There have been many write-in candidates for president, but none as friendly as that loveable old bear, Winnie the Pooh.

Pooh first ran for president in 1968. It was not a big campaign, but the popularity of it surprised the Disney publicity machine. So they were ready for the 1972 election cycle.

Working with Sears, which had the merchandising rights to the character, drawings were held at stores across the country to pick delegates for the Children’s Party convention to be held at Walt Disney World on Oct. 1 of that year.

Pooh received the nomination, in large part, because he promised free ice cream cones, and “hunny in every pot.”

After the convention, Pooh traveled to Disneyland for a three-day campaign rally complete with ticker-tape parades down Main Street U.S.A. Then the candidate and his advisers (Tigger and Eeyore) left on a two-week cross-country whistle-stop train campaign tour, as part of a marketing effort by Sears and Disney, along with Amtrak.

“We went from Union Station in L.A., across country to Kansas City, Chicago and the Sears Tower, then on to Washington, D.C., then back west and up the coast to Seattle before returning to L.A. In two weeks, all by train,” said Gary Moore, a now retired photographer and film cameraman for Disneyland who went along on the trip.

“When we got to Barstow that first night, there were several thousand people with children all waiting to see Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Eeyore,” he said.

THE JOURNEY

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Besides Moore and the characters, there were about eight others riding along to support the campaign. They stayed in a sleeper car at the end of the train, attached to a baggage car that had been turned into a traveling stage.

“It had big doors that could open on either side of the train, depending on the stop,” Moore said.

Just like a stage show at Disneyland, Pooh and the other characters danced along to a pre-recorded soundtrack on the baggage car for 10 to 15 minutes, then would hop down for photo-ops.

Because he was so loveable, “he didn’t need any Secret Service protection,” Moore said.

One of the problems with running a whistle-stop tour is that under the rules at that time, if a train was late, the engineer’s pay was docked. The stops were taking longer then planned, due to the popularity of the characters, but they adjusted and started running the train faster between stops.

FANS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

One of the more memorable stops was unscheduled and in the middle of the night.

The train was headed into the mountains of New Mexico, after a stop in Santa Fe, when it slowed down and the engineers sent word to the conductors to wake up the Pooh crew sleeping in their private sleeper car.

They were approaching a small town, population about 200, at 1:30 a.m. Despite the lateness of the hour and snow flurries, the tracks by the station were lined with people.

“It turned out there were about 2,000 people waiting there to see Winnie the Pooh,” Moore said. “Children were bundled up and sitting on their dads’ shoulders and more, so they switched us to the siding there so we could do the show.”

At each stop, the train would be slowed down enough so that Moore could step off and run ahead with his 16 mm camera to get shots of the train pulling into the station for use in ad and marketing campaigns.

Pooh lost the campaign that year to Richard M. Nixon, who won in a landslide. The bear tried again in ’76 and ’80, but of course his constituents were mostly kids and not old enough to vote.

According to Neal Kelley, at the Orange County Registrar of Voters, Pooh did receive some votes in ’72, but because the records from that year were not computerized, the exact tally is in question.

Kelley said a couple of other Disney characters have frequently out-polled Pooh. Their names? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Contact the writer: meades@scng.com or follow on twitter @markaeades