AUSTIN—The humming campaign helicopter, the hat-tossing trick with the crowd and the late-arriving, decisive ballots from the suspicious “Box 13” in South Texas.

There’s no Texas election quite like the 1948 U.S. Senate primary race between Lyndon B. Johnson and Coke Stevenson, a contest that gave Johnson an 87-vote surprise victory and propelled him on his path toward the presidency.

Sixty years later, that long-ago campaign lives on in a new election season with tales told across Texas and the legacy it left in Jim Wells County, the epicenter of the disputed race. Some say it made local voters more vigilant. County officials remind themselves of the mysterious Box 13 even as they grapple with modern-day election lawsuits.

“I would like to say that people have become more responsible,” said Pearlie Jo Valadez, county elections administrator. “While you do see some prodding from big politicos, most of it is people exercising their free will.”

Questions surrounding Precinct 13 zeroed in on powerful political boss George Parr, a Johnson ally in neighboring Duval County and his deputy Luis Salas, the man in charge of the Jim Wells precinct at the old Nayer Elementary School in Alice.

An extra 200 votes heavily favoring Johnson suddenly emerged from the box once other ballots had been counted in the days after the Democratic primary Senate runoff of Aug. 28, 1948, a race in which 1 million votes were cast statewide.

The runoff appeared won by then-Gov. Stevenson, who had never lost an election and had finished first in the primary. But the new batch of votes gave Johnson, a congressman from Austin, the apparent runoff victory and earned him the everlasting nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”

Johnson, in the days that followed the disputed election, voiced worry about election tricks from Stevenson’s side.

Johnson wrote to a friend that “there are threats from the opposition of trying to do everything in the book, and it is impossible to predict what they may or may not be able to accomplish,” according to a letter dated Sept. 11, 1948, now kept at the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin.

Frederica Wyatt, 77, of Junction, a friend of Stevenson and co-author of the biography “Coke Stevenson ... A Texas Legend,” said his supporters knew about Texas-style political influence, but they felt confident Stevenson had clinched the election.

“I’m sure in certain areas of the state some people could swing an election their way and probably did. Of course, not of this magnitude,” Wyatt said. Texas Rangers and lawyers for both campaigns sprung into action to fight over the election in court. The case ultimately was decided in Johnson’s favor with a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black that stopped the election investigation. Johnson went on to easily defeat Republican Jack Porter in the general election.

Stevenson never totally got over the loss, Wyatt said.

“It was very upsetting to him and he thought it was certainly not a legitimate conclusion,” she said. “He was bitter about it.”

In 1977, Salas, the election judge who’d been quiet for years, admitted to The Associated Press after much coaxing that he had certified enough fictitious ballots to steal the election for Johnson. Jim Mangan, the AP’s Texas bureau chief at the time, interviewed Salas and broke the story.

“I kind of pressed him, ’If you die, history will never know what happened, Luis,’ “ recalled Mangan, who lives in San Antonio. “So he told his story.”

Salas was a henchman for Parr, nicknamed the “Duke of Duval,” and obviously was intimidated by the party boss, but Parr had since killed himself, Mangan said. Salas said he was finally revealing what happened so he could find “peace of mind and to reveal to the people the corruption of politics.”

Salas said he saw the names of people who hadn’t cast ballots added in alphabetical order and that he certified them. Another witness described the names as being written in the same colored ink and in the same handwriting.

Salas is now dead, too. Johnson and Stevenson both died in the 1970s. Others closely connected to the campaign — like Johnson’s campaign manager, John Connally, and Stevenson’s close aide Ernest Boyett — have died.

“Everybody knew what had happened,” Mangan said. “This was no mystery to anybody that the election was crooked.”

Valadez, the Jim Wells County elections administrator, said, “You probably only had to be in the second grade to realize something was wrong.”

Robert Caro’s book “Means of Ascent” explored Box 13 in extensive detail in a chapter titled “The Stealing.” And in a later chapter, Caro accuses Johnson of breaking the “unwritten laws, the ethics, the morals” of Texas politics.

Johnson’s camp never admitted to a stolen election.