Alice M. Savoy

Alice Savoy is making her second try for city council because she wants to show the incumbent councilors that she's upset.

Nobody held her ex-husband accountable for child support, and no one was supervising at the MDC pool when she was assaulted by a teenager. "Nobody really cares about us poor working people," she said.

She is distressed by what she calls "a lack of compassion on the part of the councilors" and "inadequate community involvement and suupervision" on the part of the police. "People in this city don't work together and they never have," Savoy said.

Savoy is not campaigning actively: "The incumbents will win; they have the best personal contacts; and there aren't really any issues," she said. "They'll just keep yessing the city manager to death and hoping the economy picks up."

Louis F. Solano

Louis F. Solano '24 decided to run for city council when his landlord upped his rent three times in six weeks.

"It was a case of salami tactics," claims the 71-year-old professor emeritus of Romance Languages: you take a little here, a little there, and soon, though nobody's noticed, you've got the sausage. Meaning, in this case, a hefty rent hike."

Though not opposed to landlords' making a "reasonable" profit, Solano holds that rent control should not only be continued but expanded where possible, and that four of the five members of the Cambridge Rent Board should be tenants. Such a program would have two-fold effect, he contends: taking apartments "off the markets, as if they were commodities," and ending what Solano calls "sheer greed" on the part of the landlords.

Solano insists that, given his views on rent control and the fact that he would lend first-hand expertise on the problems of the elderly in the city, he should have been endorsed by the Cambridge Convention. But this was not to be.

"First they said they hadn't considered me because I entered the race too late. Then, when they drew up the campaign literature, they left me out again," he says. Combined with his status as a relative unknown in city politics, CC '75's neglect, he said has made it "hard to get the message to people."

Left with no alternative but to bring his platform into the streets, Solano started a walking campaign in the heavily ethnic East Cambridge neighborhoods.

Still, Solano's late entry into the race and his loner position in a field of familiar names make it doubtful that he can pick up the support necessary to swing election. Like most other unendorsed candidates, his campaign probably has less of a chance than a snowball in the Central Kitchen.

George W. Spartichino

George W. Spartichino is one of those ethnic candidates that every Cambridge City Council election seems to attract. Even though he is running on a shoe-string budget--his bumper stickers are the left-overs of former Massachusetts Attorney General Robert Quinn's governors campaign that have been stripped clean and reprinted--Spartichino insists that the north Cambridge voters that kept him in the State Legislature from 1956 to 1966 can send him to the council.