CANDIDATE GRANNY D WALKS THE WALK

CANDIDATE GRANNY D WALKS THE WALK

By David M. Shribman

NORTH CONWAY, N.H. -- The Harvey Gibson Center for Senior Citizens sits at the center of the village, and five days a week there's lunch, and often there's a speaker, too. But there was something different about lunch here the other day, and we're not talking about the way the pasta tubes were seasoned and how the spinach was prepared. We are talking about the speaker. She was older than all but a handful of the guests.


She wolfed down the pasta, picked at the spinach, and when the strawberry ice cream arrived, she devoured it with gusto. But Doris Haddock sat at the round table in the corner not only to be served. She served up a plate of political rebellion seasoned by age and with a side dish of straight talk. She's 94, and have I mentioned yet that she is running for the Senate as a Democrat?


She's been running for months, but it's walking that provided Granny D, as she's known, with her first distinction. She's a walker, sure to say, and in 1999 she set out on a walk and didn't stop walking until the next year -- and until she had covered 3,200 miles. This wasn't one of those 25-mile pledge walks, with balloons every mile and souvenir T-shirts for everybody and a bunch of volunteer nurse-practitioners at every stop. This was a protest march, designed to bring attention to the role that big money plays in American politics, and if you think about it you probably remember a sweet little feature in your local paper about the 90-year-old who walked for a cause.

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