Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

A: Mr. Dawson again. Called me, said he wanted to talk to me, said, "You've
made a very fine reputation as an assistant state's attorney." Be said,
1 I
You have good name-recognition and a lot of people like you and we would
like to see you run for the legislature. Would you like to do that?'' I
said, "Yes." So I did.
See, one thing about trying criminal cases, there is a lot of notoriety.
Every week there's an article about some cases you've tried and stuff. You
do that for a number of years and people get to know you. So I had excellent
name-recognition.
Q: When was the at-large election? Was that . . .
A: Nineteen sixty-five.
Q: Nineteen sixty-five. So you weren't involved with that when you first
started out?
A: Oh, yes. Not when I first started out, no. But I was in the House when it
came along.
Q: Yes.
A: As a matter of fact, I ran one of those precinct counting stations together
with a &publican fellow. We ran a precinct counting station and we started
counting ballots at about seven o'clock on Tuesday night and they didn't
finish until Saturday about noon. And we had a full complement of people. We
had maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred people, in the gymnasium of the
Catholic school counting these ballots. I tell you, it was really something,
really something.
Q: When you rqn for the House, how did you go about campaigning?
A: Well, I made all the meetings in the area, I got into several churches to
make my speech. We had pretty closely knit organizations and t would go to
the various organizations within the wards where I was running and make a
speech to the captains in terms of what I was expected to do, what I would do
and so forth. They, in turn, as they carried their precincts, would disseminate
that information. If someone had a block club meeting or a precinct club
meeting, I would be invited and I would go in arid speak, answer questions.
Q: What were the major issues--your platform, as it were, at that time?
A: Well, at that time we were very, very interested in trying to pass some
legislation for fair employment practices, number one. That was me of the big
and key issues. The other was civil rights and public accommodation, because
you have got to remember in 1957 that was before the 1965 civil rights bill
came down from the federal government and there were many places in Illinois
where you were not accorded your civil rights. As a matter of fact, when I
went to Springfield in 1947 to be sworn in as an attorney, I could not eat at
the same hotel with the other lawyers being sworn in. They had it in the