Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (4 page)

Having said that, I can’t really say that I gave the trip a fair shot. You can’t see that much scenery when you’re lying down in the backseat with a comic book. Yes, my sense of adventure along with the rest of me lay dormant, while my sense of wonder was limited to seeking frequent updates as to our exact location and how long it was to lunch. Not improving my disposition was the fact that in my attempts to gather intelligence from the front seat, I had to take care to frame my inquiries carefully to avoid a Fletcherism designed to infuriate. If I asked, “Where are we now, Daddy?,” he would invariably reply, “Right along here, son.” It was information that was technically correct and totally useless. Like a lot of the stuff I was learning in school, I figured.

Since time began, the trader and the merchant have had to develop the necessary skills to survive—and Dad was no different. He had to have a pretty good eye for what a car would “bring” when he bought it at auction. There wasn’t much margin for error. He could look at a car across a lot and tell whether it was previously wrecked or whether it was a “northern” car, meaning it was driven on snowy, icy roads strewn with salt and therefore more likely to rust. He also had a pretty good idea about a car’s odometer reading. If he knew the seller of a car he had bought, he would add to the list of selling points “original miles.”

There were few impediments or requirements for getting into the car business, and it seemed that every horse-trading country boy in Lawrence County who did not want to work for “the man” opened a used-car lot—for a while, anyway. Competition was heavy, and I sometimes wondered how Dad competed with folks who sold old beat-up rattletraps with odometer readings worthy of a little old lady who drove only on Sundays. Did he fight fire with fire, so to speak? I didn’t really want to know. All I know is that he sold used cars in the same little town for forty years. More than once a young fellow would walk onto the lot and say, “Mr. Thompson, my dad bought his first car from you and he said that I should, too.” That told me all I needed to know.

As I was growing up, Dad traded houses the way he traded cars—as often as possible. The trouble was, they were houses we were living in. He would build a house and we would
move into it. He would be offered a little profit, sell the house, and then we’d rent and repeat the process all over again. We must have lived in half the houses in town, and Mom used to say, “I’ve cleaned up about every old house in this town.” To Dad, whether it was a car or a house, it was just good business.

Dad would also move his place of business from time to time. Some of his car lots had “offices.” The office usually consisted of a little two-room structure with a portable fan and checkerboard. The great issues of the day were resolved there, especially political issues. If the issues couldn’t be handled over the checkerboard, they were taken to the Blue Ribbon Café, where even more learned experts would weigh in. But Fletch’s place was always the place where a fellow could have a good laugh, listen to some Hank Williams on the radio, play some checkers—and maybe kick a few tires and test the car market. I remember one fellow called “Shorty,” who was well named and had a big potbelly. He was a fixture at both the lot and at the Blue Ribbon. He was in the insurance business, and dressed well, always wearing a necktie with his short-sleeve shirt and straw hat. However, his claim to fame was his ability to quickly suck in his stomach and cause his pants to fall to the floor. “Never know when the unexpected is going to happen,” he would tell his startled customers. He sold a lot of policies with that one. Shorty understood marketing.

Dad had always been drawn to politics and had grown up
a Democrat. Pa Thompson never voted for a Republican in his life and thought that FDR had saved their lives. In later years they laughed and talked about, during the Great Depression, eating a thin gruel called “Hoover gravy,” named after President Hoover. Politics was a matter of looking out for the “little man.” And in rural Middle Tennessee in the 1930s, my folks were very “little” from an economic standpoint. When Dad would take me to the barbershop when I was five or six years old, he would say, “Tell them what you are, son.” He had coached me to say “a Democrat.” It was probably my first lesson on how to get a laugh.

