A Pol without a Pig to Pick
BY BARBARA ELLIOTT
Reading the interview with John Manchester about his accomplishments as mayor of Lewisburg in the last issue of the Quarterly got me to thinking about my father’s decade-long term as mayor of my hometown in North Carolina in the 1980s.
My father’s approach to politics wasn’t exactly orthodox. For one thing, he eschewed pig pickin’s (pig roasts to you non-North Carolinians) as the go-to ploy for getting votes that most politicians in the state favored in those days. We once had a pig pickin’ for one of my sister’s birthdays at a building next door to my father’s funeral home, and a group of excited voters pulled up and asked if that was a “political pig,” which my father assured them it most certainly was not.
Back then he was writing me daily letters, so I have been able to retrieve some classic examples of his approach to governance. Like this account of the time the mayor of the neighboring town of Selma called in the middle of a town council meeting to beg for water because they were all out.
“Now, I don’t mean just LOW . . . I mean OUT. All at once eight people got up and dashed to the water fountain! The power of suggestion! Smithfield has plenty of water. In fact we can make four times as much water as we can use, but the minute the good folks at Town Hall found out about the shortage in Selma they got thirsty. In fact, I got thirsty myself! Anyway, last night we laid an emergency line to Selma and today they are laying a permanent line so that our good neighbors can take a bath and have a drink. We have notified Selma that we have a lot of extra sewage to sell also . . . if they need any.”
He also recounted the time that a council meeting was reduced to a mere 50 minutes due to a bomb threat. “Some nut said that he was going to blow up Town Hall and the Library at 8:50 so we got the hell out of Town Hall so we wouldn’t get in his way. I passed the Town Hall and the Library this morning and they both seemed to be standing so maybe they didn’t get blown up. We didn’t have much business to conduct last night anyway, and I was glad to get out early for a change. Maybe a bomb threat would be good at every board meeting. It might get the business at hand conducted more promptly.”
Of course these days, such a threat wouldn’t be laughed off so easily, and I expect some of my father’s more whimsical decisions as mayor would be frowned on today. Like the time he declared “Be Kind to Beaver Day,” issuing a proclamation that basically admitted that a bunch of beavers was winning in an ongoing battle with the town over some creek they kept damming up, so why not just acknowledge that they were benign creatures and let them get on with it. It made the beavers happy, and the town was none the worse off for it.
