Jackie & the Judge

The morning sun beat down as the trim platinum blonde swung purposefully down the front walk of a luxurious ranch home in California's Coachella Valley, and, amidst a nervous flurry of hired help, stepped into a waiting air-conditioned Oldsmobile. She wheeled the Olds out past Mexican gardeners grooming the ranch-house lawn, and on the open road quickly pushed up to 80 m.p.h. In five minutes she was at the aptly named Thermal airport, where a sleek Lockheed Lodestar sat warmed up and ready for flight. She fastened herself expertly into the pilot's seat; seconds later Jacqueline Cochran Odium. 47, an orphan who vaulted from a Tobacco Road childhood to interna tional fame as an aviatress, businesswoman (cosmetics) and the wife of Financier Floyd Odium, was flying south. It was another day in her nonstop campaign for Congress.

At approximately the same hour, 75 miles to the northwest in the mushrooming city of Riverside (pop. 72,000), a short, coffee-skinned man with blue-black hair and an easy smile finished a hefty breakfast, stepped into his air-conditioned 1950 Buick and set off on a long round of meetings, conferences and calls aimed at Jackie Cochran's undoing. He was Dalip Singh Saund, 57, an India-born Sikh who came to the U.S. as a student and stayed on to become a citizen, a successful businessman, a California district judge and Jackie Cochran's Democratic opponent.

Land of Contrast. Among this year's 435 contests for the U.S. House of Representatives, none can match in flamboyance the three-way combination of Jackie, the Hindu judge and the sprawling California 29th congressional district that they are fighting for. The 2gth, undisputed preserve of G.O.P. Congressman John Phillips until he announced his retirement last November, spreads across 11,000 violently contrasting square miles. It includes the lush irrigated ranches (cotton, fancy vegetables, dates) of the Imperial, Coachella and Palo Verde valleys and Marslike desert mountains and flats. It in cludes the onetime citrus wonderland of Riverside County, now being turned into a thriving business area by the overflow of Los Angeles-bound migrants.

The campaign is as hot as the sun. Saund's Democratic partisans frequently refer to Jackie as "that woman"; Jackie's friends call Saund "that Hindu." Jackie's forces have not been above making an issue of Saund's race and religion, and Jackie publicly wonders if, in case Saund is elected, the color of his skin would inspire the powerful Southern Democratic congressional leaders to ignore him. Saund men see to it that the portions of Imperial Valley populated by Protestant Texans and Oklahomans know that Jackie is a Roman Catholic, and Saund asks how Jackie can oppose Government supports for farm prices and favor them for uranium (in which Floyd Odium is one of the nation's biggest investors).

Smooth That Wrinkle. Jackie refuses to share a platform with Saund ("I'm the popular national figure; why should I give him the publicity?"); Instead she darts around the district on her own, outfitted for frequent changes of clothes in the hot weather (she believes that a rumpled woman candidate wins no votes) and armed with a card catalogue on issues. She is well up on unique valley-farm problems such as irrigation and the astronomical cost of good land, promises to try to bring small business into the area if elected. Last week, when a listener asked for her views on organized labor, Millionairess Jackie set the Republican audience back on its heels. "I went down into the cot ton mills when I was eight," said she firmly. "I saw whole families there. I want to tell you people that the unions have done more for our nation than any other organized group."

All in the Family. While Jackie flies, earthbound Judge Saund concentrates on the new voters of Riverside, the largest urban area. (As a vice-fighting district judge in the little farm town of Westmorland, Saund is already well known in the Imperial Valley.) To help get him known to the new Riverside residents, Saund's wife, son, two daughters and a couple of in-laws have conducted a prodigiously successful registration drive, adding 6,500 new voters to the county rolls in eleven weeks. Saund himself travels tirelessly from Kaffeeklatsch to luncheon talk to dinner speech in his six-year-old Buick (he has pitted two windshields in sandstorms, added 26,000 miles since the campaign began), likes to stop along the way to talk to field hands, construction workers, just about anyone else who will listen. His specialty is foreign policy, and he has proclaimed that if elected, he will go to India as "a living example of democracy in practice."

Saund. who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, believes that "on just a matter of mathematics.'' i.e., a slight edge in Democratic registration, he will win--"I can feel this one coming." But local pundits doubt it. Reason: they never underestimate the power of Jackie Cochran.

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