However, by the 1950s, politics in Lawrenceburg were not a matter of ideology or party policies. It was a matter of the ins and outs. The outs wanted to be in, and the ins did not want to be out. The Democrats controlled the local and county political machinery and the patronage that went with it. That was basically a holdover from the Civil War. In Tennessee you could almost tell the politics of the county by the lay of the land. In mountainous East Tennessee, where slavery was rare and several counties never did secede from the Union, it was heavily Republican. As you got over to the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee, including Lawrenceburg, and especially West Tennessee, where the terrain became flatter, it became cotton country and was Democratic. In Lawrence County, since there were not enough Republicans to succeed as a party, some independents and some disgruntled
Democrats formed a “coalition” party. Dad was a coalition man.

The coalition ticket gradually gained some traction in county politics, where voters determined who controlled the courthouse and the main offices, such as sheriff, trustee, county court clerk, circuit court clerk, and county register. During election season, rallies would be held in every community in the county. Little country-music bands would play as the speechifying of politicians filled the hot night air and vice versa. It seemed that the energy and acrimony expended were in inverse proportion to the importance of the office. It was amazing to me how much excitement could be generated over the burning question of who was going to be elected to register deeds at the courthouse for the next four years.

The group most interested in these elections were the free-market purveyors of illegal spirits, otherwise known as bootleggers. And they were interested in only one job: sheriff. Whether or not a sheriff was going to be broad-minded with regard to their business endeavors was of primary importance to these folks. It was always assumed—and occasionally proven—that they ensured this broad-mindedness with a little money from time to time, and I am not just speaking of campaign contributions. In fact, over the years the relationship between some of the county sheriffs and the bootleggers was more of a partnership than anything else. So
it made for heated campaigns and plenty of “walking-around money” on Election Day.

All of this, of course, was well known to the coalition coffee drinkers at the Blue Ribbon Café, whose owner, Dudley Brewer, was the town’s leading and most respected Republican. The coalition had never elected a sheriff, and they needed to nominate someone whom people liked, was preferably honest, and who looked plausible standing behind the badge. Fletch was their man.

Initially, Dad’s biggest hurdle as a potential candidate was explaining to Mom how the sheriff lived “
in
the jail,” as Mom would put it, or “
at
the jail,” as Dad described it. Dad saw it as a terrific rent-free benefit and pretty exciting. The ancient two-story brick building on the edge of town looked like Davy Crockett had built it, or perhaps Davy Crockett’s father. The jail cells were on the second floor, and the sheriff’s family and offices were on the first floor. Dad never did really understand why Mom didn’t think this was a great setup. She wouldn’t even have to clean it up. Carefully selected criminals would do that for her. In one of life’s little ironies, it was the same jail where Dad had lost his tooth to that deputy sheriff many years prior. Dad thought his longstanding ties to the building might be a strong selling point for voters, though Mom persuaded him that it wasn’t funny and probably wasn’t a good idea to bring up on the campaign trail.

As always, Dad finally sold Mom on his idea, but alas
not to enough voters. He made a good run against a well-entrenched incumbent. It turned out to be a bad year for the coalition, but the campaign did give me some time with Dad. I drove him around the back roads of the county in search of votes. When he would see someone sitting in a rocker on their front porch, we would stop for a spell. The problem was that they usually would know Fletch and he would talk with them as long as they wanted to. Dad enjoyed it and was buoyed by the fact that everybody he saw and talked to was for him—which, of course, is every beginning politician’s delusion. To make matters worse, we were only seeing a handful of people every day on our trips.

Occasionally, Mom would hear a disparaging word, but it was often along the lines of “Fletch is too good of a man to be sheriff.” It aggravated Dad, but I knew that Mom agreed. At the supper table at night, Dad would talk about what a great thing it would be to help clean up politics in Lawrence County and the way he would elevate the sheriff’s office in the eyes of the people. Over the years, I decided that it probably was a good thing that this political neophyte full of high ideals was never confronted with the reality of the sheriff’s office in Lawrence County. Besides the bad influences of the office, Dad was a little naïve when it came to people. His talent for driving a hard bargain, his wicked sense of humor, and his occasional flashes of temper concealed a soft heart; he was a sucker for a hard-luck story. Every miscreant caught redhanded by the law who protested his innocence and any
ne’er-do-well or drunk who insisted they were a “changed man” found a willing believer in Fletcher Thompson. In retrospect, the bootleggers and a majority of the voters were probably right. Not a good fit.

