Teaching the Pig to Dance

by Fred Thompson

  Back in Lawrenceburg, what with my big-city experience and greater understanding of the ways of the world, I was upgraded to a more responsible position. I got to clean up old cars at Dad’s lot, which he’d moved up the road on Highway 43 North, toward Nashville. He took an old bus, put it on a concrete foundation, and made it into an office at the back of a 150-foot by 150-foot lot, which was big enough to hold twenty cars or so. This time, Dad went into partnership with his brother, Mitch, who was three years younger than Dad, with movie-star looks and dark wavy hair. Having inherited the Thompson gene of avoidance of salaried employment and guaranteed paychecks, he too chose to become a “car man”—and was a good one. Quick with a joke and a laugh, he was what could euphemistically be called a “free spirit.” After his divorce he “ran pretty hard” for a few years, with more than a passing familiarity with women, drink, and automobile wrecks—sometimes all at once. More than once he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One night the police shot through the windshield of his car, mistaking him for a handsome outlaw famous in Tennessee at the time. At least, that was Mitch’s story.

  Some of my earliest memories are of Dad and Mitch sitting around after dinner laughing and talking about their exploits while growing up. Mitch’s personality, even as a kid, was aptly demonstrated by a story Dad used to love to tell. One day a young Mitch was teasing some old man who was about out of it. Dad chastised him: “Mitch, cut it out. That old man is almost ninety years old.” “I don’t care,” Mitch said, grinning. “I could whip him if he was a hundred.” Dad saved his hide more than once. He dearly loved Mitch even as their personal lives as adults took different paths. Mom liked Mitch, but needless to say she was not impressed by some of his habits and exploits, even though he eventually settled down. But one thing everybody agreed on: Mitchell Thompson paid his debts. In Lawrenceburg, if you paid your debts, folks would cut you some slack. Even your sister-in-law.

  They had a third partner—a fellow by the name of Half Durrett, an old friend of the family. They named their place Rebel Motors and had a grand opening with balloons and banners. When the local radio guy from WDXE came by to sell them some advertising time, Mitch had a great idea for a radio commercial: “Don’t Be a Son of a B——, Trade with Half, Fletch, and Mitch.” That provided laughs for several days before an ad that was a little more conventional was settled on.

  I think that Tennessee in August was the time and place the phrase “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” was born. With my shirt off, and with sweat pouring off of me like water, I’d clean up the cars on the lot that had been bought or traded for. Then, after sweeping them out, I’d spray down the cars with a hose and wash them. Then I would go inside the “office,” stand in front of the air conditioner, and listen to a little country music and the deep and complex existential messages that the songs conveyed. There was the Everly Brothers’ drive-in-movie classic lyrics “Wake up, Little Susie, wake up … We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot,” or Webb Pierce singing, “You say that you loved me, but I know it’s a lie, so tell me why, baby, why.” How could a fellow listen to that and not have a deeper understanding of life?

  I can still remember the lyrics to dozens of those songs (learned while other kids wasted their time on things like algebra)—possibly because I heard them so often, but maybe because the theme was usually about hard living, drinking, and boy-girl stuff, none of which I had had any experience with but which seemed to permeate the atmosphere of my little Southern town in the 1950s. Someone once said that the perfect country song would be something like this: “I lost my job and was drinking the day my mama got out of prison, ’cause my woman just left me when my car broke down after I had run over her best dog. Then my luck turned bad.”

  I liked working at the car lot. The pay wasn’t much and the work was uninspiring, but you couldn’t beat the cultural side benefits.

  It was a banner day for me when Half took in an old motorbike as part of a trade-in. The contraption looked like someone literally had taken an old bicycle and put a motor and rigging on it, but to me it gleamed like a new Harley-Davidson. I annoyed Half about it—very subtly, of course—until finally he just gave it to me. I was shocked; Half was going to be out $10 or $15, I thought. There was a little problem with my cycle: It had no brakes. I don’t mean that it had bad brakes or brakes in need of repair: It had no brakes.

