20 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
On Pentecost every year, the anniversary of the choir’s founding, Mr.
Martin presented the worthiest with gold medals. The easiest to earn was
for perfect attendance. “And perfect attendance meant every rehearsal
and every service for the entire year,” Gorton says. “One of my two best
friends, who lived across the street from me, got scarlet fever the month
before the awards. In those days that meant you had your house quaran-
tined. He had to be strapped into his bed because he was going to miss a
perfect attendance medal!”
Every year, Mr. Martin awarded a General Excellence medal. One boy—
at most two—received the coveted award. Slade has his framed. “You got
to wear them on your vestments on Christmas, Easter and Pentecost.
During those years in the choir, I learned to read music, to tell the subtle
differences between one chorus and the next and how to tell a good an-
them from a yawner.” Gorton attends a performance of Handel’s Messiah
every year, following the score intently with sheet music. The timbre of
his tenor yields hints that his boyhood soprano was lovely.
Gorton was a member of the choir for more than 12 years, sitting in
whenever he was home from college, even during law school. “My voice
changed and I soon became a baritone, but that experience and that man
teaching you that if you are going to do something you damn well better
do it right was simply overwhelming. There were all kinds of little things
I learned from being a member of that choir. Not only does the attitude of
discipline and excellence last, but the music appreciation lasts.”
Growing up, he also developed a lasting appreciation for the Republi-
can Party. The first time he heard his mother swear or saw her cry was
after the 1936 election. James Farley, FDR’s campaign manager, had pre-
dicted that Alf Landon, the GOP candidate, would carry only Maine and
Vermont. “That damn Farley was the only one who got it right!” mother
declared. Slade was 8. That’s his first political memory.
Four years later, when Roosevelt was seeking an unprecedented third
term, Gorton’s father stuffed Wendell Willkie literature in every ship-
ment of fish. The dining room window of the Gorton home featured a
Willkie-for-president sign. When the window was shattered by a brick,
the sign went back up with the new window. In short order, there was
another brick, another window and the same sign. Gortons are stubborn.
Slade was too young to vote in 1948, but he favored Arthur H. Vanden-
berg, a progressive senator from Michigan, over Thomas Dewey for the
GOP presidential nomination. Vandenberg was one of the founders of
NATO and also backed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World
War II. “That was always my segment of the Republican Party,” Slade