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
TWO 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 t
he 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.
“Now, folks,” he said, “I’m not gonna get here and try to fool you with fancy language. First of all, I wouldn’t know how, you have to be a lawyer to do that, and second of all, I think every American deserves the truth in plain English and I trust the people to know it when they hear it.
“Make no mistake, the big mules want your vote. Oh, they smile and grin at you and promise to love, honor, and obey. Trying to get you to the altar. But you should hear how they talk about you behind closed doors. . . . They think you’re stupid. They think you’ll fall for anything they tell you. They think they can just do anything they want up there and get away with it. It reminds me of when I was a boy growing up out in the country. My mother would open up the pantry and here would be all these mealy worms and moths eating away at our cornmeal and flour. And she would yell out, ‘Daddy, we’ve got pests in the pantry.’ Now, I’ve been up at the state capital for a few years and I’ve seen how that bunch up there is stealing the taxpayers blind, and folks, we’ve got pests in the state’s pantry right now and if you elect me I’m gonna get rid of every one of them. I’ll chop all that extra fat right off the budget and put that money back in the workingman’s pocket, where it belongs, not to pay the salaries of folks in the governor’s mansion to cook up lace-panty lamb chops and serve a lot of little sissy food on silver plates. Good old American hamburger is just fine with me.
“Now, I know my opponent, Mr. Peter Wheeler, claims his family goes way back. And that’s fine. But I ask you, whose family don’t? Oh, I may not have the poodle-dog pedigree behind me and I may not get invited to their little high-society pink-tea affairs. But I’d stack my momma and daddy and your mommas and your daddies right up there with the best of them. I know that bunch up in Kansas City, all dressed up in their furs and diamonds, driving in fancy cars to their million-dollar brick churches. But let me tell you this: A vote don’t care if you’re fat or skinny or if your socks don’t match or if you smoke store-bought cigarettes or roll your own. A vote don’t care if you listen to the Grand Ole Opry or sip your coffee out of a saucer. . . . Why, it don’t even care if you’re wearing silk drawers or flour-sack skivvies.” By this time he had the audience laughing and cheering. “A vote is the best friend we have. A vote from my momma and yours that walks to a little ramshackle wooden church in the country counts just as much as the rich man’s vote. Now, I hear some of you saying it don’t matter if I vote or not, the whole thing is fixed anyway . . . and you’re right, it is fixed. The man who gets the most votes wins—and I want your vote . . . I won’t lie to you. I could have gone after support from some of these big-money interest groups and be doing a whole lot better but I didn’t. Why? Because I don’t want to be in debt to anybody but you. So I’m asking you to give me a little something today, it don’t have to be much, just a little loan. What will I put up for collateral? Well, I don’t have much. I don’t own a house, my car’s not paid for. You can’t have my wife. But I’ll tell you what you can have is my word. My word that if you send me up there as your governor, I’ll work for you. And I want you to hold me to it. The only payback I want to have to make is to you people . . . and I’ll pay it back, law by law, road by road, school by school, and electric pole by electric pole.”
While the Missouri Plowboys played, the Finley men watched as every one of the farmers came up and put money in a big barrel that had HAMM’S PEST CONTROL written on the side and shook hands with him. When the lights went off and the projector shut down, Earl smiled. “This guy’s an idiot. We can beat him at his own game.”
The next day they hired for Pete Wheeler a huge Dixieland band to travel with him and brought in top entertainers from Hollywood and New York to appear at all his fund-raisers. At the big Kansas City “Peter Wheeler for Governor” dinner, they even flew big Kate Smith in from New York to open the evening by singing “God Bless America.”
The New Dog-and-Pony Show
Now, with all the parties, money, and efforts going into the Peter Wheeler campaign, Hamm started to worry. The more he thought about the promise he’d made to Betty Raye to quit politics if he lost, the more desperate he became. After being gone for a week he came into the bedroom around 3:00 A.M. and tried to wake Betty Raye without waking the baby. “Sweetheart,” he said, shaking her.
She opened her eyes. “Hey . . . what time is it?”
He sat down on the bed. “It’s late. But I need to talk to you.”
“Is anything wrong? Has anything happened?”
“No.”
She sat up and switched on the light. “Are you hungry?”
“No. The boys and I stopped on the way home and got a bite.”
She reached for her glasses and put them on and looked at him in the light. She could tell by the worried expression on his face that something was wrong. “What is it?”
He sighed. “Honey, you know I never wanted to bother you with any of this. And I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, but I need your help.”