Years later, Dad’s friendship with Pat Sutton said a lot about Dad and the nature of Lawrence County politics. Dad had become friendly with Sutton when he ran for and was elected to Congress representing the district that Lawrence County was in. He was a smart, good-looking guy with an outgoing personality, and in fact he looked a lot like Dad. Dad thought he was great. After a few years in Congress, Sutton took on the popular Senator Estes Kefauver. Kefauver beat him badly, and Sutton left the area for several years. He returned to Lawrence County with great fanfare and ran for county sheriff and won. In 1964 he was charged in a counterfeiting conspiracy—that’s right, a rural county sheriff charged with counterfeiting. Even more bizarre, he persuaded the people that it was all a conspiracy between the FBI (which does not have counterfeiting jurisdiction) and his local political opponents. He was reelected. Dad supported him all the way (even after he was convicted).

The day after Dad’s own election defeat, he was back on the car lot. On the surface, at least, there was no keeping Fletch’s spirits down. By Christmas he was in rare form. At Ma and Pa Bradley’s house in Tuscumbia, Alabama, by tradition the entire extended family, each with a passel of kids,
would sit around the living room and open presents one at a time, starting with the youngest. All of Mom’s sisters and her brother and their spouses had opened their gifts one after the other, working up to the eldest. Each couple was opening their gifts and was receiving an envelope from Ma and Pa Bradley containing a $100 bill. Thanks, oohs and aahs all around. Mom being the oldest sibling, she and Dad opened their envelope from Ma and Pa Bradley last. Dad had the honors. Out of the envelope came not one but two $100 bills. Dad, trying to look slightly embarrassed, held up the two $100 bills for all to see, thanking Ma and Pa Bradley profusely. Ma Bradley almost died. For a moment everyone was looking at one another or at the floor—until they saw Dad grinning. Then it hit them. He had slipped the second $100 bill into the envelope. The entire family was doubled over in laughter for thirty minutes.

Dad could hold his own in any company. I invited Mom and Dad to D.C. during the Watergate hearings and introduced him to my friend, Connie Valanos, the owner of the Monocle Restaurant, a landmark on Capitol Hill where I spent many evenings. Connie was a humorous guy himself, and he and Dad struck up a friendship. One night when Mom and Dad walked into the restaurant, Connie said to Dad, “Fletcher, was that your briefcase left in here last night with ten thousand dollars in it?” Dad immediately replied, “Yeah, but it was twenty thousand.”

•    •    •

Being “Fletch’s boy” gave me the benefit of the doubt growing up in Lawrenceburg. And I often needed it. While Dad had a temper and could say angry things to me in the heat of the moment, I could count on my folks to be there for me day in and day out. The more trouble I would get into and the worse my offense, the calmer Dad became. He never punished me when he saw that I was punishing myself. As a little boy, I simply worshiped him. He was not one for much small talk or “activities,” but I simply thought he could do anything.

Kids are shaped by what they can take for granted. I knew that Mom would come in at bedtime (after dutiful application of face cream and hair net) and we would say our prayers together (although I never really took to that “and if I should die before I wake” part). I knew that Mom and Dad would be together and always there for me. It produced a childhood without one moment’s insecurity or anguish over anything going on in my home.

To one extent or another, every man measures himself against his father. Once past the adulation phase and the resentment phase, something more realistic sets in. You begin to think, “I remember Dad at this age—at the age I am now.” It’s only then that I realize that he did not have everything figured out at times when I thought he was so strong and certain.

My parents never set the bar high for me as far as education
or professional titles were concerned. But they gave me much more. Dad set the standard for what a man ought to be—strong and protective of those who depended on him. Trustworthy and striving every day to be a better man. It became a standard by which I measured things, whether I lived up to them or not.