Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509250008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Trixie Averill breaks into Mickey Mouse songs within earshot of reporters at another candidate's news conference. She names her pets after the Republicans she's worked for - Olivia for Oliver North, Georgette for George Allen.
When she was chosen to head the state board that governs Explore Park, she quipped that it was such a thrill to be put in charge of a million-dollar budget because her husband wouldn't let her have the family checkbook.
And when Republicans flocked around her at a Richmond fund-raising event, Averill joked that she couldn't have raised more money "if I'd stood out on Campbell Avenue" - a reference to Roanoke's red-light district.
Nowadays her husband, Dan, often will remind Averill when she gets too talkative at public appearances: "Remember the Campbell Avenue comment."
"I'm impulsive," Averill admits. "Everybody has their little idiosyncracies."
Yet perhaps no other question overshadows Averill's bid for the House of Delegates - a challenge against none other than the House majority leader himself - than this:
Will voters take this Roanoke County homemaker and part-time Orvis telemarketer seriously as a potential state legislator?
"The biggest detriment Trixie probably has is her shoot-from-the-hip comments," says Roanoke County insurance agent Ron Adkins, a longtime Republican activist. "Frankly, we've told her she needs to tone 'em down. Trixie is a person who didn't take herself too seriously."
Paradoxically, though, Republican Party leaders have long taken her seriously - and that may be the key to understanding just who this irrepressible candidate really is.
Over the past 15 years, Averill has worked her way up in the ranks of Republican workers from a door-knocker and envelope-stuffer to one of the most influential GOP leaders in this part of Virginia. Republican officeholders may be better known to the public, but many of those officeholders routinely look to Averill for support.
Bob Goodlatte? He thinks back to the early days of his initial campaign for Congress in 1992, when he was still trying to solidify his Republican support. "When she threw her support behind me, that was a pretty decisive thing," he remembers.
Naturally, she was part of the "kitchen cabinet" of informal advisers that Goodlatte convened on a weekly basis during that campaign - and still calls on from time to time.
Allen? Averill was the western coordinator of his 1993 campaign, a position that put her in charge of virtually all of the candidate's public appearances in the western third of the state.
North? Averill held no formal role in the campaign, but she didn't need one. Valued for her organizational skills and contacts with grass-roots activists, Averill was a major presence in North's Roanoke Valley headquarters.
But perhaps the surest sign of her influence is a symbolic one. Averill's annual Christmas party at her home in the Falling Creek subdivision east of Vinton rivals the ones once held by the late industrialist John Hancock for the number of luminaries it attracts. "If the governor doesn't come, some of his top folks in the governor's office come," Goodlatte says. "It's a place where people do come to find out what's going on in the Republican Party and state government."
So just who is this self-proclaimed "little ol' housewife" who the state's most important Republicans pay court to?
Averill grew up in New Orleans, where her father was in real estate. By all accounts, she was a precocious child who attended Catholic schools and took an early interest in public policy. "As a little girl, I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debates," she says. As a teen-ager, she baby-sat the children of a future Republican governor of Louisiana, David Treen. "When he took me home, he'd talk politics with me," she says. Unlike most kids, she was fascinated by the issues of the day.
Not that she planned to do anything with this interest. She studied journalism at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. "I wanted to be a journalist so I could be a foreign correspondent in London," she says, "but that was only because I wanted to meet Paul McCartney. He was single at the time."
A music buff, she was hired as the rock 'n' roll disc jockey at a local radio station. "I think they wanted the novelty of a female wearing a miniskirt and a peace symbol," Averill says, although she says that for her, the latter was a fashion statement, not a political one. She's always viewed the world through a conservative lens, she says.
After 2 1/2 years of college, Averill dropped out to get married. "I've never had any great ambition," she says. "I've never set any goals other than being a good wife and mother and a credit to the community."
In 1972, though, Averill found her true calling when she acted on her childhood interest in politics and got involved with the Louisiana Republican Party. Asked to be an Election Day poll worker, she remembers sitting through an organizational meeting "when all of a sudden, something isn't quite right. I'm sitting in a political meeting and my water broke. I should have known Amy would be a political animal."
