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Pass the Cookies and the Ballots
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I spoke to Wortman and her husband, Wilbur, recently because I wanted to know how other sections of the county voted in the past. He first voted in a presidential election in 1948; she in 1952. Their polling place was Porter's Store at Neersville, in then-remote northwest Loudoun, an area known as Between the Hills. The Harper's Ferry Road past the store was dirt in 1948.
No free victuals greeted voters at Porter's, little changed since its opening in 1839. Joseph Jesse Porter had run the store since about 1886, and things had been tight since the Great Depression. Wilbur Wortman said Porter "would open it up at 12 o'clock at night to sell you a penny box of matches."
Jane Wortman recalled the store as "somewhat dark and dank" when she voted there in 1952.
"That's because there was no electricity," her husband said.
Coal-oil lamps provided rudimentary light, and Porter, bent on saving wood, would have been a strong supporter of President Jimmy Carter's suggestion to turn on the heat only when the temperature fell below 66. It did on most November election days, for Wilbur Wortman recalled locals gathering around the warm potbelly stove after they had voted.
George Roy Hess, Porter's son-in-law, was the official at Porter's Store. Like Porter in his younger days, Hess had taught at the nearby one-room Neersville School and had been a director of the old Purcellville National Bank.
"He was a stickler for accuracy," Jane Wortman said.
He gave you the ballot. You checked it wherever space was available, gave it to Hess, and he dropped it in the box. When the polls closed, he counted the vote.
You had to be 21 to vote in Virginia when the Wortmans and I first voted for president in Loudoun, an age that had been codified by the Virginia legislature in 1874. It would give us the saying that if you were "free, white and 21," the world was at your fingertips.
In 1970, Congress, taking heed of the Vietnam era saying, "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," lowered the voting age to 18 in national elections.
When I asked Arlene Janney about voting in the past, 1952 came to her mind -- not because it was the first year she had voted but because it was when she was asked to be an election official.
"I took George Hoge's place. He loved the job, so I think he wasn't feeling well," she said.
