Southies' Comfort

Louise Day Hicks is a bulky grandmother who would not stand out in a supermarket crowd. Yet she stood out so far from nine male candidates in Boston's nonpartisan primary last week that she may well become the city's next mayor. With the general-election contest narrowed to herself and a bland fellow Democrat, Massachusetts Secretary of State Kevin White, it would take a rash bookie to rate the lady an underdog.

That, nonetheless, is the rating that she covets, and with good reason. Mrs. Hicks collected 28.1% of last week's vote (compared with White's 19.8%), principally from the large blue-collar and lower-middle-class groups who feel bypassed by federal and city welfare programs and who support her unsuccessful attempts to block measures promoting public-school integration.*

They got the message when she repeatedly piped: "You know where I stand." Another motto was "Boston for Bostonians." Excluded by this definition are civil rights activists, Harvard intellectuals, suburbanites, Yankees, urban-renewal advocates and other purveyors of unsettling influences. Postprimary speculation that a bipartisan coalition including Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Governor John Volpe would support White meshed well with Mrs. Hicks' strategy. "A powerful structure is coming into Boston to defeat the people," she warned darkly. "I'll take them all on."

Sociological Theories. Her disguise as Lone Ranger pitted against the Beacon Hill and Cambridge Establishment is reminiscent of James Michael Curley's durable appeal to Bostonians of another generation. And the notion that Kennedy men cannot lose in cod country is illusory: Mayor John Collins, who is retiring after two terms, originally beat a Kennedy endorsee. Both Lawyer Hicks, 48, and Lawyer White, 37, are Irish Catholics, but Mrs. Hicks is the daughter of Judge William Day, whose memorial is a boulevard in the Irish quarter of South Boston, and her address allows her to warble Southie's My Home Town with fidelity. White lives in the Beacon Hill section, suffers in the eyes of Southies from guilt by association with Brahmins.

It was the racial issue that first brought Mrs. Hicks to prominence. Since being elected to the school committee six years ago, she has vigorously fought all attempts to break down Boston's de facto school segregation. She opposes the bussing of pupils out of their neighborhoods on the ground that bussing destroys "freedom of choice," and has opposed the open-enrollment system that permits Negro parents to register their children in predominantly white schools. Though a 1965 state law to promote racial balance now makes some student bussing unavoidable in Boston, Mrs. Hicks promises to fight the measure, condemns its goal as deriving from "arbitrary decisions based upon unproved sociological theories." At the same time, she insists that she is an "ardent believer in civil rights for all," noting that her best friend in law school was colored.

Matter of Arithmetic. White does not oppose bussing in principle, but, like some other liberals, says it is "really not a solution." He has campaigned in general terms for a more humane, neighborhood-oriented city government, despite the $200 million in federal funds that have gone into Boston's urban-renewal program in the past seven years. White echoes the common complaint that the money and effort that have gone into face-lifting the downtown skyline have not done much for residential areas or for Boston's down-at-heels schools and hospitals.

White's line is obviously less rousing than Mrs. Hicks' emotional pitch. The largely ceremonial post of secretary of state, which he won in 1960, has given him little experience in close political combat. Thus White's hope to win in November is mainly a matter of arithmetic. If he collects the major share of the votes that went to the eight also-rans in the primary and gets solid Negro backing, the Hicks' primary plurality of 12,933 out of a total vote of 155,000 would evaporate.

*Thirty-two percent of Boston's Negro public-school enrollment attend schools which are classified as "racially balanced"--schools with 50% or more white enrollment. The number is growing.

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