by Randy Reynolds
The mayor pulled his gun, crouched behind his car door and yelled at the people in the car ahead of him, “Get out with your hands up! This is your mayor speaking!”
The mayor pointed a gun at people on many occasions, including at least once at city hall when he threatened a councilman.
Early in the mayor’s term, a city councilman who often voted against him was shot to death through the screen door of his motel—no robbery involved. The killer shot him down and left. Nobody was ever accused of that crime, but never again did a councilman stand up to the mayor. Whatever the mayor wanted, they voted for it unanimously. And when he spoke, the councilmen nodded non-stop like bobble-head dolls in the back window of a moving vehicle. On my morning radio show, I dubbed them “The bobbing-head city council.”
He ran roughshod over his police department, too. When he told a cop in the city parking lot to stop whistling, the cop disobeyed. “You just ended your career,” said the mayor, who subsequently had the sergeant fired. (No wonder cops and ex-cops became my best anonymous sources of stories about the mayor!)
He liked to prove to his policemen that he was tougher than they were, so he challenged them to impromptu wrestling matches behind the police department and beat all comers.
The mayor and his sons often tailed police officers through the night to make sure they were making their rounds. To prove this was happening, some off-duty cops took me with them and we tailed the mayor’s sons tailing the cops for more than four hours.
He required the police department to do a safety check of his property each night at 2 a.m. He called his home “The Eagle’s Nest” and the inspecting officer was expected to call in, “The Eagle’s Nest is secure.” If the mayor didn't hear this call at the expected hour on his bedside scanner, he'd get on the horn to the police department and berate the officer on duty.
Such antics from the gun-totin’ mayor were great fodder for my morning radio show (and occasionally for the front page of the newspaper.) But the cops warned me that he was a violent and dangerous man, and that I had better be prepared for a confrontation. When I tried to laugh this off, a prominent local businessman who was an ex-cop, brought me a handgun and told me to keep it with me at all times. An officer from a neighboring jurisdiction gave me some basic self-defense lessons because he was certain the mayor was going to take me down the next time he saw me.
I was handling all this in good-humor until the morning on the bridge when the mayor’s son pulled up beside me and pointed a pistol at me through his window. I pointed the borrowed Glock at him and he sped up and disappeared into the pre-dawn darkness. He’ll never know how scared I was and how close I came to shooting him.
From then on, a “locked and loaded” routine was the opening of my morning show. My co-host and I would go through a checklist: “Headphones… check.” “Microphone …check.” “Oldies…check.” “Walther P22…check.” (Here we’d noisily shove in the clip.) “Glock 9…check.” (More noise.) “12-guage…check.” (We’d chamber a round right next to the mic.) “All right! We’re locked and loaded, let’s get this show on the road!”
That was just to let the mayor know we were ready.
When my co-host left on vacation, my father-in-law (a preacher who happens to really like guns) sat at the front desk each morning with a loaded shotgun. Just in case.
Though the verbal war stayed heated—me holding the mayor to account, the mayor insisting we were lying about him—no physical altercation occurred that year except for the mayor’s son kicking me in the shins at a banquet… someone slashing three of my car tires… and the mayor yelling at me outside a courtroom.
My show got a big boost in the ratings, the 7-term mayor was beaten in the next election, and—after an ad agency executive commented on the gun in my belt when she dropped in to visit the morning show—the station owner suggested we stop bringing guns to work.
A couple of years later when the Legislative Auditor made some untrue allegations about the ex-mayor, I came to his defense. Although I’m sure he never forgave me for exposing and ridiculing his foibles, and I certainly never turned my back when I was in the same room with him, on the air, we carried on like long-lost friends.
Some folks didn’t understand how I could be so friendly to a character I had derided for being so bad, but that explanation was easy: I was just sticking with the truth and the truth sometimes changes sides.
