(Editor's note--The following article was written before Wallace was shot yesterday afternoon.)

IN RALEIGH, N.C., the Wallace for President Headquarters is in a little prefab shed lost in the sprawl beside hot, roaring highway 401 South, in front of a gas station, next to "The Pork Palace"--"Old-fashioned pit-cooked barbeque"--and just down the road from the Purina Feeds elevators. The sickly, rural smell of the feeds mixes with the pork smell and the hydrocarbons and the hot dust that blow into the one-room headquarters. Inside, there is a five-foot high, very grainy litho of Wallace with about half a smile, and on a card-table there are the usual bumper stickers, buttons, pamphlets--plus a big pickle jar full of bills and change: Wallace supporters pay for this material.

On this oppressively average day, hot for early April, the gentleman at the desk is heavy, sweaty, and uneasy in his neat suit with the shiny blue tie spelling his man's name in silver letters down his chest--all too predictable. He gives me literature, but has little to say.

The pamphlets talk about rededicating ourselves to faith in America and in God, and claim that Wallace is the only candidate to sense the real feeling of the people: "He truly cares. He is truly concerned. He is real." I pick up Impact 72: A Newspaper for Young Americans and scan the inside topic, "Right On, by George C. Wallace;" "Charisma! Charisma! Charisma!"; "The Wisdom of Wallace: The Magic of Dreams, The Fabric of Freedom..."; "No Generation Gap in the Wallace Family." Other themes are just as predictable--the old values made new, George Wallace standing up boldly, honestly, for an America of free enterprise, religion, and the family.

"Send 'em a Message" runs one of the big slogans--a message mainly about two symbolic issues: "the busin'" and "the welfare." Government has withdrawn to the snug offices of a distant Washington bureaucracy which subjugates practical men to the dictates of "pointy-heads." They are destroying our schools for the sake of the minorities, they are taking our money and giving it away.

The man with that tie warms up when I mention Wallace's strong finish in the Wisconsin primary the day before. "Yes," he drawls with a smile, "and that was their home country too."

II

RALEIGH IS THE state capital, 120,000 and growing rapidly with burgeoning state government and an influx of northern corporations. Durham, twenty-five miles away, seems less a city than an over-grown small town. After the Civil War, a man named Duke made the tobacco factories and they in turn made the city. Now the factories fill Durham with their distinctive odor. When shifts change, thousands of black and white khakied workers leave the big buildings to go pretty much their own separate ways.

Just to the west of the factories, the money from Mr. Duke's enterprise created one of the finest Southern universities. Still further west lies the most recent of Durham's big institutions, the black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, in a tall modern building which is by far the most impressive structure in the city.

North Carolina Mutual has created a couple of black millionaires and numerous black executives in the city, and serves as the symbolic focus for one of the most progressive and best organized black communities in the South. Downtown in Durham, Chisholm buttons are frequent; even now, a month before the primary, the New York Congresswoman has made several appearances in the state.

But Edmund Muskie, his campaign faltering, has already decided not to campaign here, which leaves Wallace, Chisholm, and Durham's own candidate, Duke University President Terry Sanford.

Sanford had been North Carolina's Kennedy-era governor, pushing bigger education budgets, what was then a moderate racial policy, and an early state anti-poverty program. After leaving office in 1965, he headed a Ford Foundation study on the role of the states which produced the book Storm Over the States--a soundly liberal reformulation of a favorite Wallace focus. In 1968, Sanford passed up a shot at Sen. Sam J. Ervin in the Democratic primary, got on several lists of potential Democratic vice-presidential nominees, and ended up heading Citizens for Humphrey-Muskie. His political career seemed at least temporarily thwarted, so he took the Duke presidency in 1970.

Now, at 54, he had used Duke and the University of North Carolina students as a base to get 25,000 names on petitions for a spot on the Presidential primary ballot. He hopes to emerge as a dark-horse choice in a dead-locked convention, or, at least, as a vice-presidential possibility with proven power to keep Southern Democrats away from Wallace.

III

THE CORE OF Wallace support is the familiar, almost archetypal poor white southerner, often surprising in the breadth of his populism, often frightening in the intensity of his discontent. His epitome seems to lie somewhere between two men I talked to on a little side street only a few hundred yards from Sanford's university. It's a dead-end street, with about a dozen small white houses with porches and yards tiny enough for playing children to have trodden away all the grass. The tobacco factories are within walking distance, and even closer are streets where black people live; indeed, on one nearby block the two races face each other across the unpaved street.