The Bald Truth
WHEN WORD CAME of the passing of presidential also-ran Harold Stassen, Off Beat was curious to see how the local dailies would handle the boy-wonder governor's most conspicuous physical feature: his oddly hued hairpiece. Sure enough, the rug made an appearance about halfway through the St. Paul Pioneer Press obit, with scribes Lisa Donovan and Bill Gardner deftly noting that "[t]he perennial campaigns, like the stiff toupee he wore late in life, obscured his political image." On the other side of the river, meanwhile, the Star Tribune gave the rug a miss. Because Off Beat's bosses shell out obscene sums of money for a Lexis-Nexis account, we thought we'd run the wig through the database for the definitive postmortem on Stassen's orange aid. The results: While the New York Times refrained, CNN and the Los Angeles Times mentioned the toupee in their obits, as did the Washington Post. In fact, in a subsequent column the Post took it right from the top: "Even the obituary writers, schooled in the generosity owed to the dead, mention Harold Stassen's improbable toupee," reads Marjorie Williams's opening salvo. "This one great concession to the political realities of our age was stubbornly, proudly wrong, topping his great head like a sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze." And in a piece for the Palm Beach Post, columnist George McEvoy offered up this reminiscence about covering Stassen's 1968 presidential bid as a greenhorn reporter: "We all spotted the wig immediately. Somebody must have convinced Mr. Stassen that he was beginning to show his age, so he went out and bought a toupee. He must have purchased it in a novelty store, because it was of a hideous burnt orange color, curly, and just plopped on top of his head like a damp rag."
At Off Beat our motto is "Staying informed so you don't have to." Call (612) 372-3788 or send an e-mail to offbeat@citypages.com with any poop that's fit to print.
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From the Archive
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- So you want to be a public servant? You too could be mayor of St. Paul! Just answer a dozen of the most preposterous, frivolous, and insultingly direct questions you could ever hope to encounter in your whole squirming political life. (Cover Story - Feb 28, 2001)
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