  I did not see this as a problem. Brakes were a luxury I saw no particular need for. I would simply learn to anticipate when I was going to need to slow down (a talent I could have used later in life). When I came to a traffic light, for instance, I figured I would let up on the gas, and when I slowed down enough, I’d just drag my feet until I stopped. Miraculously, with no license, no helmet, and obviously no clue, I rode that motorcycle without incident for about a year. What got me off the bike wasn’t a run-in with the law or another inanimate object, like a wall; it was a few of my slightly older buddies and an occasional girl whizzing by me in their cars, laughing. It occurred to me that I was not being looked upon as especially cool. This, of course, could not be tolerated.

  Although I had been around them all my life, I was never interested in cars the way many of my buddies were. I was never a gearhead; I always looked at them as something to get you someplace, without a lot of romance connected with it. Dad never taught me anything about them, and I never really asked. I figured later that he probably thought he was doing me a favor and he probably had other things on his mind. Observing him on the lot doing business was interesting. There was no fancy filing system inside that bus on the blocks of an office, no computerized inventory. Dad was able to keep track in his head of what he had “in” a car, and often that car was on the lot as the result of several other trades. He had to know the answer in order to calculate his profit when he priced the car for sale.

  Amid the jokes and the occasional flurry of activity, life on the lot for me was mostly unrelenting monotony with long stretches of absolutely nothing to do. For all of his outgoing personality, Dad could be very quiet and self-contained. He would walk the lot or look out the window, lost in his own thoughts, seemingly almost sad. Dad was an interesting guy in a lot of ways. His handwriting was beautiful. Also, after I was grown, Ma Thompson showed me a picture that Dad had drawn as a young boy. It was a drawing of cowboys sitting around a campfire, and it looked almost professional. I hadn’t known that he could draw. In addition, he had a beautiful bass voice and sang not only in church but in informal quartets at funerals. I sometimes wondered what he was thinking about, although it never occurred to me to ask because I knew it would never have occurred to him to answer. I assumed it was part of being an adult. My opinion hasn’t changed much about that. What I was witnessing, of course, was just a man making a living. Possibly hardwired to be a little melancholy, he was playing out an age-old process. Doing the only thing he knew, without the benefit of a formal education or assistance from family or government; without a pension plan or health insurance, knowing that his family depended on prospective customers deciding to pull off of Highway 43 onto his car lot and what kind of mood they were in. But he knew that he was better off than his parents had been and that almost everybody he knew was pretty much in the same boat. And at least he always had a chance at having a really good year, as he judged it. He had some of those good years, and I never heard him express any misgivings, doubts, or regrets about anything.

  As for me, I didn’t like the feel of this glimpse into the world of earning a living. I am sure it probably showed in my work habits. I am just as sure that Dad would have been surprised to know that about forty years later, down the road on Highway 43 within sight of his lot, there would be a sign that read “Welcome to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, Home of Fred Thompson.”

  But it’s funny how so often life comes full circle. In politics they say that sincerity is very important. Once you are able to fake that, the rest of it is easy. But even more important than sincerity is authenticity, and
authenticity can’t be faked. Over thirty-five years after my car-lot days, I decided to run for the U.S. Senate. I had never run for public office before, and I knew that I would be going up against a fourteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives—a Rhodes scholar whose father had been governor of Tennessee. He also would have a good head start on me in fund-raising. Nevertheless, I had simply become fed up with standing on the sidelines complaining about the government, and I decided it was time to put up or shut up. Of course, being a political neophyte, it turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. For several months I was getting nowhere and lagging in the polls. My campaign had rented a fancy van with all the latest equipment and put me in the back of it in a suit and tie as we traveled from stop to stop. It wasn’t fun.

