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Good morning, fellow Democrats!
First and foremost, I’d like to thank Chairman Wallin and the County Central Committee for the confidence in me that they expressed by nominating and electing me to fill the vacancy at the position of Vice Chair of the Democratic Party of Torrance County. I will do my best to prove that that confidence was not misplaced. I have been a Democrat since several years before I was old enough to officially register to vote, working on my first political campaign when I was 19, even though the voting age at the time was 21. Today I’d like to explain just WHY I became a Democrat.
My parents were both Republicans. They were what we now refer to as “Eisenhower Republicans”, which were far different from most of the Republicans we see today, but they were Republicans, nevertheless. When I was about six years old my father had been working as an electrician for the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady, New York but lost his job in a company downsizing. A few days after he got laid off there was a knock on our front door. My father opened the door to find a man standing there in the snow, holding a large box. The box was filled with basic food items, like rice, beans, bread, powdered milk and other staples. He told my father that he’d heard that my father had lost his job and that there were two small children in the family. He said that his organization wanted to help in a small way. It turned out that the man was the Block Captain for the local Democratic Party in Schenectady.
My parents, to the best of my knowledge, never formally changed their registration to Democrat, but I know that they voted for Kennedy for President in the 1960 election and for successive Democratic presidential candidates at least into the 1970s. For me, however, the image of that man standing at our door stayed fixed in my memory through the years. It was the Democratic Party . . . not my parents’ own party . . . that wanted to help our family in a time of need. So, in early 1968 I went to work on the campaign of the presidential candidate that seemed to personify my mental image of what a political person should be. That candidate was Bobby Kennedy. A few years after Bobby’s death I made it official and registered to vote on my 21st birthday, registering as a Democrat. Since then I have never turned away from the principles of that man in Schenectady or Bobby’s principles.
My hope for the next year and a half, as I pick up the reins at Vice Chair, is that we can continue the progress we’ve made over the last couple of years, sending the message that our county party has two goals: First, to elect Democratic candidates who will serve to help the less fortunate; and that the party itself will teach voters that the Democratic Party is STILL the party that supports farmers, ranchers, working people and those less fortunate than ourselves.
Bill Peifer
DPTC Vice Chair
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