UNION COUNTY — When President Donald Trump and his democratic challenger Joe Biden meet in a nationally televised debate Tuesday night, Sept. 29, Northeast Oregonians with long memories may find themselves reflecting back to 1948.

History was made on May 17 of that year in Portland when the first presidential debate ever broadcast on radio was conducted, according to npr.org. The debate matched two candidates who had both campaigned in La Grande less than a week earlier — Republican front runners Thomas Dewey and Harold Stassen. The face-off was broadcast on Portland’s KEX radio and picked up by four national networks. Forty million listened to the debate, conducted four days before the Oregon primary.

Dewey appeared in Union County on May 11, 1948. He first spoke in Union and then La Grande. He arrived in Union late in the morning and he spoke to a capacity crowd in the high school gym, according to the May 12, 1948, Observer. He accepted a large cowboy hat and a placard sized ticket to the Eastern Oregon Livestock Show.

Doran Hopkins, who now lives in Texas near San Antonio, said on Sunday, Sept. 28, that he was a student at Union Elementary School in 1948 when Dewey spoke. He said students were let out of class so they could listen.

“He was very dignified, very studious and a no nonsense type of person,” said Hopkins, who was the son of the late Albert Hopkins, then superintendent of the Union School District.

Albert Hopkins was responsible for getting Dewey to come to Union, his son said. He was able to get Dewey with the help of state education officials in Salem.

“He (his father Albert Hopkins) was very well connected,” Doran Hopkins said.

He said his dad asked Dewey, during his Union County stop, how his presidential campaign was going.

“I’ve got it,” Dewey told Albert Hopkins.

The UHS gymnasium Dewey spoke in had been built less than two years earlier. Unfortunately it was destroyed by a fire about two years later, Doran Hopkins said.

After speaking in Union, Dewey went to La Grande, where he spoke to the Rotary Club at a luncheon that about 200 people attended.

Next he addressed a crowd of about 2,000 at a La Grande High School field. Dewey told his audience the United States cannot “buy peace through appeasement, but must do it through strength and vigor.”

Dewey took a plane to Pendleton following his final presentation in La Grande.

Dewey’s chief opponent in Oregon, Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen, made a campaign stop in La Grande on May 15, 1948. Stassen addressed an audience of about 400 at La Grande High School.

He lost to Dewey in the Oregon Primary on May 21, 1948. Stassen, however, did beat the New York governor in Union County.

Dewey, of course, went on to win the Republican nomination and later lost to incumbent President Harry Truman. His triumph is considered one of the great upsets in U.S. political history.

Dewey (1902-71), an attorney, served as governor of New York from 1943 to 1955. President Richard Nixon later offered him a position on the U.S. Supreme Court, which he declined.

Stassen served as governor of Minnesota from 1939 to 1943. He later became a perennial presidential candidate in the Republican Party, running for office in 1952, 1964, 1968, 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992.