Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (2 page)

I
SUPPOSE
everyone remembers where they were when they realized they were not going to be the leader of the free world. I know I do. It was on January 19, 2008, in the back of a bus rolling down a road just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, when early exit-poll results started coming in from the South Carolina presidential primary. I had edged out McCain in Iowa and come in ahead of Romney and Giuliani in South Carolina. The bad news is I came in third in both places. Not good enough. In presidential primary politics, many are called but few are chosen. I wasn’t, and it was time to hang it up.

I had walked through many doors of opportunity in my life and was used to finding something good on the other side. In fact, for me the 2008 primary season was officially the first time in my life I had proven (in a most public way) that I couldn’t accomplish something I had set out to do. It
was a rather humbling experience. It occurred to me that, to paraphrase one of Churchill’s comments, perhaps I had more to be humble about than I had realized. It also occurred to me that this was a pretty doggone expensive way to achieve a little humility. Maybe I needed to be reminded of what an old-timer told me years ago after I’d had some success: “Just remember, son, the turnout at your funeral is still going to depend a hell of a lot on the weather.”

Yeah, yeah, I accepted all that, but for some reason the immortal words of Dick Tuck seemed more appropriate. Tuck was a Democratic operative famous before and during Watergate as a political prankster. When President Nixon adopted the campaign slogan “Nixon’s the One,” Tuck had several women boisterously show up at a Nixon rally in pregnancy costumes, waving signs saying “Nixon’s the One.”

Tuck finally ran for office himself—for the state senate in California. On Election Night, when it became obvious he was receiving a drubbing, he went before his supporters and the media and said, “The people have spoken … the bastards.”

By the morning of January 20, I had other things to be thinking about. By then, I was at the bedside of my mother at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. At eighty-seven, she was enduring her latest and most severe bout of pneumonia, compounded by several other ailments. She did not look good at all. In fact, the doctor and the head nurse privately talked to me in very somber tones, uttering “We’ve done all
that we can do”–type comments. Of course, they didn’t take into account the fact that “Mrs. Ruth” was tough as a pine knot. She hated hospitals with an extraordinary passion and was totally exhausted from the constant visits by hospital personnel. For the next twenty-four hours, I camped outside her room in a chair and made the medical staff justify their admission before I would let them in. She got some rest and soon was improving, just as she had many times before. She and I have concluded that most people who die in hospitals flatline from aggravation and lack of sleep.

Literally, almost overnight, I had gone from the most public, intrusive, self-centered existence known to man to the exact opposite—the quiet of my mother’s room late at night. It was a quick journey from manufactured reality to reality. I smiled as I remembered her telling me when I was a kid: “Freddie, you can be anything you want to be, but please just don’t be a lawyer or a politician.” Over the years I think she changed her mind about my becoming a lawyer, but I don’t think she ever quite fully bought into the politician part. I knew that she’d laugh when I told her, “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t turn out to be much of a politician after all.”

My career choices were not entirely my fault. The atmosphere I grew up in in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, was dense with politics and debates, the exploits of public figures and larger-than-life characters engaged in bare-knuckled political theater. I merely inhaled.

I am willing to bet that the town square in Lawrenceburg
has never been compared to Times Square in New York. But they say that if you stand in Times Square long enough, everybody you know will pass by. By the same token, when I think about the square in Lawrenceburg, it occurs to me that every major development in my life can be traced back to there.

In the 1950s, Lawrenceburg was a little town of six or seven thousand. It is seventy-two miles south of Nashville and just north of the Alabama state line. My folks grew up on farms in Lawrence County and came to town to start their new life together, as so many of the country kids did. By the time I came along, the town square, just like the people, had shed some of its rougher edges, although an ample number of pool halls still served as the town’s designated dens of iniquity.

The courthouse had a yard around it often populated by a good number of tobacco-chewing checker players. Between games they swapped knives and lies and talked politics. The square had mostly old two- and three-story buildings housing dry goods, hardware, and drugstores as well as “the bank.” The square was the center of commerce for the county, and the center of the universe, as far as I was concerned. A fellow could cash his check, shoot a game of pool, buy his tags, grab a burger, and pick up a new shirt for Saturday night without ever having to get in his car.

Today, I can stand in that square and in my mind’s eye envision the sight of the old Princess Theater, where I saw
my first movie. The “new” Crockett Theater, built when I was in grade school, was where I spent as much time as possible as a boy. It also was the town’s main date destination. I can also see the locations of two different little cafés my grandparents owned and ran. Farther around the square are the hall where I shot my first pool and the spot where I sold my first newspaper. I also see the site of my first law office and where I made my announcement speech when I first ran for the Senate. I’m not sure how many folks were there for that, but there were thousands the night we had a rally during my presidential campaign. The courthouse was where I heard numerous political speeches, tried my first lawsuit, and saw my first election returns.

On election night, they would set up a big blackboard in the yard outside the courthouse and keep a running tally as the precinct boxes came in—if they came in. Boxes being stolen and thrown into the river or hidden in the woods was not unheard of on election night, and neither was gunplay—even in the courthouse. For a time, it was easier to steal an election than it was to buy a beer in Lawrence County.

The old courthouse was built in 1905, a Gothic—or perhaps pre-Gothic—structure, and when I started practicing law, cases were still being tried in the large second-floor courtroom where lawyers had to plead their cases while dodging the tobacco cans strategically placed around the room to catch the water when it rained.

