WHY THEY WANT HIM

FOR Ronald Hoppe and his wife Sally, hard work has always been a way of life. Growing up in Old Town, Chicago's tough ethnic crucible, Ron learned the Protestant virtues from his sea-captain father, an immigrant from Denmark; he learned to cram pennies into jars and projects into leisure time. By driving his Royal Crown Cola truck long hours, sometimes from 7 in the morning to as late as 10 at night, Ron earns $17,700 a year in wages and commissions and has bought his family the $27,000, two-story house that they share with his father and stepmother on the city's Far North Side. Ron, 28, has had only one vacation in the past three years. Mostly the Hoppes stick close to their home and four children. They relax by listening to their record collection of 450 LPs (Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Kenton), watching television on a set bought with quarters saved in a giant Seagram's bottle, or taking the family tor a weekend picnic on Cedar Lake.

But the Hoppes are not happy. The world they were born to, a white world of upward mobility based on hard work, has been threatened by the storms of social change They now find it an incomprehensible world of yippies and hippies, riots, crime and inconclusive war, and they long for solutions couched in phrases that they can understand and relate to themselves. Their quiet protest, voiced in tones of dismay and bewilderment rather than anger, has led them to espouse George Wallace. The candidate from Alabama expresses their ideas as though he has read their minds.

"I think it's criminal to pay people for having babies," says Ron, referring to the Aid to Dependent Children program. "Why do we do it?" Sally answers that people getting welfare should be put on buses and taken to jobs; "There are jobs--just look in the Sunday Chicago Tribune" Ron agrees. "That's where I always used to look." The Hoppes want Negroes to have a good life if they are willing to work for it. They do not believe that most blacks display that willingness. "I think we should look into the Negro problem with the Communists," says Sally. "They're being used. Why should we elect a soft President and play into the Communists' hands?" For the Hoppes, "Communism" is an all-pervasive evil threatening every aspect of their lives.

"I think the Communists have been left unchecked in this country for so long, and I don't think the average American is aware of it," says Ron. "Look at the riots at Columbia and Berkeley. Who gains by all this? The Communists. It makes them gloat," Sally agrees and adds: "Mayor Daley handled it right. He was prepared. The Democratic Convention wasn't a fraternity initiation." Ron, a Lutheran, believes that there is too much permissiveness everywhere: "I would have gone to college if I had been spanked a few more times."

Hubert Humphrey, the Hoppes believe, is "soft" on Communists, rioters and every other problem that they see. "Where do they get the right to burn and loot?" asks Ron. "There are rules and we should abide by them. Murder is murder and treason is treason. You can twist the law in this country, and it shouldn't be twisted. The majority is supposed to rule" They voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but confess that they had no real interest in politics until now "I feel I have been a dummy all these years," says Sally. Ron, too young to vote in 1960, thinks that John Kennedy would have been his choice. "What's holding us back everywhere?" he asks. "We've got to win a war. J.F.K. would have wanted to win it militarily. He would have gone in there and bombed the heck out of them "

Sally argues that Lyndon Johnson ''has not stood up against the Communists in Viet Nam. He's told us the story, but there hasn't been any ending." Richard Nixon does not offer a compelling alternative. "I can listen to Nixon, and at the end I never know what he has said," Sally says. "Nixon may say it, but Wallace means it."

They are certain, when they listen to Wallace's rhetoric, that they do in fact know what he means. So do their friends. Are they willing to waste their votes? Sally is sold, "to the end," she says. "I don't consider it throwing away a vote. I think I'd be throwing it away on Nixon or Humphrey. And besides, who says Wallace will lose?"

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