The Senator

James Henderson Duff, 68, walked into Suite 244 in the Senate Office Building last week and hung up his cream-colored fedora. "Big Red" Duff, biggest political force in Pennsylvania, had arrived to take on his job of U.S. Senator--15 days late, because he had stayed to finish out his full term as Pennsylvania's governor.

Suite 244, formerly occupied by Idaho's beaten, guitar-playing Glen Taylor, was stacked with flowers. Shortly it became stacked with Pennsylvania well-wishers, many of whom had ridden into political office on the Duff coattails, had traveled on to Washington bedecked with yellow ribbons reading "Good Luck, Jim" to celebrate "Duff Day." Scowling with happy embarrassment, Duff took the subterranean trolley over to the Senate chamber with his senior colleague, Senator Ed Martin.

After escorting Duff to the rostrum to be sworn in by Vice President Barkley, Martin asked that the galleries be permitted to rise. "So far as the Chair knows," said Barkley good-naturedly, "it has never been customary or necessary to give unanimous consent for Pennsylvanians to arise anywhere they are." The galleries, packed almost solid with Pennsylvanians, arose. Then Big Jim Duff, the man who licked the Grundy machine in the primaries, licked the Fair Deal's Francis Myers in November, took his seat--an able, rugged, progressive addition to the Republican side of the Senate.

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