Ward Heelers' Revenge

In twelve years as mayor of St. Louis, Raymond Roche Tucker floated $129.5 million in public-improvement bonds, bulldozed away acres of slums, attacked the traffic problem. Today, monuments to his administration stand everywhere: a nearly completed arch, designed by the late Eero Saarinen, symbolizing the city's history as a gateway to the West; an $89 million sports stadium rising from what was once Skid Row; 602 city blocks undergoing a facelift.

But last week St. Louis voters turned Tucker out, nominated as his replacement a prominent Jack-of-all-trades with the fascinating name, in the city of Anheuser-Busch, of Alphonso Juan Cervantes. A great-great-grandson of a Spanish immigrant from Barcelona who wandered to frontier St. Louis via New Orleans, Cervantes, 44, served for four years as president of the city's board of aldermen until he was defeated in 1963 by a Tucker-backed candidate. Cervantes is president of an insurance agency, vice president of the Resort Corp. of Missouri, which operates a lodge beside Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks, a director of a trust company, a taxicab company, the St. Louis Municipal Opera Association, and has an interest in a company that sells bonds to liquor dealers.

More Than the Machines. In his attempt to win a fourth term, Tucker was done in by St. Louis' Democratic ward leaders, who have never liked him. A onetime Washington University engineering professor, Tucker made a name for himself in the 1930s when, as his city's first smoke commissioner, he was instrumental in getting through a strong anti-smoke ordinance that went a long way toward cleaning out St. Louis' polluted air. Reform-minded business leaders in 1953 nominated Tucker as an independent Democratic candidate for mayor, and Tucker defeated the Democratic machine candidate by a narrow 1,500 votes. After that, he was re-elected twice.

In this year's party primary the ward heelers got their revenge, joined forces behind Cervantes, who gained the endorsement of 20 of the city's 28 ward organizations. However, there was more to it than machine politics. After twelve years in office, Tucker, now 68, had begun showing signs of wear (in 1961 his right lung was removed because of a tumor).

"Progress Gap." Moreover, Tucker's slum-clearance projects had generated bitter protests among the people who were displaced, mostly Negroes, and among those into whose neighborhoods the displaced were moved. Negro leaders threw their support to Cervantes despite the fact that Tucker had consistently backed ordinances barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and housing. Finally, Cervantes charged that, for all Tucker's works, St. Louis had suffered a "progress gap," and simply promised to do more faster.

Last week, with the votes in, Cervantes came out on top by 81,330 to 66,888. The Democratic nomination for mayor in St. Louis has, for the past 16 years, resulted in election, and Cervantes is virtually certain to win over his Republican opponent in the April 6 general election: Maurice Zumwalt, a storm-door manufacturer.

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