Crummy & Cloistered

With the air of an unwilling valetudinarian, Michigan's handsome, boot-jawed Governor Kim Sigler got up to speak before the Economics Club of Detroit. Everybody in the ballroom of the Book-Cadillac Hotel knew that he would be operated on the next day for an ailing gall bladder.

"I have no fears about this thing," he began diffidently. "When your number is up--well, your number is up. So I am going to speak frankly to you." Then well-dressed Governor Sigler (he has 43 suits plus a morning coat) kept his promise.

"The office of governor of Michigan," he said, "is now the crummiest job in the U.S." A man, he grumped, should be elected for four years instead of two. That way he would have time to develop a program instead of thinking about re-election a couple of months after he got in.

He thought he ought to be able to name his own cabinet, with the exception of the auditor and treasurer. "There is no more reason for the people to elect an attorney general or a secretary of state than there is for them to get the itch." He took a dim view of doing departmental business by commission, board or bureau. "After 14 years of Washington's experience with government by bureaus," said Republican Sigler, "we know it didn't work. Every time you set up a bureau, you get the business of government further away from the people."

One of his complaints was almost wistful: "If I don't get out of the hospital, for heaven's sake see that the next governor of Michigan has a place in which to live." The state has no governor's mansion. Governor Sigler lives with his wife in a three-room suite in the Olds Hotel across the street from the Capitol in Lansing. He said it gives him "cloisteritis."

At week's end, Kim Sigler was recovering from his operation. It looked as if he would be suffering from "cloisteritis" for a while longer.

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