Andy’s Hotel (prop. Andrew Knutson) used to be the place to go in Oklee, Minn, pop. (510). A good deal of its charm lay in its restaurant, where the innkeeper’s blonde, comely wife Cornelia Knutson cooked hearty food, waited cheerfully on tables and made the guests feel right at home. But no longer: in 1954, popular “Coya” Knutson, long active in Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, visited every farm in northwest Minnesota’s Ninth District, won, and went off to Washington. With Coya gone, the hotel business fell off to the point where Andy Knutson finally closed the restaurant, took a part-time job with a plow dealer.

By last week Andy Knutson, 50, had had enough: he demanded that Coya leave Congress and come home—or else. Since her election to Congress four years ago, said Knutson, “our home life has deteriorated to the extent that it is practically nonexistent. I want to have the happy home that we enjoyed for many years prior to her election.”

But Coya Knutson, 45, slimmed down and modishly coiffed, was not about to leave Congress, where she had become a carping critic of Republican Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. When her intention to run again became clear, Andy Knutson backed away from his original ultimatum, said Coya could stay in Congress if only she would get rid of her handsome executive secretary. Bill Kjeldahl, 30. Said Andy: “The decisions made in Coya’s office are not hers, but Kjeldahl’s.” But Coya Knutson was having none of that, either. Kjeldahl would stay, cried she. Her life was her own—and she aimed to live it a long, long way from Andy’s kitchen.

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