Muffled Boom

The new sign in front of the Granite Block Spa, across from Fall River's City Hall, proclaimed in neon lights: "Joe Martin, Our Next President." Hastily, the Joe Martin Day Committee advised the proprietor that this wasn't the right idea at all.

The idea was that Joe Martin Day would be a strictly nonpartisan affair, just a home-district celebration by Fall River's citizens to show homespun Speaker of the House Joe Martin "the pride and affection they feel in him by virtue of the high office he has attained." The plan had been conceived by William S. Canning, a movie-chain manager, a Democrat, and Fall River's most zealous booster. Canning was well aware that Joe had carried strongly Democratic Fall River only once in the last 22 years.

Fall River Line. Last week Joe Martin Day turned out a boisterous success. From his home in North Attleboro, Martin drove through streets decked with bunting to the City Hall, where a huge picture of him had been erected over the door. The stores had closed for the occasion and the Democratic city administration had given its employees the day off. A crowd of 5.000 waited in the drizzling rain. After his speech, Joe shook hands with everybody he could reach, and called everyone he could by his first name. He knew a lot of first names.

Then Joe drove out to Lincoln Park, an amusement park seven miles out of town. There 1,500 select guests, Democrats and Republicans, sipped Martinis and Manhattans out of paper cups in a big dance hall. Then they all girded on "Joe Martin Day" aprons and addressed themselves to the corn, clams, lobsters and beer of a traditional New England clambake. Joe, an old hand at this sort of thing, expertly did away with a heap of clams and half a lobster. Licking buttery fingers, the crowd sang:

Oh, the old Fall River Line

We sent our Joe to Washington

And he always treats us fine.

You can take a train or aeroplane

And you might arrive on time,

But our Joe's on top and what helped a

lot

Was his old Fall River Line*

New Threshold. When the speeches began, the nonpartisan bonds slipped a bit, and there were sounds very like a muffled boom. Cried Massachusetts' Governor Robert Bradford, who returned from a vacation in Maine for the celebration: "He's only on the threshold of an even greater career." Massachusetts' Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a leading candidate for "favorite son" himself, declared: "If he wants more, the people of Massachusetts will be with him to a man."

When Joe Martin rose to speak, a short man in a white suit leaped to his feet and shouted: "Three cheers for the next President." The crowd cheered. Joe Martin blushed and his voice choked. His speech was barely coherent, but everybody heard him when he said at the end: "This will be an event that as long as time itself, I can never forget."

When all the guests had gone, Joe went back to the kitchen and autographed the aprons of the waitresses and dishwashers, then drove off for his summer home in Sagamore on Cape Cod. Other guests drove back into Fall River. Opposite the City Hall, the sign outside Granite Block Spa now said with bare coherence: "Joe Martin."

*A play on the old steamer service plying between New York and Fall River, which ceased operations in 1937. Things of grandeur in their prime, in their latter days the old boats still aroused the affectionate exasperation of a large public. One frequent passenger cracked that the Priscilla was held together by the strip of red carpet in her main saloon.

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