Alert the media! I am occasionally wrong

Speaking of questions, Bob M., my treadmill buddy at cardiac rehab three days a week, asked one out of the blue on Thursday. We had just checked our blood pressures when he suddenly asked, apropos of nothing, "Who said 'a chicken in every pot'?"

I said, "Al Smith, I think, but I will look it up to make sure."

Since Bob is 80, I didn't have to explain who Al Smith was.

It was not Al Smith.

I was wrong.

I was close, though (they say "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades). I was definitely in the right neighborhood. In the U.S. presidential election of 1928, Republican candidate Herbert Hoover won the electoral college vote 444 to 87, defeating the Democratic candidate, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. During the presidential campaign, a circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.“ I had the right year but the wrong guy.

Note that Herbert Hoover himself never specifically made such a promise, but that was the perception throughout the land. In actuality, less than a year after his election the stock market crashed. During the decade-long Great Depression that followed, many people didn't have chickens, pots, cars, or garages.

A memorable thing happened in 1931 when, on the president's birthday, radio announcer Harry Von Zell goofed, creating one of the most famous spoonerisms of all time when he inadvertently referred to Herbert Hoover as Hoobert Heever.

Which one looks more presidential to you?












To my mind, Mr. Hoover looks like a very kind Methodist minister (he was Quaker) and Mr. Smith looks like either a robber baron of the Victorian era or a New York City police commissioner.

Not that I'm given to making snap judgments.

Riiiight.

Later, while we were walking on adjacent treadmills, I asked Bob why he had asked me that question. He replied that he had seen his wife putting a chicken in a roaster pan.

Moral of today's post: There is generally a perfectly logical reason for everything that happens even if you can't see it at the time.