This whole tableau was presided over by Davy Crockett.
Actually, it was Davy Crockett’s full-length statue on the south side of the square. Davy had “laid out” the town of Lawrenceburg as a surveyor, lived there, and run a mill for a period of time. But Davy was a traveling man and therefore was claimed by a lot of different folks around the state and elsewhere. However, we were the only one with a Davy Crockett statue, which, in our eyes, legitimized our claim. He was, of course, a hunter, a trapper, a congressman, and a hero at the Alamo. He was also cantankerous, even bucking Andrew Jackson. And when he was defeated for Congress, he called a delegation together and told his constituents, “You all can go to hell, I am going to Texas.” As it turned out, he stayed in Texas a lot longer than he intended to.

It just seemed appropriate to have old Davy permanently standing in the middle of Lawrenceburg. We liked his grit and we liked his style. Actually, we didn’t pay that much attention to him until the miracle of television intervened and changed the way we perceived Davy’s importance forever. I refer, of course, to the Walt Disney television series starring Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, which had half the little boys in America (and all them in the town of Lawrenceburg) wearing coonskin caps. Lawrenceburg and our statue got their share of notoriety and attention, and before the dust was settled we had Crockett Theater, a Crockett School, a Crockett Service Station, a Crockett Beauty Salon, a Crockett State Park, as well as many other namings. As it turned
out, we were among the first people in the world to realize that nothing is important or noteworthy until it appears on television.

Most of us have learned that the significance of the people and places in your life is not so obvious until you are looking at them in your rearview mirror. Actually, the transitions my parents saw and made surpass any that I have experienced. And they, like millions of others, did it anonymously and without fanfare. I never heard a lot of stories about the Great Depression, but it was obvious that in many ways it defined my parents’ childhood. They were farmers and sharecroppers in rural Lawrence County, but they had plenty to eat, which is all their neighbors had. On the Thompson side, that hardscrabble life produced a couple of six-foot-five-inch brothers who were well “filled out”—my grandfather, Edgar, and his brother. I never knew which of the stories I heard about Pa Thompson were true, but one of the more persistent had to do with the time a young mule kicked at him and he grabbed the mule’s hind legs and ran him around the barnyard. He was a giant by the standards of the day. Ma Thompson was an Allen—rough-hewn folks like the Thompsons, except a little more entrepreneurial. Many years after most of that generation had passed away, “Uncle Percy” Allen, who was in his nineties, was asked by
some of the grandchildren about the Thompsons and the Allens. Pressed, he finally said with a wry smile, “Well, the Allens made a whole lot of whiskey. And the Thompsons drank most of it.” Uncle Percy may have been exhibiting the sense of humor that both clans were known for; then again, maybe not.

“Drinkin’” had a different meaning for country folks in those days. There was no such thing as a social drinker. Either you drank or you didn’t, and drinking meant getting rip-roaring drunk. When a young girl would talk about meeting a new young man, a discussion would ensue in hushed tones as to whether or not he “drank.” A drinker was further defined as either a “mean drunk” or a “happy drunk.” I got the impression that my daddy may have been both, depending on the occasion.

All I know is that I never saw a drop of alcohol in the house of either my parents or my grandparents. Actually, it’s all consistent with what I learned about my ancestors over the years and so many of their neighbors. They had a hard life but loved to laugh and joke and have a good time. And while the men were wild in their youth, they grew up, joined the church, and became domesticated when the time came.

My dad was a prime example of that. As a young man, Fletcher was the oldest of four brothers, six feet tall, slender, and tough with wavy hair. His pictures reflect the fact that he looked like John Dillinger. He hired out to plow a mule for fifty cents a day and drank and fought on Saturday nights.
During the Depression he wanted to leave and become a Golden Gloves boxer, but he was afraid his family couldn’t survive without him. The only legacy that came from his fighting days was a partial gold tooth he had from an encounter with a deputy sheriff.

Dad made it through the eighth grade. In ones and twos, the Thompsons, having “enjoyed” the rustic life as much as they could stand, came to town to live. My mom, Ruth Bradley, was a country girl from a few roads over and the oldest of five children. The Bradleys were a more serious bunch. Pa Bradley’s father died when he was a child. He was sixteen when he married Ma Bradley, who was eighteen. He worked the fields, the mines, and at anything else that came along. Everyone said he was the hardest worker they had ever seen. My mother adored him. Her mom also worked the fields, raised the family, and was a pretty good carpenter. She made several pieces of the furniture in their home. Young Ruth was sent to the cotton fields at an early age. In later years, when Dad would wax nostalgic about growing up on the farm and expressed a desire to someday get back to the country, Mama would have none of it. Growing up on a farm in Tennessee during the Depression had not been her idea of fun. She’d seen enough of it for a lifetime and was determined never to go back. And she didn’t.

Shortly after Dad married Mom, it became obvious that Fletcher had met his match. By the time I came along, Mom had laid down the law and Dad had renounced his old habits,
joined the church, and was taking a very dim view of the vices that he had almost perfected during his single days. For the rest of his life he never drank a drop, and he never missed a day’s work except for illness. He walked in the door every night at 6 o’clock to sit down for a supper that was already waiting on him. I never saw my parents engage in so much as a heated argument. My mom’s influence reminded me of a story about a fellow who, after years of low-down behavior, was hit across the head by a two-by-four and then reformed. “Nobody ever explained things to me like that before,” he said.

One thing that didn’t change about Fletch was his take on life. He seldom saw a situation that didn’t call for a humorous or sardonic comment. One of my earliest childhood memories is one night after Wednesday Bible study, when I was in the backseat of the car as we were driving home. We stopped at a red light, and a pitiful, haggard old lady walked across the street in front of us. Dad said, “You know, I believe that is the ugliest human being I have ever seen in my life.” Mama responded, “Why, Fletcher, she can’t help it.” To which Dad replied, “No, but she could stay home.” His comments were often so outrageous that Mom spent a good part of her life trying to stifle laughter in front of the children, who she knew were receiving a terrible example.