Standing in the Rainbow (34 page)

It was not only Betty Raye who thought it a bad idea.
Everybody
tried to tell him he was a fool to think he could launch a gubernatorial campaign out of nowhere and with no money but he had made his mind up and he refused to listen. “Betty Raye,” he said, “honey, if you just go along with me just this one time, I promise you if I lose I will get out of politics for good. But I can’t give up without even trying.” All she would have to do is just pose for one picture with him and the kids, and after that she would not have to be involved and would never have to appear in public. He would do the rest.

What could she do? She loved him. So Hamm Sparks entered the primaries with nothing more than a good reputation with farmers, a name that sounded vaguely familiar, and a willingness to work night and day if he had to. He was convinced he did not need flashy billboards or fancy campaign headquarters with a staff of political advisers and so-called experts. He said his headquarters would be the back roads and small towns across the state. All he had to do to get his platform across was look people in the eye and tell it to them like it was. Tell them they needed someone who would be on the side of the veteran, the workingman, and the small farmer. “Why, there are smart people all over this state who can make up their own minds and not be led into the polls like sheep by some big-city political machine. All I need to do is find them and explain how they’re being taken advantage of by the big mules running the party in Kansas City.” This sounded good but after running up and down the state for over a month in a field of twelve hopefuls, he was running dead last. Most people in the state had no idea who he was and he did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of even making it through the primaries if he could not do something about that—and fast. He had already gone through their savings. He scrambled around and got some backing from a few friends but the kind of money he needed to get his name and platform out to the public was much more money than Rodney Tillman had. More than anyone he knew or had ever met . . . or so he thought.

Just four hundred miles away, in the six-room Kansas City apartment he shared with his mother, Cecil Figgs was preparing to go to work. He stood at his dressing table and carefully attached a small toupee to the front of his large round head and placed a fresh flower in his lapel and was ready to face the day. When he walked into his large, thickly carpeted office at the funeral home, he found a note from his assistant telling him that his first appointment of the day was going to be ten minutes late. He picked up the newspaper on his desk. Usually he just skipped straight through to the obituaries to check his ads but a picture of Sparks jumped out at him. He was listed as one of the remaining candidates running for governor. Cecil Figgs supposed Hamm would probably not remember meeting him four years ago at Ferris Oatman’s funeral but Cecil had never forgotten the day he’d met Hamm Sparks. When the funeral had concluded, Hamm had walked up to him at the reception afterward and introduced himself as Betty Raye Oatman’s husband, shaking his hand vigorously and telling him what a good job he had done. He then shoved a business card at him, patted him on the back, and said, “Mr. Figgs, if you’re ever in the market for a good tractor or a combine, be sure and give me a call,” and walked away.

Cecil had been dumbfounded. Was Hamm insane? He was the last person on earth that would ever be in the market for a tractor. Cecil could have been highly insulted and offended at such an outrageous assumption but there was something so genuinely earnest and sincere about the man that instead of tearing Hamm’s card up, he put it in his pocket. For some unknown reason he had been very affected by the hunky little guy.

Although Cecil had been busy dealing with all the details, he had watched Hamm out of the corner of his eye, walking around the reception with nothing going for him but a bad blue suit, a two-dollar haircut, and sheer nerve, trying so hard to mingle with the governor and his staff. Hamm had more or less been ignored of course, but the little guy hung in there. That afternoon something unexpected happened to Cecil. He did not know what it was about Sparks but he found that he had developed a sort of odd affection for this complete stranger. He had felt sorry for him in a way and yet at the same time admired him. Maybe it was because he had noticed Hamm trying to hide the fact that the sleeves of his jacket were too short when he shook his hand or maybe it was that he reminded him of another young man he had known and liked years ago. Whatever it was, because of this strange attachment he had formed to Hamm Sparks, when he saw his picture in the paper, wearing the same bad suit with the same bad haircut, he felt compelled to look him up and try to help him if he could. And nobody needed more help at the moment.

