MAN FROM MINNESOTA

The first Democrat to declare his candidacy for his party's presidential nomination: Minnesota's Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr., 48.

Early Life. Born May 27, 1911, in an apartment over his family's drugstore in Wallace, S. Dak., the second of four children, he inherited his name and his politics from his pharmacist father, who was persuaded into the Democratic Party after he heard William Jennings Bryan speak. As a prizewinning debater and bright student in high school and college (University of Minnesota '39), he acquired a volubility and an oratorical flourish that have stuck with him through the years. A victim of the Depression (he was forced to quit college for six years when his family's fortunes hit rock bottom, finally worked his way through school as a part-time janitor and drugstore clerk), and a witness of the dust storms that scourged South Dakota in the 1930s, Humphrey became an ardent advocate of Franklin Roosevelt. Phi Beta Kappa Humphrey wrote his master's thesis at Louisiana State University on The Philosophy of the New Deal.

Political Career. After a brief fling at teaching political science at the universities of Louisiana and Minnesota, Humphrey orbited naturally and eagerly to politics, was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 at the age of 34. A thoroughgoing and effective reformer, he vigorously cleaned up the city, at the same time began a prudent purge of Communists and Wallace Progressives from Minnesota's lively Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party. In 1948 he was elected to the Senate, descended on Washington as one of the brashest and most brilliant of the Fair Deal's Young Turks. In a decade of national politics, Humphrey has been an outspoken advocate of civil rights, farm supports, foreign aid, all manner of liberal legislation, has built (with the help of his old friend Governor Orville Freeman) a formidable political machine in Minnesota. At the same time he has matured and mellowed enough to reach such a warm rapport with the Southern conservative leaders of the Senate that he is ranked as one of the best-liked members of that exclusive club. His 8 1/2-hour talkathon with Russia's Nikita Khrushchev in December 1958 gave him an internationalist's aura and propelled him into a commanding position in front of the Democratic liberals.

Personality & Philosophy. An indefatigable, apple-cheeked dynamo (he regularly consumes vitamin pills), Humphrey breathes, eats and lives politics. One of his party's most adroit campaigners, he is the poor folks' avowed

spokesman, will doubtless pursue a subdued rags v. riches campaign against his friend Jack Kennedy. Married to Muriel ("Bucky") Buck, his college sweetheart, he is the father of four children. "I set my aim on Congress," he wrote his wife years ago, after his first trip to Washington. "Don't laugh at me."

Having achieved that aim long ago, Humphrey has now shifted his sights upward.

And. though the political pros consider him one of the least powerful of the Democratic aspirants, Hubert Humphrey has proved before that he knows how to make the bad breaks break his way.

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