Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300438
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Coincidence?
UMW officials didn't think so. They're convinced that Dole, and perhaps the entire Bush administration, was embarrassed into action by the attention the Pittston strike was starting to get from international la bor officials - some of whom had threatened to file a protest with the United Nations about the way striking American coal miners were being treated. "She's getting all the international labor heavies, including some from Solidarity, coming to talk to her and she's the only one who hasn't been here, so she decided she'd better come on down," UMW spokesman Gene Carroll said.
Other political figures scoff at that suggestion and offer their own.
Aides to Gov. Baliles suggested West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller's bill that would have forced Pittston to contribute to the health funds caught Dole's eye and she needed to preempt the legislation.
For her part, Dole said she had been following the strike for some time and decided it was time to get involved.
On Oct. 14, she went to Moss 3 - a site her aides had picked because it would provide a dramatic TV backdrop - and announced that she'd invited Trumka and Douglas to her office the next day, for what was then still believed to be their first meeting. After 90 minutes, the trio emerged smiling, and Dole announced they'd agreed she would appoint a "supermediator" - something Trumka had been calling for all along.
Ten days later, she chose former Labor Secretary William Usery, who had been on Trumka's list of possible mediators.
After more than 20 months of no progress in its talks with Pittston, the UMW had scored two big political victories.
It would soon score another.
\ DEL. DON MCGLOTHLIN SR., D-GRUNDY, had premonitions.
Six to eight weeks before the election, he knew he would be in a tough fight, even though he had no opposition. Buchanan County is one of the most solidly Democratic counties in the state and the Republican Party rarely bothered to oppose him. McGlothlin had more than two decades of seniority in Richmond and the chairmanship of the House Roads Committee, a plum for road-poor Southwest Virginia - and that seniority made McGlothlin even harder to oppose. But now he had a feeling in his bones that somebody this time would. "I didn't know it would be him," McGlothlin says of the candidate who eventually emerged. "I knew it would be somebody."
It only made sense.
His son was the circuit judge who by now had fined the UMW almost $31 million.
The "sins" of the son would be visited upon the father. One way or another, McGlothlin knew the miners would find a way to get back at him.
As the fall campaigns picked up, the strikers grumbled that they'd missed an opportunity to run one of their own. Not that they were unhappy with the people they were supporting - in Wise County, Del. Jack Kennedy was a union supporter; in Dickenson and Russell counties, the Democratic candidate for the open seat in the House was Bud Phillips, who had quit as Clintwood High School principal to join Frank Kilgore's law firm. Anyone working with Kilgore was a good guy. No, the thing that grated on strikers most was the McGlothlins. If someone was running against the father, they'd be able to get back at the son. But with McGlothlin unopposed, the strikers felt helpless, unable to express their rage. Unless . . .
UMW President Richard Trumka was the one who came up with the idea of running Jackie Stump for the House of Delegates.
It seemed natural. A big problem with getting back at McGlothlin was that he represented Buchanan County and a sliver of Tazewell County. A lot of union miners lived there, but not many worked for Pittston, whose operations were mostly in Dickenson and Russell. But District 28 President Jackie Stump was from Buchanan and the strike had given him a high profile. It also had given him a police record: Stump had been to jail three times, once for sitting down in front of Moss 3; another for a protest outside Judge McGlothlin's courthouse, of course; the two weeks he spent in the Roanoke jail until he promised he wouldn't encourage any more civil disobedience.
Trumka saw an opportunity. "He asked me to raise it with Jackie, and Jackie said, `I'm not doing that,'" UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts recalls.
Trumka was insistent. He told Roberts he could talk Stump into running. Roberts talked with Stump for about an hour and the reluctant Stump finally agreed to think it over.
Strike leader Eddie Burke, who'd run campaigns for union offices and had planned the Moss 3 takeover, now started plotting to take over McGlothlin's seat. The district seemed receptive to a working-class candidate. "The question was, we were running out of time," Burke says. "I don't think Jackie made up his mind until the night before," Burke says. Stump says he actually made it up the weekend before he announced.
No matter: By then there was less than three weeks until Election Day.
Stump still didn't seem to have his heart in it. On Wednesday, Oct. 18, the day of his announcement, Stump was asked to come to Castlewood for a rehearsal. A friend who rode with Stump told Roberts: "He's been cussing you all the way over here."
McGlothlin was a shrewd operator who wasn't reluctant to use his legislative pull. Some griped that his son's judgeship was an example. But many kids from his district owed their college educations to McGlothlin, whether they knew it or not. "We'd have 4.0 [grade point average] students who couldn't get into the [Virginia] Tech vet school because they're from Southwest Virginia and female," says one McGlothlin supporter. One call from McGlothlin would be all it would take. The results of his legislative horse-trading in Richmond were more visible. "Every building over there at the [Southwest Virginia] Community College was something he pulled out of a trash can on the final night of the session in a trade," a supporter says. But McGlothlin had one failing, this supporter says. He wasn't outgoing; some saw it as arrogance, others as mere remoteness after being in office so long. Either way, the friend says, "he didn't go around and beg people for their votes."
And that would cost him.
\ CAMPAIGN MANAGER EDDIE BURKE WAS PARANOID about the election judges. The Democrats controlled the election machinery. How picky would they be when it came to disqualifying write-in votes? What if someone misspelled Stump's name? He didn't take any chances. Jackie Stump became Jack Stump. "The `ie' was two extra letters we didn't want to fool with," Burke says.
Stump shucked the camouflage, too.
Only about 20 percent of the district's voters had UMW ties, Burke explains. If Stump wanted to win, he had to be more than just the union candidate.
