If You Ask Me

In the spring of 1955, as I was about to graduate from college with a degree in journalism and history, I went looking for an entry level job as a copyboy at one of the big New York newspapers.

No president has ever refused to leave office after not winning an election but a governor did it once in a most unlikely place, the Land of Steady Habits.

Consider this. Forty-three states offer in-person voting before Election Day; the others don’t. Twenty states allow voting on Saturdays, five on Sundays. Five states permit every voter to mail in their ballots between 10 and 18 days before the election.

In mid-October of 1948, an election year, The New York Times was reporting Republican Tom Dewey’s likely cabinet choices after his all but certain victory over President Harry Truman in November.

If Joe Biden is elected president, he plans to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.  We know this is true because Donald Trump told us so and Donald Trump is the first president since George Washington who has never told a lie.

The fate of America’s oldest, continuously published newspaper, the 256-year-old Hartford Courant, is in the hands of a man accused by 21 United States senators of “the reckless acquisition and destruction of newspapers,” including some of the nation’s best.

This will be the 21st presidential election in my lifetime and I can remember all of them, though I admit I can’t recall all that much about the first one when I was 3.

Twenty years ago, on Oct. 1, 2000, I wrote a column in this newspaper “congratulating” four of Connecticut’s six members of the U.S. House of Representatives on their “splendid victories” a month before they were actually reelected.