Hamm had no real staff except for his old friends who stopped by every once in a while and Rodney Tillman. His campaign office at the moment was a small one-room storefront that used to be a lamp store before it went out of business. The amenities consisted of a desk, four metal folding chairs, and a phone, plus three old dusty lamps that had been left behind.

Cecil picked up the phone and called Hamm to set up a meeting and was somewhat surprised that Hamm seemed to remember him. Cecil did not seem to understand that he was a man that very few people would forget meeting. How many men in Missouri wear purple flowers in their lapel and a bad hairpiece the color of root beer?

A few days later Cecil walked into the campaign office, looked around the messy, dingy room, and shook his head. The first thing he said to Hamm was “Oh, honey, you need a better place than this.” Cecil cleaned off a chair, sat down, and said: “Listen, if you expect to stay in this thing, you are going to have to get a decent place to work out of and some better advertising. Now, I have a lot of money and if you are really
serious
about staying in this thing, I’m willing to back you.”

Hamm could not believe his luck. This was the first time in his life anybody had ever offered him something before he even had to ask. He jumped up and came around the desk and shook Cecil’s hand. “Mr. Figgs, I’m as serious as a boil on an old maid’s behind and if you will help me I promise to fight as hard as I can. I’ll work night and day.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Cecil. “Just figure out how much you need, let me know, and it’s Cecil.” Then he got up and started to leave. Hamm followed him to the door. “Hey, wait a minute. Don’t you need to hear my platform?”

“Oh no, darling,” Cecil said, dismissing him. “I don’t know a thing about platforms. I’ll just give you the money and leave the politics part up to you.”

Thus began the most unlikely of friendships between the two men, one that nobody ever understood. They did not even understand it themselves.

When Rodney came sauntering into the office with a bottle of whiskey and two paper cups, as he did every afternoon, Hamm was sitting at his desk beaming from ear to ear.

“Hey, Hambo, what’s up?”

“Rodney, I just got a serious backer with big money.”

“Who?”

“Cecil Figgs, the Funeral King. You just missed him. He said he would pay for the whole campaign, give me whatever I needed. I’m writing out a list right now.”

Rodney looked somewhat skeptical. He knew how much money it would take. “Ol’ buddy, I’m afraid somebody’s been kidding you. Nobody’s that rich.”

But Cecil had not been kidding. He was that rich. Not only was he the Funeral King of Missouri, over the years he had quietly bought mortuaries in seven other states and branched out into wider areas as well. With the mortuary and floral business, combined with his 50 percent interest in the Perpetual Rest Custom Casket Company, he was a very wealthy man and he had no qualms about spending it. In his business he was reminded on an hourly basis that life was short and you cannot take it with you. He had no children to leave it to, so why not spend it and, in this case, take a chance on a dark horse? However, in this case there were also other motivations at play. There was something he wanted in return but he did not want to tip his hand yet.

As for Hamm, he was so excited he could hardly contain himself. All he really needed was a little advertising, a good hillbilly band, and a flatbed truck with good sound equipment and he would be on his way. He immediately phoned Betty Raye’s uncle Le Roy Oatman over in Nashville, who had a hillbilly band called the Tennessee Plowboys and hired them. A week later Hamm Sparks, with a flatbed truck and Le Roy’s group, renamed the Missouri Plowboys, said good-bye to Betty Raye and the kids and hit the road. They went everywhere, from VFW fish frys, Elks Club pancake breakfasts, and Kiwanis meetings to bingo games and even family reunions . . . anyplace where more than ten people gathered, Hamm was there.

Coleman and Barnes Public Relations handled all the advertising for the Cecil Figgs funeral homes, so when Cecil called Arthur Coleman, the ad man jumped on the phone immediately. Cecil was not only a good friend of his wife, Bipsey, but he was also one of his biggest and most lucrative accounts.

“Cecil, how are you?”

“Fine.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Honey, I need you to do me a little favor.”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Could you take a look at someone for me on the Q.T. and tell me what you think?”

“Absolutely. Be glad to. Who is it?”

“His name is Hamm Sparks and he’s running for governor. I’d like to help him if I can but I don’t know a thing about politics.”

“What is it that I’m looking for?”

