No. 9

It was low man out; nine incumbent Democratic Congressmen were running at large for the eight seats left to Alabama after reapportionment resulting from the 1960 census. Last week the ninth man turned out to be none other than Mobile's Frank W. Boykin, 77, a flamboyant fixture in Washington for 28 years, a Mason, an Elk, a Moose, a Shriner, and a very Odd Fellow.

A multimillionaire (real estate, timber, livestock), with an imposing mane of grey hair thatching an elephantine hulk (250 lbs.), Boykin's political stock in trade was a boisterous greeting: "Hello there, Pardner! By God, everything's made for love!" Funny thing was, Boykin really meant it. "God is love, see?" he explained. "He made everything, didn't he? So everything is made for love, get it?" He took genuine pleasure in doing favors for friends. He established a 100,000-acre game preserve in Choctaw County, to which he brought planeloads of folks from Washington and all points south. He could put them in 69 beds in his big house, and he loved to send them out hunting deer, wild turkey, quail, dove, wild boar and even buffalo.

In 1949, Boykin threw a testimonial party for Texas' Sam Rayburn in a Washington hotel, invited just about everybody in the phone book. Winston Churchill cabled his regrets, but 900 others came to sample a score of cases of Scotch and bourbon, along with Quebec salmon, Alabama venison, Montana elk, bear meat from the Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia turkey, and antelope from Chugwater, Wyo. Boykin's all-for-love motto was bantered about the banquet hall. Everybody had a great time, and jolly Frank was delighted to fork over the $16,000 tab.

But brotherly love is wearing a bit thin in Alabama these days. And among the nine Congressmen running for eight seats, Boykin was both the oldest and the richest; many Alabamans apparently figured that he was the one who could most afford to retire to private life. In 14 past elections, folks had remembered the ebullient fellow who had hauled water for construction gangs at eight, become a business success at 16, a near millionaire at 21. But now Boykin's was simply a case of love's labor's lost.

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