On the first weekend, union supporters were at all the shopping centers from Richlands to Grundy - passing out more than 18,000 fliers than had been printed on short notice.
By the time the weekend was over, handmade red, white and blue plywood signs - with "Write-in Jack Stump, House of Delegates, He Will Speak Up" - were up across the district.
Not until after the signs had gone up did Burke learn exactly how voters would go about casting a write-in vote - by sliding up the lever on the seventh ballot position on the voting machine and writing Stump's name on the piece of paper they'd find underneath.
"God bless the sign crew, they went back and changed all the signs," Burke says, adding the catchy logo "7Up" in the corner.
\ BOBBY MAY, THE BUCHANAN COUNTY GOP CHAIRMAN, heard about the Stump campaign on the evening news.
"I thought it was just a way of getting attention. I said to myself, `He'll get 3,000-4,000 votes.' "
It didn't take long for May to realize something was up.
"About a week after Stump announced, [a high-ranking county Democrat] called me, feeling out whether we could give Don support. I figured, `What in the world is going on here?' He never did anything for us. All of sudden, he's calling, saying `let's do it for the good of the community.' . . . Then I got a call from a prominent Democrat out in Tazewell, asking the same thing. Then I got out and found everybody was" supporting Stump.
Frustration with the strike went beyond union members, even in the adjacent counties McGlothlin represented. "Doctors weren't doing as many X-rays," says a McGlothlin supporter. "If you had a clothing store, you weren't selling as many suits, or trading cars. It affected everybody."
And now along came Stump. He wasn't simply a union leader running against the father of the judge who had threatened to bankrupt the union; he was a working man running against the patriarch of one of the most politically connected families in the coalfields.
Stump didn't have to promise a thing; his mere candidacy said enough. It was a classic populist pitch - send the big boys a message.
Strikers, their wives and sometimes their children came from neighboring counties to help. Union supporters knocked on the doors of more than 5,000 homes, explaining how easy it was to cast a write-in vote.
The union brought in a direct-mail consultant who set up shop in the UMW office in Oakwood. His computer fired off letters to all 22,000 registered voters; union men and women came in for all-night envelope-stuffing parties.
Phone banks were set up in homes. Burke would take the computer printout of registered voters, tear off 100 names, roll up the list and hand them out to volunteers. "They'd take their 100 and go home and call and come back and get more."
Burke stressed that callers needed to be dispassionate in recording comments; better to put someone down as "undecided" or "unfavorable" and know who was who than pad a list with inaccurate responses. But when the summary sheets came back, the phone bankers reported that 75 percent indicated they would vote for Stump. Surely that couldn't be right. "I said not that many people are gonna lie to us," Burke says. "We felt real comfortable."
The consultants weren't as optimistic. Direct-mail man Tom Knight "was trying to get me ready," Burke says. "He could hear the excitement in my voice. He said less than one-half of 1 percent of all write-in elections are successful. I said, `Sure, and this is one of those.'"
"People told me they'd gotten four telephone calls prior to the election," marvels one McGlothlin supporter. "This was one of the most well-orchestrated campaigns I've ever seen."
With union money paying the way, Stump saturated the airwaves with radio and TV commercials. The spots only briefly mentioned Stump and concentrated on educating voters on how easy it was to cast a write-in vote - "7Up for Stump." Washington media consultant Vic Fingerhut produced the TV ads. His work was slick; giving a ragged, last-minute write-in campaign a professional feel.
McGlothlin tried to counter with testimonials from Rep. Rick Boucher and Virginia Speaker of the House A.L. Philpott about what an effective legislator he was and how it would be a mistake to lose his seniority. It may have been true, but it was hardly an emotional appeal the way Stump's campaign was. Even Republicans were campaigning for Stump just to stick it to a Democrat. Among McGlothlin supporters, a sense of desperation seemed to set in.
The night before the election, Burke and four other top campaign workers met in union headquarters. "We've done all we can do, there's nothing else we can do," Burke told them. It was time to make predictions. "I predicted a heavy majority, 62 percent. I was the lowest man on the pole."
\ THE STUMP CAMPAIGN ORDERED 44,000 CAMOUFLAGE PENCILS with Stump's name on them, two for each registered voter. It organized volunteers into pencil-sharpening teams to grind each pencil to a fine point.
Election morning, the campaign had teams at each polling place - handing out the pencils, giving instructions on how to cast a write-in vote.
The polls had been open about 15 minutes when the first call came into Stump headquarters. The voting machines were messed up. First at one precinct, then two - until finally word came that eight of 22 precincts had machines that had malfunctioned.
Burke feared fraud, frantically called lawyers and dispatched staffers to investigate.
The crisis passed. The paper for a write-in vote had been in the machines so long that it had turned stiff; whenever a write-in was cast and the machine tried to advance the roll, the paper cracked and jammed. Fresh rolls were installed and the voting continued.
One McGlothlin supporter studied a Richlands precinct for 40 minutes as the Stump volunteers passed out pencils and literature to voters. "I didn't see them refused but one time," the supporter says.
\ THAT NIGHT AT THE JOHN L. LEWIS UMW HALL IN OAKWOOD, a bluegrass band entertained until results started coming in.
The returns soon became monotonous, but that made the crowd even more jubilant.
McGlothlin carried his home precinct in Grundy. Stump carried everything else. It was a landslide beyond anyone's imagination: Stump 7,981; McGlothlin 3,812.
Tears welled in Jackie Stump's eyes as he stepped to the microphone: "The working people made history today, not Jackie Stump," he said.
Jackie Stump had gone from the jailhouse to the statehouse.
This was one message they'd be sure to hear in Richmond, loud and clear.
by CNB