He had never asked her for anything before except to marry him, so she knew it must be pretty serious. He looked so pitiful, she reached over and took his hand. He hesitated a moment and then said, “I hate to ask . . . but with all the big money being thrown at Peter Wheeler, I’m in trouble.”
“What can I do?”
“Well,” he said, “like I say, I hate to ask, but the boys were talking and they think that since your momma and the Oatmans have such a big following now, that if you were on the platform with me and let me introduce you to the audience it might help.”
The baby in the other room suddenly started to cry. Betty Raye got up out of bed and Hamm followed her. “All you would have to do is just sit there, honey, you wouldn’t have to sing or anything. And I’d get to be with you and the kids a lot more. . . . It would only be for a little while. . . .”
On April 6, Neighbor Dorothy reported to her listeners that the dessert cookbook had received an entry all the way from Lake Martin, Minnesota. “Mrs. Verna Pridgen writes, ‘Dear Neighbor Dorothy, I am sending you a recipe for a layer cake, some have called it a Minnehaha cake but while it is similar to the Minnehaha cake it is even nicer. I live out here on the Minnesota prairie and we call it a prairie cake.’ Thank you, Verna, but whatever it is called I can assure you it is a good one. And, let’s see, I got a call from Tot Whooten and she said to tell all her customers that the beauty shop would be opened back up this Wednesday. As you all know, last week Tot had a faulty dryer blow up and had to have all her wiring redone and it’s taken longer to fix than expected. Also, this morning I want to say how happy we were to see a picture of our little friend Betty Raye in the paper and to see how big Hamm Junior has grown. It seems like only yesterday when she was still in high school.”
For the next two or three weeks of the campaign, they moved in a caravan made up of a large black platform truck loaded with sound equipment, wooden folding chairs, and HAMM SPARKS FOR GOVERNOR banners, followed by three cars: Le Roy and the Missouri Plowboys in one, Hamm and assorted cronies in another, and Betty Raye, Hamm Jr., and the baby in the last car. And for Betty Raye it was also the last place in the world she wanted to be but she could not seem to refuse Hamm anything. They traveled up and down the state from sunup to sundown, sometimes making six or seven stops in one day. This was a grueling schedule for the men, but with two children to take care of, by the end of a few weeks Betty Raye was exhausted. Still, Hamm kept his promise. All Betty Raye had to do was sit off to the side in a chair and smile and wave as he introduced her as not only his wife but also the daughter of Minnie Oatman, the great gospel star, and the announcement was met with strong applause.
She did all of this without complaining but a week later, when Hamm did his speech in Clark County, he pushed her over the edge. Right in the middle
of it, out of a clear blue sky, he paused and said, “You know, folks, I have a soft spot in my heart for Clark County. My wife and I spent our honeymoon right up the road here.” Then he looked over to where she was sitting and said, “So you might say that little Hamm Sparks Junior, there got his start in Clark County.” And if that was not bad enough, amid hoops and hollers and guffaws from the audience, he put his hand up and said, “That’s all right, folks, I assure you the pleasure was all mine.”
Betty Raye wanted to die right there on the spot.
She did not know if it was because she was so tired or because she had been so embarrassed but when she got back in the car she burst into tears. When Hamm finally came over, he was surprised to see she was upset.
“What’s the matter?” he said, opening the door.
“Why did you say that?”
“Say what?”
“About our honeymoon . . . all those men laughing, looking at me funny—and it’s not even true.”
He chuckled and climbed in beside her. “Oh, come on, sweetheart. Don’t be like that. Nobody was looking at you funny. It was just a little joke, that’s all, made them feel good. People like to feel like where they live is special. Nobody was laughing at you, honey.” He kissed her and put his arm around her. “Besides, if you think about it, it could have been true, couldn’t it?”
The baby started to cry again. Hamm said, “Aw now, look, honey, you’ve got the baby all upset.” He rolled down the window and called out, “Hamm Junior, come over here and give your mother a kiss and tell her to stop crying.”
Hamm Jr., who at five was already turning into a charmer just like his daddy, crawled in over him and put his arms around her neck and gave her six big kisses. What could she do? She was outnumbered.
Because he had gotten such a big laugh in Clark County, Hamm continued to use the same line everywhere they went in the next few weeks. After a while Rayford Fusser, the bass fiddle player for the Missouri Plowboys, who was not too bright, turned and asked Le Roy: “How many honeymoons did this guy go on?”