The Triumph of Roger Lapham

Loafers in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza, idly feeding crumbs to the pigeons, suddenly found three circus elephants in their midst. With equal suddenness, in the midst of the elephants, appeared sober, chunky Roger Dearborn Lapham, the onetime shipowner who is now San Francisco's bustling new mayor. Mounting a soapbox, able Mayor Lapham gave the pigeon feeders an impromptu 15-minute lecture on the merits of unifying the city's traction system. Pointing to the elephants, he cried: "There stands an early outmoded form of transportation the likes of which we intend to get rid of in this town."

This was only one of Roger Lapham's efforts to get San Francisco voters to approve the city's purchase of the ancient Market Street Railway, which for long years has run outmoded cars up & down Market Street, competing against municipally owned cars. The four sets of tracks gave San Francisco a famed traffic hazard. But four times the voters had turned down the purchase proposal.

But Roger Lapham, who has pledged himself to one nonpartisan term in office, made 70 speeches in three weeks. On a newsman's suggestion, he began calling up housewives at random, explaining the proposal to them in five-minute chats. On the Saturday before election he drove an old-fashioned horsecar, drawn by two white horses, for a two-mile trip along Market Street. The car was followed by a modern bus from which a loudspeaker blared: "I've been waiting for a streetcar all the livelong day."

Last week Roger Lapham had his well-earned triumph. The voters approved purchase of the Market Street system by a 22,000 majority (last year they turned it down by 34,000 votes). The city will pay $7,500,000 for the private line, and operate it without change until the purchase price is paid out of revenue. Then it will be time to talk about junking the old cars, ripping up the extra tracks on Market Street.

The scoffers, changing their tune, began to speculate on Roger Lapham as a successor to aged (77), ailing U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, who has been absent from the Senate most of the time in the last three years.

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