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You can still run into Idaho people who recall Glen Taylor, a U.S. senator from 1945-51, who will write him off as an embarrassment or worse. Cecil Andrus, who years later would enter politics and become governor, recalled that as a young man he saw Taylor come through town and do his stand-up campaigning bit, and thinking that if this was what politics was, he wanted no part of it.
Taylor was by profession an entertainer, a singer and dancer and skit player in the old traveling show circuit that began to die out with the coming of talkie movie theatres. But he was also substantive, a true ideologue (probably the closest to a true socialist Idaho ever sent to Congress) and surprisingly substantive. And politically courageous besides.
Which is by way of seconding College of Idaho Professor Jasper LiCalzi's suggestion of Taylor's memoir, The Way It Was With Me, as a good read. Taylor was as entertaining a writer as he must have been on stage, and he includes tales that could only have been told by someone who knew his political career was far behind him, and who had moved for good from the state where he ran. LiCalzi remarks in his blog post that "This is the most enjoyable political memoir I have ever read but it is the person that is most fascinating." Not hard to feature (even if the book may not be especially easy to find).