Tuesday, May 7, 1968
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
5
Lurleen loses fight with cancer
MONTGOMERY, Ala.—(UPI)—Gov. Lurleen B. Wallace, a former dimentestive clerk who rode her husband's popularity into office as Alabama's first woman governor, died today after a lengthy battle against cancer.
The blonde, 41-year-old mother of four died quietly in the governor's mansion at 12:34 a.m., CDT, with her husband, former Gov. George C. Wallace, at her bedside.
"She has lost her gallant fight for life," a brief news release said.
Lt. Governor Albert Brewer, 39, a north Alabama attorney and close personal friend of the Wallaces, became the new Alabama governor. He told a caller at his Decatur home that "it's too quick" for any statement on Mrs. Wallace's death. He said he would leave for Montgomery immediately.
Brewer, a Tennessee native, is considered more moderate on segregation than George Wallace and once remarked that he was no Wallace "messenger boy."
Mrs. Wallace died on the day of the Alabama Democratic primary, when voters were to nominate candidates for U.S. Senate and a slate of electors pledged to George Wallace, a third party presidential candidate. Brewer was on the Wallace slate, which was almost certain of victory. The next governor's election is in two years.
Wallace had to postpone his campaign for president at times because of his wife's illness, but he was not expected to drop out of the race. He once said he had pledged to his wife to seek the presidency despite any adversity.
Mrs. Wallace first contacted cancer in 1965, before she campaigned for governor because her husband was probitibed by the Alabama Constitution from succeeding himself. But she said an operation apparently had cleared up the uterine cancer.
Mrs. Wallace, inaugurated Jan.
16, 1967, on the Capitol steps where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy,
has been in office less than six months when she was hospitalized for cancer the second time.
While she had maintained a busy schedule of appointments and sometimes had two or three speaking engagements a day during her first half year, she was seldom in the office after the cancer recurred.
She lost considerable weight and showed the strain of hospitalization and radiation treatments in the months after her July 10,1967,
operation in which an abdominal tumor was removed. But her composure never wavered when she made her few appearances in public.
Mrs. Wallace had been released from the hospital April 13 and was well enough to take automobile rides, but Monday morning it was announced that she had suffered another setback. The "turn for the worse" came Sunday night, the announcement said.
Mrs. Wallace was elected to succeed her husband as governor with the largest vote ever given a gubernatorial candidate in Alabama.
She ran as a stand-in for Wallace, who was barred by the Alabama Constitution from succeeding himself, and Wallace became her No. 1 "adviser" and made the major decisions after she took office. He worked from an unmarked office directly across the hall from his wife's office in the Capitol.
The attractive honey-blonde contacted cancer of the uterus in 1965, prior to her campaign for governor, but underwent radiation treatments and doctors said an operation Jan. 10, 1966, revealed no evidence of any remaining malignancy.
Mrs. Wallace said her decision to run for governor was based on the doctors' findings that the operation was "a complete success."
Though she lacked her husband's flair for off-the-cuff oratory, Mrs. Wallace was an effective speaker who spoke with poise and clarity.
The words in her prepared speeches were unmistakably those of George Wallace and contained frequent protests against federal intervention in local government.
On June 26, 1967, after a series of examinations which doctors described as "routine," it was announced that Mrs. Wallace had cancer for the second time.
She flew to Houston July 4 and entered the M. D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute, where six days later doctors removed several tumors.
She recuperated at the governor's mansion here and in Gulf Shore until she returned to the office Sept. 1.
On Sept. 10, however, she returned to Houston to begin more than seven weeks of cobalt radiation treatments designed to pre-
'Poor people' march
SELMA, Ala. —(UPI)—The Poor People's March today heads down the Jefferson Davis Highway, a one-time deadly trail for civil rights workers, on its way to an Alabama capital mourning the death of Gov. Lurlee Wallace.
More than 100 marchers will ride in four old school buses to Montgomery, a 54-mile trip down U.S. 80, path of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march led by the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that resulted in the Voting Rights Act.
At Marks, Miss., where the other phase of the Southern segment of the Poor People's March is organizing, about 500 persons will depart on chartered buses Wednesday for a four-day trip to Washington. This group is the main body of a crew that will construct a tent shantytown in the nation's capital to house the marchers, due to converge on Washington this month from various places around the country.
A proposed mule and wagon train tentatively is scheduled to leave Marks Thursday, carrying
more than 2,000 Negroes. A large number of the marchers plan to remain in Washington, leaving their Mississippi homes for good.
The caravan, which left Edwards, Miss, Monday, arrived in Selma that afternoon and was joined by several hundred Selma Negroes for a triumphant march into the Alabama town that was a civil rights battleground three years ago.
vent a recurrence of the disease.
But on Jan. 4, 1968 it was announced another presumably malignant nodule had been discovered in her pelvis.
She underwent betatron radiation treatment, followed by surgery Feb. 22 which removed the nodule and a 10-inch section of her bowel.
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