Made in America

Together, California's Imperial and Coachella Valleys form one of the wonders of the New World. Stretching from the Mexican border to the outskirts of Los Angeles, the area is a lush, natural hothouse, larger than the state of Delaware and yielding as many as three crops a year ("You plant the seeds," a local saying goes, "and jump out of the way"). Within 50 years the valleys have been changed from sun-cracked desert (summer temperatures range from 100DEG F. to 120DEG F.) into one of the biggest irrigated regions on earth, and one of the richest. In this improbable winter garden last week, warming up for a congressional race, were two improbable political candidates: a platinum blonde who fought her way from hideous poverty to fame and riches, and a county judge with blue-black hair and coffee-colored skin who was born in Amritsar, India.

Barefoot Girl. The story of Candidate Jacqueline Cochran is beyond the rosiest dreams of Horatio Alger. She does not know who her parents were, or where she was born an estimated 47 years ago. Her childhood was spent in a succession of Florida and Georgia cracker shanties, in dreary sawmill towns at the dead ends of Tobacco Road. Her dresses were flour sacks, and she got her first shoes when she was eight. Starvation was always lurking outside the door, and Jackie ate mostly what she could steal or scrounge. She learned to read from the signs on railroad boxcars, went to work in a cotton mill when she was eight (she had been a midwife before that). At eleven, she left home to work in a beauty parlor.

From such a bleak beginning, Jackie Cochran became a beautician, a nurse, a good airplane pilot, and the wife of Multimillionaire Floyd Odium. After her marriage, Jackie's career (or careers) soared upward like a jet plane. As the head of her own nationally known cosmetics firm, she is a keen and successful business woman. As the U.S.'s No. 1 aviatress, she has won scores of awards, set dozens of records, was the first woman to break through the sound barrier. During World War II she headed the women pilots' ferrying service, the WASPs. As Mrs. Floyd Odium she is a social leader, a world traveler, the friend of celebrities.

Last November, when Republican John Phillips announced that he would give up his seat in Congress as the Representative of California's 2gth District (the Imperial and Coachella Valleys and surrounding wasteland), Jackie instantly tossed her Lilly Dache bonnet in the ring (TIME, Nov. 14). It was no feminine caprice: Jackie Cochran has long had a hankering to go to Congress, and, unlike many of the big landowners in the Imperial Valley (40% of the land is held by absentee owners), she has spent a great deal of the past 20 years personally operating the 600-acre Odium ranch, and is well known in the district.

Fascinating People. Jackie's principal Democratic opponent, Judge Dalip S. Saund, 56, has had an equally remarkable career. The son of a well-to-do Sikh fam ily, he became a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and an admirer of Woodrow Wil son while he was still in college. After reading Lincoln's Gettysburg Address ("The most sublime thing I had ever read"), he decided to visit the U.S. He intended to return to India, but America was too fascinating. At the University of California, Saund studied viticulture, got his Ph.D. in mathematics, became a lecturer. In 1928 he married Marian Kosa, the daughter of a Los Angeles painter, and started a lettuce farm.

From the beginning, Saund had a lively interest in community affairs, and especially in Democratic politics. But as an East Indian, he was barred by old Oriental exclusion laws from citizenship, and his political activity was confined to the backstage. In 1946, when Harry Truman signed the Luce-Celler Bill, granting citizenship rights to 3,000 East Indian immigrants, Saund promptly applied for first naturalization papers. In 1949 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Three years later, he was elected judge of the Westmorland judicial district court.

Once he became judge (he is the only East Indian holding elective office in the U.S.), Saund sold his farm and bought a prosperous ($250,000 annual gross) fertilizer plant that would allow him more time for his judicial work. His record as a judge has been excellent, and his stiff sentences are credited with cleaning up the city of Westmorland (pop. 1,600), which was a sink of prostitution and gambling. Over the years, Saund has won the esteem of his neighbors as a conscientious judge, a spellbinding speaker and a good citizen. Two months ago, he announced that he was seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress.

Platforms & Plans. Last week, from the turquoise swimming pools of Palm Springs to the torrid calles and alleys of Calexico, the 29th Congressional District buzzed with politics. In addition to Candidates Cochran and Saund, three others (two Republicans, one Democrat) were trying for the nominations next June, but the political odds were heavily in favor of the aviatress and the Sikh. At her headquarters on the Odium ranch, just outside Indio, Jackie Cochran mapped her strategy carefully with her campaign manager, Harry C. Harper, who managed Phillips' seven successful campaigns. She was barraged with invitations to speak, and accepted all of them. As an ardent Eisenhower Republican, Jackie will take her cues from the President's State of the Union Message. Says Jackie, a woman of formidable competitive instincts: "In order to win, I won't leave a stone unturned, so long as it is commensurate with dignity."

Judge Saund, meanwhile, was hitting the hustings hard himself, with a program aimed at the Imperial Valley's farmers (he favors rigid 90% price supports) and its multitude of racial minorities. Be cause of his dark skin, Saund has a natural appeal to the region's Negroes, Mexicans, Japanese and Hindus. He feels that, if he wins, his color will be a strong asset in combatting Communist anti-American propaganda. (His election as judge made a deep impression, and was widely publicized back in India.) "If elected to Congress," he says, "the first thing I would do would be to fly to India and say, 'Here I am, a living example of democracy in practice.' "

Whichever of the unusual candidates wins in their unusual district, one fact is apparent to the voters who will decide: it could happen only in the U.S.

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