried Governor John Connally of Texas.

"No one will be able to hear me; all they'll be able to do is read my lips! Bar, get Jim to negotiate with the League people," cried Congressman George Bush of Texas.

In all the fuss over Connally and Bush, we all forgot about the congenial California governor, who stood in the middle watching the rest of us fuss over the two Texans. We could see he was stewing over being ignored in favor of his opponents.

"Hey, wait a minute! Come over here, too. I paid for this microphone!" Governor Ronald Reagan exclaimed, "George and John, there you go again, hogging the spotlight."