by Michael Solomon It was a
great day of triumph for House of Bamboo on April 18, 1964
at the Party Out of Power Republican Mock Convention at
Queens College.
House of Bamboo constituted the Oregon delegation and its
candidate was the then Great Governor of Oregon, Mark O.
Hatfield.
Starting
with only nine delegate votes, the HOB delegation managed to
secure the Republican nomination for Governor
Hatfield.
Michael
Solomon
was Chairman of the Oregon delegation and the other
delegates were David
Vogel,
Jerry
Schulman,
Mike
Schwartz,
Andrew
Gottesman,
Robert
Shulman,
John
Jokl,
Harris
Schectman
and Howard
Stone.
Our alternate delegate was Richard
Golden.
The other candidates at the Queens College convention for
the Republican presidential nomination were Senator Barry
Goldwater from Arizona (who became the real 1964 Republican
presidential nominee), Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge from
Massachusetts, Governor John Love of Colorado, former Vice
President Richard Nixon, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New
York, Governor George Romney of Michigan, Governor William
Scranton of Pennsylvania, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of
Maine, and Chief Justice Earl Warren of California.
This must have been Governor Hatfield's finest hour and he
later acknowledged in a letter dated April 28, 1964, with
great gratitude the support and organizational triumph of
HOB. Barry Goldwater ultimately lost in a landslide to
Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 election.
If Governor Hatfield had been elected president in 1964,
history may have turned our very differently over the last
40 years.