Indeed, the elder of her two children has grown up to be a respected Republican campaign operative in her own right: Amy Averill is running a legislative campaign in Richmond.
In 1980, the Averills moved to the Roanoke Valley. "In New Orleans, you grow gills instead of lungs," she says. "But Dan hates hot weather. He wanted four distinct seasons. He visualized himself chopping wood like Daniel Boone. He started talking Colorado. I put my foot down and said I didn't want to move to any state that didn't secede with the Confederacy. Virginia was as far north as he could go and get everything he wanted."
Dan Averill wound up as head of management information systems for Litton-Fibercom; his wife wound up volunteering for the local Republican Party. "Only 12 people were at the meeting, and they were all talking politics, but local politics, and I had no idea what they were talking about. I thought to myself, I shouldn't have done this, it takes so long to get up to speed. I felt totally out of place. I'll never be able to catch up. But I was so enthusiastic about Reagan; I guess I'll stick it out."
It's telling that Averill's first Roanoke Valley campaign was a national contest. Her orientation was to the national conservative movement, not the local tradition of moderate Republicanism that it was eclipsing.
At the 1982 GOP convention to nominate a congressional candidate, Averill was part of a group of conservative party newcomers who frustrated front-runner Ray Garland's bid for the nomination. "She'd rather risk losing the race instead of having it fall to someone who wasn't true blue," Garland recalls.
But Garland also looks back on Averill as a pioneer. "I think she was a forerunner in pointing the direction of the Republican Party before a lot of us understood it was the direction to take. She's been dedicated to making the Republican Party a very conservative party, especially on family-values issues."
So how would Averill fare in the General Assembly? She makes a case that she'd enter with an advantage other freshmen wouldn't have. Thanks to her political work over the years - she's now on the state Republican Party's governing committee - "I know just about every Republican member in the assembly," she points out.
Del. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, goes further. "She can make a few phone calls to the administration and find out more about what's going on than any sitting delegate in Western Virginia."
Some Republican legislators say if she upsets Cranwell, and if the GOP gains a majority in the process, she'd enter with such star quality that she'd be rewarded with committee assignments most first-termers can only dream of. "I can see her being among the leaders over time," predicts Del. Jay Katzen, R-Warrenton, one of her friends from Allen campaign days.
Adkins, her campaign treasurer, says Averill's breezy personality belies her tenacity and organization skills - skills that often go a long way in politics. "She doesn't take rejection lightly. When I was [Fincastle state Sen.] Bo Trumbo's finance director four years ago, I had to literally stand over him and say, `Bo, you have to call this one' and beat him over the head. Not Trixie. She's out there all the time."
Averill brushes off her fund-raising skills, saying they come from her years of "up-selling" - talking customers into buying more products - at Orvis. "I'd probably be the only delegate who was a telemarketer," she laughs.
But she also says that highlights another reason she thinks she'd be a good legislator. "I'm a normal, average citizen with normal, average concerns. I feel I'd be very representative. We need a legislator who is still in awe of $1 million."
TRIXIE AVERILL
Party: Republican
Age: 46
Occupation: Homemaker and part-time telemarketer
Residence: Falling Creek subdivision in Roanoke County
Family: Married, two children.
WHAT THE CANDIDATE HAS TO SAY ABOUT HER:
CORE VALUES: "No one is responsible for you but you. That's where the ultimate responsibility lies, not with the government. The function of a state is to provide a good, healthy climate for employment, to encourage small businesses, to encourage entrepreneurs. Tax cuts always help the economy."
INDEPENDENCE: "I do believe in voting my conscience and voting what is right, but so far, that's pretty much in sync with the party."
VISION: "Safe neighborhoods and a strong economic base. A place where our children can play and grow and stay in their hometown if they choose after they've graduated. A place where people aren't always worried about how much money is being taken out of their checks and where they have more money to spend on leisure and recreational pursuits."
Keywords:
PROFILE POLITICS
by CNB