An article in the New Yorker once told of competition among purveyors of steaks along the tollways.
My first experience with tollways — long before the Interstate network developed — was getting on the Turner Turnpike in Oklahoma, which in those days, the ‘60s, was the only way to drive across the state in less than a week.
The article stressed that wherever privately owned tollways exist, that gives states an excuse to neglect the free highways. But what impressed me the most was the number of billboards advertising quickie steaks. The first billboard promised a sizzling sirloin steak on your plate in a mere 10 minutes. Farther along, some restaurateur peddled an 8-minute, 8-ounce steak.
Interestingly, as restaurants and gas stations at the time had a monopoly of food and services, the need to compete seemed strange. The New Yorker writer concluded that had there been real competing restaurants, diners’ intestinal tracts would suffer considerably. Ever taste a 90-second sirloin?
Something like that goes on during election cycles. It’s always enjoyable to see what candidates come up with to get their message and sometimes facts before the public.
I’ve grown accustomed to seeing a campaign poster for Nicolas Leger, who’s running for re-election as a county commissioner. Nicolas virtually has a reserved place on a stationary bike at the City Recreation Center. One knows he’s there because he picks the parking space farthest away from the entrance, lowers the tailgate to his pickup and displays his campaign sign.
It’s hard to miss.
Just as hard to miss is the early-50s Ford often parked downtown and bearing campaign signs for long-time State Sen. Pete Campos. That classic car — for which I would give my eye-teeth — certainly draws attention. And the signs are mobile: wherever the car goes, so do the posters.
But not so mobile is the highly imaginative device used to hoist the election chances of Bertha C. Bustamante, a candidate for county treasurer. Her sign, a 4×8 piece of plywood, is visible in various high places. Using an industrial-strength device that shoots the sign up 30 feet, the candidate certainly knows how to project her message.
One day we spotted Bustamante’s sign in the parking lot that houses O’Reilley’s, Bealls, Dollar Tree, etc. Another time it was parked (and raised) on South Grand, and over the weekend, it appeared near the train on Grand and Mills.
A regular-sized piece of plywood probably doesn’t weigh more than 40 pounds, but raising it to the height of a three-story building takes a massive amount of machinery. The “Cat” machine contains telescoping sections that support some kind of hydraulic forklift. The tires are so massive that one wonders whether the ‘dozer-type vehicle is even allowed on public streets.
Does it require a behemoth trailer to transport the lift? Regardless, that has to be the most imaginative of all campaign strategies this election.
We drove many streets of Las Vegas, noticing a number of large free-standing signs or those adorning fences and house fronts. The largest signs we spotted announce the candidacies of Tomás Salazar, Jennifer LaFebre, Richard Vigil, Ben Ray Lujan and Mark Guerin.
What’s next? Between now and the early-June election, will a candidate come up with anything even more imaginative than the sign-on-the pickup, the classic-Ford arrangement or the plywood-poster-on-a-stick?
Well, such a question takes me back to the days when every military recruit was sent on endless errands. At summer encampment with the National Guard in Fort Bliss, some NCO often would complain that the solution he was using to clean the equipment wasn’t sufficient and thereby would send the rawest recruit to the next battery “to borrow some blue steam.”
Of course, the neighboring unit, familiar with the ruse, would claim they’d just that minute run out of the blue steam, “but the guys in the next battery probably has some.”
It was amusing watching the kid making the same request of a couple of dozen National Guard units, especially after people like Elias Monroe, Robert Ortiz and I had been selected for that honor the year before.
Oh yes, the first year we also got to visit other guard stations to request a mythical “ham stretchers” when on KP, we ran low on meat for the mess hall. And we mustn’t forget the “sky hooks” we were sent to borrow when our own equipment was insufficient to raise certain instruments.
I believe the most innovative use of campaign strategy — a technique that didn’t require a diesel-guzzling piece of machinery — came when Alfred Nelson, running for re-election as state senator, discovered vandalism to his signs; usually the vandals defaced Nelson’s visage on posters throughout town.
Since Nelson had pin-on buttons with the same message and image, he once showed up at KFUN, sporting a button with his face effaced.