THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 30, 1995 TAG: 9503300517
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
I wish you could have known mountainous Bill Tuck of Halifax. For the fun of it.
He was a good governor of Virginia in the late 1940s and, in personality, a sudden man, inclined to boil into action with the impetuosity of a tornado.
One night, alone in the Governor's Mansion, he took to wondering how fast Capital Square guards could reach him in an emergency.
Going outside with his revolver, standing by the swan fountain, he fired round after round at the night sky. Then he went inside, and, holding his watch, timed their response from 100 yards away.
Next morning, he told Carter Lowance, his executive aide: `` 'Fore God, Cyahtah, it took 'em 15 minutes to get to me!''
Tuck and Carter figure in another story, this one in ``Stepping Out from Kitchen to Capitol'' by Evelyn Cosby King of Williamsburg.
I'd cherish it if only for the story of how Governor Tuck invited Sunshine Sue and her guitar pickers to the Mansion after their last performance at the nearby Old Dominion Barn Dance.
One performer admired a rare porcelain bird, a Boehm sculpture, one of a pair decorating each end of a mantel. She kept praising its beauty.``Honey,'' Tuck said, ``if you admire the thing that much, why don't you take it with you?''
Next morning, when reason reclaimed him, Tuck realized that his wife, Eva, would return in two days from a trip. He dispatched Carter to board the train to New York in pursuit of an identical bird.
``And don't come back until you find one,'' Tuck said.
As a young homemaker, King left housework for a career in the file room of the Capitol during the second term of Gov. Mills E. Godwin.
What troubled her was that so many letters addressed to the governor were set aside as inconsequential, unworthy of a reply.
One man, referred to by the filers as ``that man,'' had been writing governors for years asking to become a forest ranger. King took to slipping discarded letters to the governor's secretary in the Mansion.
And one day, lo, there was a letter from ``that man'' thanking the governor for helping him get a job as a forester.
A mite of a man, Lowance had served Godwin during his first term and, to King's joy, he rejoined the governor for his second term.
``He unfailingly gave time to others. . . irrespective of who they were. . arrived,'' she writes.
``Always in the background, he wielded power by his ability to resolve problems with humility as well as wisdom.'' ILLUSTRATION: Bill Tuck
by CNB