“Just see if you think anything can be done to enhance his public image. You know about those things, I don’t.”

Arthur wrote the name down. “Hamm Sparks? Isn’t he that hicky-looking guy with the bad hair?”

Cecil sighed. “Yes, that’s him.”

Good News, Bad News

T
WO WEEKS LATER
Coleman called Cecil with his report.                  “I checked out your man.” He laughed. “You sure picked yourself one hell of a wingdinger there, Cecil, but he’s colorful, I’ll give him that.”

“What do you think he should do?”

“Honestly? Not a thing.”

“You don’t think that maybe it would help if he got a suit that fits and maybe cleaned up his English just a little?”

“No. From a public-image point of view, I wouldn’t mess with him a bit. This guy is all natural and if you try and fool with him at this point it will just confuse him.”

“So you wouldn’t suggest changing anything?”

“No. He has good instincts and he’s doing just fine the way he is. And as far as the whole package, it’s not bad—two kids, a nice little wife-and-mother type who doesn’t get in the way . . . but now, Cecil, you
do
know that this guy doesn’t stand a chance in hell against Wendell Hewitt, don’t you?”

“Yes, but thank you anyway.”

“Anytime. But I am curious. What made you decide to back this particular candidate?”

Cecil said sincerely, “I don’t know, honey, I wish I could tell you. But I really don’t know. Just a hunch I had, I guess.”

Wendell Hewitt, clearly the people’s choice for governor, took the lead in the polls right from the first day of the race and kept it. He was a six-foot-two, affable, hard-drinking man with an eye for the ladies who was not only a good solid politician with a law background but an independent thinker. Most important, people liked him. However, the state Democratic higher-ups did not like him, and did not support him. They wanted a party man they could control and Wendell Hewitt was not it. As far as they were concerned, he was a loose cannon. Peter Wheeler, a wealthy, well-educated, rather effete insurance executive from Kansas City, was their man. But they had a problem. Their man was a bit stuffy and could never win against such a popular choice as Wendell. Behind closed doors, Earl Finley, the head of the party, agreed it would be best if Hewitt were to be out of the race altogether. A month later, by some miracle and a lot of money exchanging hands, their prayers were answered. A photograph of Wendell Hewitt leaving a motel room with someone other than his wife appeared in the
Kansas City Star
and was picked up by papers all over the state. Wendell and his staff assumed it had been the Republicans that had done him in but he took it like a good sport and did not whine about it or try to lie his way out of it. In his television address he said, “Due to recent events I have no choice but to withdraw from the governor’s race because, ladies and gentlemen, if my opponents are going to continue to stoop so low and use beautiful young blondes as bait . . . I can tell you right now they are going to catch me every time.”

With Wendell out of the race, Pete Wheeler was a shoo-in. Or so they thought.

To Earl Finley and the boys, Hamm Sparks was a man they had never considered as anything more than a joke, some pie-in-the-sky candidate thinking he could fiddle his way into the governor’s mansion, running around the state with his half-baked, pseudo-cracker-barrel philosophy and hillbilly singers. But during the weeks they had been concentrating on getting rid of Wendell Hewitt and pushing Pete Wheeler forward, the Hamm Sparks dog-and-pony show had crisscrossed the state and hit every small town, farm community, creek bed, and railroad crossing with a vengeance.

Hamm more or less did the same speech everywhere he went but it seemed to hit a nerve with the farmers and with the people in the country towns he spoke to. As his numbers started to rise, Earl Finley started to wonder about him and sent out a man with a newsreel camera to see just what in the hell he was doing and saying. The man caught up with the Sparks campaign, such as it was, at a stop outside of Cooter, Missouri, close to the Tennessee-Arkansas border. What the big boys saw on film later was a shot of a dirt-road farm town where about seventy-five to eighty country people had all gathered around the back of a flatbed truck where Hamm stood speaking into a bad microphone. Every time he made a point or told a joke, someone in the crowd rang a cowbell. The audience seemed to be hanging on to every word he said. The men in overalls and John Deere caps, the women in cotton dresses and bonnets laughed and nodded and seemed to agree with what he was telling them.