Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

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 alasnot 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 anyne’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