Mayor or a Second Eight Years – 1986

Once I announced that I wasn’t going to run for re-election, people began to come to come asking “Would you consider running for Mayor again?” To be honest, I said no. “Why don’t you ask this guy or this girl?” I was hoping to have a break. I thought, “Why do I want to do this?” But there were a series of months when this was happening. Some people who’d been my supporters in the past, some outstanding citizens in the community who’d been instrumental in diversification and had investments here, and people I grew up respecting were coming to me. They were saying they wanted somebody who didn’t have a special interest, an axe to grind, or whatever was motivating other possible candidates. So they offered to raise the money for the election and circulate the petitions. As it turned out, it was close to the deadline and they only had one day to get the petitions signed. They said, “Casa Grande needs you!”

I suppose it sounds corny, but Casa Grande had been my whole life. Casa Grande helped raise me. There were people in this town who supplemented my not having a mother and it meant a lot to me. It STILL means a lot to me. If you haven’t been there, it probably sounds corny. I felt I needed to respond.

There’s a funny anecdote to this. I said “OK, I’ll run. But you better be getting yourselves someone else because I’m not in this for the long haul. In the next two years you need to find somebody else. I’m doing it for the town and people I respect in the town.” The story is, I stayed for four elections—eight years--and I enjoyed it. I was proud. We made a lot of progress.