Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online

reflects that this risk is run on behalf of a College that is not needed and serves no creative function, the folly of retaining it becomes even more clear. It was with such gloomy speculations that I prepared to report to Harrisburg to play my role as a member of this curious institution.
    On the morning of my departure a blizzard invaded the eastern part of the state, blowing in upon us from the Atlantic, and within a few hours it deposited on our roads some six inches of snow, laid down upon a foundation of ice.
    Since it seemed unlikely that I would be able to reach the capital if I waited till mid-morning to depart, I rose at five and in the gloomy hour before sunrise, headed westward. Snow swirled through the darkness. The air was bitter. And gales whipped the snow into such deep drifts across our country roads that I felt certain I was going to be bogged down before I got fairly started.
    Fortunately, a few farmers were out and their milk truckshad broken a trail which allowed me to reach a main road, but this headed directly into the storm, and although the road surface was cleaner, driving was even more hazardous than it had been on the back trails. My windshield was quickly caked with snowy ice, and when dawn began to break, gray and ugly and freezing, I was still only a few miles from home.
    It was an unseasonable storm and therefore crippled a large area that might have been able to handle it more easily later in the winter. In the first hour I saw three cars badly disabled and concluded that I would have to turn off the road and wait till some service station opened where I could keep warm. I thought it unlikely that I would make Harrisburg.
    And then I met a truck coming eastward. We both stopped, and the driver yelled, “What the hell goes on here?”
    “Sudden storm.”
    “Storm! This damned thing’s a blizzard. Look at the drifts.” He left his truck and stared down the barely visible road. “How long’s this been going on?”
    “Five or six hours. Why? Hasn’t it been snowing where you’ve been?”
    “Hell no!”
    “Where’ve you been?”
    “Harrisburg.”
    When I smiled, he told me that up the road about twenty miles, at Allentown, the roads were clear. “You’ll have a straight run in to Harrisburg. No trouble.”
    I told him he’d have plenty of trouble in the direction he was headed, and we parted. He was right. After about fortymore minutes of very difficult going, with some cars stranded and others in the ditch, I at last reached the point at which the storm had stopped, a line as clear as if drawn by a pencil, and from there the road was open and clear and bitterly cold. The snow would follow later, but on that day it would not catch up with me, so within a few hours I was in my hotel room in Harrisburg.
    I had been summoned a day early to meet with those officials whose duty it would be to see that the procedures on Monday moved swiftly and legally. I was not quite sure why I had been asked to participate, but a splendid old parliamentarian for the Republican party, who would supervise the proceedings and get little joy from shepherding a bunch of Democrats, explained over the telephone that the electors had been consulted and they wanted me to serve as their president. What he and I decided on Sunday would be the procedure on Monday. He would wait for me in the capitol.
    I put the phone down and considered the ambivalent moral position in which I found myself. That my peers had selected me to be their president was an honor which I appreciated, for I had stood with many of them in political wars and I was pleased that together we had helped carry our state for the Democratic party. But at the same time I recalled with painful clarity the course I had decided to follow had the Presidential election proved inconclusive. In those days, as danger threatened, I had determined to subvert the Electoral College in an effort to forestall either a Republican or a Democratic deal with Governor