As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who … - Robert A. Caro

Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics — not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio — in 1927 — to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O’Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.

A surprising number of representatives,” the Saturday Evening Post reported, “knew his hat and coat, when it hangs on its accustomed peg in the House restaurant” — a discreet reference to the fact that many Congressmen checked to see that he was present before they entered the restaurant, lest they be forced to pay for their meals themselves.

He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too.