Landslide

In midwinter of 1972 my unemployed father brought home a Parker Bros. board game called Landslide. In the game, players competed for electoral votes and the winner became the president. He probably borrowed it from somebody at the union hall, where he spent a lot of his time. He'd been laid off from his job as a quality control inspector at Goodyear; it was work he said he hated but after a while it was obvious he'd give anything to have it back. The game looked lame, and it wasn't new. The board was a little warped and we discovered the player pieces were missing. There was just a single die to roll and little stacks of cards that said "Politics" and "Win Votes."

"I want you all to learn something here," he told us. My father correctly surmised that my sister and I wouldn't care about playing so he announced the winner of the game would be president of our house for a week. The president would have no chores and could choose what we had for dinner and what we watched on TV afterward.

My father, whose name was Douglas Schadler, started going through the magazines and newspapers he kept in stacks in our living room. He found a Time article with photos of all the major Democratic candidates. His idea was that everyone could pick who they wanted; we'd cut out the photos and use those as the player pieces. My mother worked ten hours a day at a walk-in clinic in downtown Akron and usually still had on her name clip (alanna, receptionist) when we sat down to dinner at night. She wanted to be Teddy Kennedy. My father said, "You know he's out of the running, sweetheart."

"I know," she said, looking over the photos of the candidates still in the race. She pointed to a black woman who wore eyeglasses, Shirley Chisholm. My sister, a year older than I, jumped in and said she could be New York City mayor John Lindsay. In Lindsay's photo, he looked actor handsome.

My father said to me, "All right, Randy, you pick." I pointed at a photo of Gov. George Wallace.

My father and mother looked at one another and she said, "What about Edmund Muskie?" To me, Muskie looked like a dentist. In his photo, Wallace was making a speech; his hair was all greased back and he looked super pissed ohf.

"No," I said. "No way. That's my guy."

"You wanted them to be interested," my mother said in the direction of my father. "Come on," she said in that all-is-well voice of hers. "You be Muskie," she said to him.

He considered the candidates. "Hubert Humphrey," he said. "That's probably the closest thing we've got to beating Nixon."

When it was my sister's turn to roll the die, one of my parents would say, "Mayor Lindsay, you're up." It was great to pretend like that. My mother turned into a congresswoman and my father had once been a vice president. Governor sounded good to me; I liked it. I was eleven and certain Alabama was a good place, even if I'd never been there. I got lucky rolls and the game seemed easy. I piled up "Win Votes," used "Politics" at the right times. In the end, I had the most electoral votes and I won. My mother attempted to congratulate me using my real name but I said, "President Wallace asks that you clean this up, please. Mr. Vice President, please get wrestling on the TV for me. Thank you." I didn't want to be a bad president. But my family was annoying and I wanted to see how far my power could go.

My fifth-grade classroom was stocked with two sets of encyclopedias and I was casual about looking up George Wallace in World Book and Britannica during a study period. There was a photo of Wallace on a stage with Richard Nixon. Wallace wore a white suit and looked like a clown. I sort of...