  One day I was having lunch with an old friend of mine, Tom Ingram, who had helped another friend, Lamar Alexander, get elected governor of Tennessee. I had left the campaign trail for a couple of hours, and we were chowing down at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. I was complaining about my circumstances and finally said, “You know, if it was left up to me, I would just get in an old pickup truck and drive across the state, stopping whenever I wanted to talk to people.” Tom replied something to the effect of “Then why don’t you do it? That’s who you are.” “Yeah,” I thought. “That is who I am.” Back at the campaign the opinion was unanimous. Bad idea. So we did it anyway.

  We found a red 1990 Chevrolet “straight stick” Silverado, and with a staff guy to drive me, we took off and did exactly what I envisioned. Wearing my jeans and boots, we would pull up in the middle of a crowd at a campaign stop and I would hop into the back of the truck bed and give ’em hell. It all fit. I was having fun, and folks said that it was showing. As I started climbing in the polls, my opposition unloaded on me. “He is a fraud,” they said. “He’s not really a good ole boy, but a champagne-sipping, Gucci-wearing, Grey Poupon–spreading Washington insider.” Frankly, I thought that was the best line of the campaign. But I also thought that accusing me of sipping champagne in Jack Daniel’s country was over the line. I replied that my opponent was just jealous that he didn’t have the advantages that I had by my not being a Rhodes scholar. I knew that I had ’em. I knew that I was coming off as exactly who I was.

  The truck became pretty famous. We had campaign pins and buttons made with pictures of the truck on it. Sometimes when I would go out of state, folks would say, “Yeah, you’re the fellow with the red truck.” The old red pickup truck now resides at the Baker Center at the University of Tennessee, where I donated my papers.

  My opponent didn’t know about my dad, the car lot, and the way I grew up. When I had gotten into trouble with the campaign, I had simply gone back to my roots, including an old truck just like the ones I used to drive and clean up on my dad’s lot.

  TEACHING LATIN to someone like me in high school was somewhat like trying to teach a pig to dance. It’s a waste of the teacher’s time and it irritates the pig. But such was the task that Mrs. Garner accepted at Lawrence County High School—with predictable results. If there is such a thing as teacher’s heaven where the saints of the profession go, then Mrs. Garner is undoubtedly there—for not having someone shoot me, or for not doing the deed herself. And there’s not a jury in the state that would have convicted her.

  Mrs. Garner was a heavyset, middle-aged lady of mild disposition. Even I didn’t know how steady her temperament was until that day she walked into class—as usual, exactly at the time for the class to start—and took her seat at her desk. I, along with another classmate with no visible signs of redemption, had come into possession of a small supply of “cracker balls,” which were very popular around the Fourth of July and Christmas season. They were like little round firecrackers, not much bigger than a large pea, and when you threw them on the sidewalk they made a pretty loud pop. Before class that day we put a cracker ball under each of the four legs of Mrs. Garner’s chair. She came in, sat down, and two or three of them went off. In the classroom it sounded like gunfire. Then something remarkable happened—nothing. Without so much as flinching, she proceeded to scoot her chair in behind her desk and begin the class as if nothing had happened. Man, this was awe-inspiring. And with that she managed to cause me to experience the one emotion that I hated most—shame. To my mind, her forbearance was even more remarkable in light of the fact that the chances of her being able to finger the right culprits in that class were about 99.9 percent. She wouldn’t even have had to “round up the usual suspects.” They were sitting right there in front of her, trying their best to look shocked and surprised. But she didn’t. I was so impressed, I even made a halfhearted attempt to learn a few Latin words, and I did. I just never learned what they meant.

  Attempting to create “shock and awe” in class was not the only “independent study” I undertook to endear myself to the faculty. Every day we had to put in an hour in study hall. It was a large auditorium full of desks. My challenge every day was to decide how best to kill the time in study hall. Given that farming is a major part of life in Tennessee, we had a teacher who taught agriculture and was also our study hall teacher my sophomore year. Mr. Ag was a big, rawboned fellow with straight blond hair. He could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting. He was also what we called “wall-eyed.” His eyes just didn’t go in the same direction at the same time. When one was looking northeast, the other one was looking southwest. You can imagine the sensitivity my buddies and I demonstrated in our discussions about his appearance.

