Newspaper Articles


Bluefield Daily Telegraph
April 27, 1960 Kennedy Given Warmest Welcome Yet In Southern Region Politicking

Will Speak At Concord Today

Senator John F. Kennedy, seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, will speak this morning at 10:30 at Concord College.

The Athens talk will follow his appearance last night at Glenwood Park in Mercer County, and several other appearances throughout McDowell and Mercer County Tuesday.

The crowds that heard Kennedy Tuesday seemed more interested in what he had to say about unemployment than in his Roman Catholic religion.

Seldom Comes Up

Although he invited questions after every talk, the subject of religion seldom came up. It is a subject which has made Kennedy the underdog, in the eyes of most state politicians, in his West Virginia campaign.

Kennedy's reception Tuesday on a motor tour on winding mountain roads from Logan to Bluefield was his warmest yet in southern West Virginia. It is an area where the non-Catholic proportion of the population is even higher than the statewide figure of 95 per cent.

2 Days in Coal Fields

This was the second day of what started out as three-day campaign tour-two days in the coal fields, and then a swing into farming areas in the northeast.

But there was a possibility that Kennedy would cut short today's schedule somewhere along the line to fly back to Washington for a Senate vote on a mine safety bill.

Speaking in front of the municipal parking building in Welch, Kennedy remarked that Humphrey's candidacy in West Virginia has attracted "some of the strangest political bedfellows in political history."

This was provoked by afternoon newspaper accounts of Humphrey speeches early in the day. Humphrey had said at Kingwood that he was "being ganged up on by wealth" and at Keyser that he "can't afford to run through this state with a little black bag and a checkbook."


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