"Good Friend Alben"

It is no fault of Senator Alben William Barkley that Marvin College, once the pride of Clinton, Ky., no longer exists. In the late nineties, long before he became the new democratic leader of the Senate. Alben went out once a week to "do or die" on Marvin's football field. His muscles had been hardened on his father's Kentucky tobacco farm. It is said that when Alben Barkley came down the field, everyone got out of his way. But he could forgive his enemies while demolishing them, for he never missed prayer meetings at Marvin College.

Young Barkley was a forerunner of the youths who work their way through college taking magazine subscriptions. He sold kitchenware from house to house. The best senior honor at Marvin was the Declamation Prize. Senior Barkley won that. He remembers that for a long time afterward no function was considered complete unless he delivered his recitation.

Marvin College no more, Emory Junior College and the University of Virginia law school have made the most of his new prominence as democratic Senate leader. He studied at both schools, but learned the rest of his law in Paducah, Ky., under the portative of Irvin S. Cobb's "Judge Priest."

Senator Barkley bit through a pipestem while waiting for the results of the Senate's poll on a new leader. He slid through score 38-37. From his eminence as President Roosevelt's "good friend Alben," the new Leader can look back on a career very American: birth in a log cabin, campaigning on a mule for an early prosecuting attorneyship, learning law in a picturesque law office, finally soliciting votes by way of horse and buggy to get to Washington in 1912. There he has remained, leaving the House for the Senate in 1926.

Already 60, husky, quick with a joke, Leader Backley's position will be a difficult one when Congress reconvenes. The party revolt is under way, and the opposition won't clear out as easily as that which faded before Alben Backley sweeping down the football field for Marvin College.