  As best I could tell, he had two jobs in his role as study hall monitor as he sat on a slightly elevated platform and looked out over the auditorium. First, he had to evaluate the sneezes. Practically every day, once or twice, someone would let out a loud sneeze. Occasionally, one of them would be a real sneeze. Others were borderline, and most often they would be accompanied by a rhetorical flourish wherein the sneeze sounded like a dirty word. The teacher had to evaluate these sneezes as to whether or not they were fake or genuine and, if fake, dole out the appropriate punishment—usually demerits. But, of course, demerits didn’t inflict pain, and with us, anything that didn’t hurt did not serve as much of a deterrent. His second job was to be the restroom cop. People who wanted to go to the restroom had to sign a slip of paper and hand it to him on the way out.

  Given Mr. Ag’s appearance, he was naturally a target-rich environment for the artistically inclined. One day I decided to work on my portrait skills by drawing Mr. Ag’s face. I was doing a pretty good job, if I do say so myself. I especially wanted to get the eyes just right. I was concentrating heavily on that, and just before I finished I felt the presence of someone standing to my left and slightly behind me. Much to my chagrin, I looked up to see my subject, Mr. Ag. He was looking (as best as I could tell) directly at my handiwork. “Not bad,” he said, and walked on. Another close call. However, I knew better than to ask permission to go to the restroom for the rest of that semester during study hall, although I surely could have used a restroom break the moment I looked up and saw him standing there.

  Yes, life for me in high school was pretty good. The only cloud on the horizon was provided by narrow-minded teachers who insisted that I show up on time and not talk in class. They bombarded me with demerits, which would be dutifully recorded by them on “pink cards,” which became a part of my permanent record. Given my rate of production of pink cards, I could imagine a “Freddie Thompson” file cabinet drawer dedicated solely to me.

  The school faculty continued to remind me that they would follow me and haunt me for the rest of my life, and, well, I couldn’t have that. And my response? What I thought would be the response of any red-blooded American boy—eliminate the pink cards. One day during one of my frequent trips to the principal’s office, where the pink cards were kept, I unlatched the window to the office, which was on the ground floor. I recruited another ne’er-do-well buddy, and we agreed that it would be a real hoot if we came over that night, sacked up all the pink cards, and took them t
o the woods and buried them to protect them from the prying eyes of future unknown busybodies intent upon ruining our glorious futures. Of course, school officials would have no idea who pulled off this brilliant caper. Never mind that I would probably rank as the top three suspects on any list. Or that when questioned I was the worst liar in the history of delinquency and usually I fessed up after the first question.

  Nevertheless, the two of us laughed all the way to the school that night, enjoying the brilliance of our scheme. We continued to laugh when we discovered that the long horizontal window would open only halfway and we could not stuff our oversized bodies through it. And we were probably laughing with relief when we realized we weren’t going to be able to pull off the pink-card theft. We figured we’d eluded the night watchman, done our best, and when trying to right an injustice, it’s the thought that counts.

  It didn’t occur to me until years later that it was only a matter of a few inches that prevented me from committing a felony before even leaving high school. They say that God protects drunks and children. I would add young morons to that list.

  One of my other pals had his dad’s car one night, and a few of us were driving around when we saw this large sign, “Gone Fishing,” over a bait and tackle shop on the outskirts of town. It took a considerable amount of time for us to get that sign unhinged and transported over to the high school. But it was more than worth the effort when we gazed upon our handiwork after we had nailed the sign up above the entrance to the study hall, which could be seen from the rest of the campus. The sign was up so high that it actually took the maintenance people two or three days to get it down, giving us plenty of time to appreciate the results of our hard work.