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place at a certain time easily. You had to rely on the paper and on word of mouth. Not everybody had a radio in their house. The radio audiences who heard the Governor's speeches all through that campaign, and there weren't too many of them heard on the radio, largely heard them standing on the sidewalk in front of a stationery store or some other place that had a radio and put it on a loud speaker. We stood around on the sidewalk and listened to it. I remember plainly listening to Herbert Hoover standing on Broadway and 97th Street. I had been up to some meeting up there, or was going to speak at some meeting, and I remember standing and listening to Hoover. It was the speech that he made about the two chickens in every pot that stuck in my mind. I was standing on the sidewalk and some drugstore was broadcasting. I listened to all of it.
This was really an enormous turnout of people who had come to see Smith, partly, I suppose as we look at it now, out of curiosity - very largely out of curiosity. At any rate, their behavior, their enthusiasm, their excitement and their apparent deep affection and immediate personal response to this candidate was very impressive. It didn't seem to me extraordinary because I was impressed by Al Smith's personality. He was a likable fellow. I liked him right away, and so did quantities of other people in
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