Crowded Field

Even before the roistering days of James Michael Curley, Boston was not noted for the sobriety of its politics.

Last week, however, even old city hall hands were blinking a bit as the 1967 mayoralty campaign got under way. No fewer than 23 candidates showed at the elections department to pick up filing papers for a Sept. 26 preliminary run off, including an Oxford-educated Brahmin, a mother of six, a blind man, a city councilman named lannella and an ex-con named lannello, a man named Mines and another named Hynes. There were also three Collinses, including Boston Globe Columnist Bud Collins, who cracked: "There may be more voters in the race than out by the time everybody has announced."

The free-for-all was assured last month when able two-term Mayor John Collins announced that he would not seek reelection. That left the field wide open. It also left Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, Boston school committee member and long a fierce enemy of enforced school integration, with at least a slight popular lead on the early form sheet. A strong campaigner who topped the ticket in the last two citywide elections, Mrs. Hicks wows the voters with her theme song--Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise--and her parochial slogan: "Boston for Bostonians." In a city of strong ethnic divisions and relatively low levels of income (45% of the registered voters earn under $6,000) and education (38% never finished high school), she appeals to those who distrust academics, business leaders and suburbanites.

Though he has no real political base in the city, Edward Logue, head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which has performed a radical face lifting on the city's skyline in the past seven years, is given some chance of defeating Mrs. Hicks. Another strong candidate is Massachusetts Secretary of State Kevin White, a man of honest Irish antecedents though he has, as they say in the lace-curtained flats of South Boston, "turned blue"--i.e., taken to mixing with the Yankee aristocracy. But both Logue and White will probably lose Beacon Hill and Back Bay votes, which they badly need, to Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar John Sears, the first Republican who has had the temerity to run for mayor of Boston in 18 years.

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