Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410070024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALEC KLEIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: TAPPAHANNOCK NOTE: BELOW LENGTH: Long
He sleeps in his red Dodge Dakota, shaves in Hardee's bathrooms, moves from town to town, 18 hours a day, six days a week, listening to motivational tapes, Mozart and country music.
Where he's going, he says, "I don't always know."
William Otis Pratt, age 60, is on sabbatical from his $6.50-per-hour cashier's job at Lowe's hardware store in Spotsylvania County. A retired Defense Department engineer, he's running as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia.
On the dashboard lie the spoils of his unending journey, 11,000 miles and counting on the odometer: Kraft syrup, a cube of butter, Scotch tape, a pack of sugar and the New Testament, a page circled, a passage reading:
"And I will shew wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapour of smoke."
Pratt travels alone, his thoughts focused only on winning, even though his name won't appear on the November ballot. He's fashioned his own name I.D. - "WILLIAM O. PRATT" is printed on the back of his Lowe's nametag, haphazardly taped in its plastic covering.
"I don't want to look too professional," he says.
In a campaign season turned on its head, Pratt may be the most unlikely of politicians, more outlandish than an incumbent senator who confessed to accepting a nude massage from a beauty queen, more bizarre than a challenger who shot to fame for his role in an illegal international wargame.
"I think I can win," Pratt says. "I'm not here playing around, I'll tell you that."
So it would seem from his road warrior getup: black Reeboks, white socks, dress shirt and slacks, thick glasses, set jaw. So it would seem as he crisscrosses the state for a third time, dishing out close to $10,000 of his own savings and dropping off some 20,000 campaign leaflets wherever he goes: Norfolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Newport News, Hampton, Roanoke, Bristol, Fairfax, Richmond, just about any town or city with a courthouse in it.
"I've had some big-city people laugh at me," he says. "But it doesn't bother me."
He shrugs off his opponents, Republican nominee Oliver North, Democratic incumbent Sen. Charles Robb and independent candidate Marshall Coleman.
"I think I have something to offer," Pratt says.
He came to that conclusion after he retired four years ago, dabbled in the stock market, studied Russian history, and journeyed to the Capitol to watch the Senate in action.
It wasn't a revelation. Pratt - born in Radford, only child of a shirt factory manager and a seamstress, father of three, grandfather of two - simply decided to run.
"I try to think about what I'll do when I get elected," he says. "I've got the first six months figured out."
Balancing the budget, promoting international trade, creating jobs, "Sen." Pratt would be a busy man.
Whether or not he is just a dreamer, there is something deeply American about Pratt's modern-day tilt against the political windmills. After all, the Constitution requires only that a Senate candidate be at least 30 years old, a U.S. citizen for nine years and a resident of the state that he would represent.
Nowhere did the framers stipulate that a candidate must have a real shot at winning. "It's how you choose to spend your money," said political scientist Tom Morris. "Do you buy a boat, or run for the Senate?"
Pratt's not the only one exercising his rights, particularly in an election spawning more and more none-of-the-above voters.
Dennis L. Bybee, a former high school teacher and a retired civilian employee of the Defense Department, is spending $25,000 out of his own pocket to run a write-in campaign from Alexandria. Herb Kirstein, an author also from Alexandria, is spending about $8,000 for his own write-in candidacy.
"If somebody doesn't stand up," Bybee says, "if not me, who? If not now, when?"
There may be others like them out there; only candidates who raise or spend more than $5,000 are required to file with the Federal Election Commission.
But few, if any, could match Pratt's singlemindedness, or ingenuity. He has even concocted his own method of mass media advertising: He sticks his hand-made campaign posters behind the marching band at home football games at Virginia Tech, his alma mater, hoping to catch the television camera's eye.
Unabashed, Pratt pitches his candidacy wherever his truck takes him, stopping at shopping centers, schools, local newspapers, fishermen's wharves, groceries.
"Can I give you a piece of paper?" he asks a man lowering his car window in a parking lot.
"Y'all give me some consideration," he says to a bank teller. "We can win our Senate seat back."
"Hate to bother you," he tells a Radio Shack clerk, "but my wife told me to go out and get a job." Which may explain what inspired this improbable trek.
The Defense Department confirmed that Pratt was an aerospace engineer who tested missiles, and Pratt says he briefed three presidents on nuclear weapons. Open-heart surgery led him into retirement, but after he recuperated, he couldn't find another job. Not at J.C. Penney. Not as a community college dean. More than 120 job applications produced little but a few weeks' work as a 7-Eleven cashier and the job at Lowe's.
Pratt's No. 1 campaign issue, not surprisingly, is jobs.
In a sense, he has created his own occupation, hitting the road by 6 a.m., lights out in the truck by 10 p.m., making pit stops in motels every third day for a shower, thinking all the time about the towns he will visit on the campaign, the work he will do after he wins.
"A wandering mind," he says, "gets nowhere."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB