Searching for the Punchline Where is perennial candidate Willie Jacox now that we really need him? by Jim Hanas n an open letter to Tennessee Regulatory Authority member Sara Kyle last September, Commercial Appeal political columnist Susan Adler Thorp advised Kyle to stay away from the governor’s race. The reason? No Democrat has a chance in hell of unseating Don Sundquist. “Where’s Willie Jacox when the Democrats really need him?” Thorp concluded. Everyone knows Prince Mongo, but Willie Jacox has entered – and lost – far more races far more times than Mongo – who, at least, is a character, a privately celebrated local institution. Jacox, on the other hand, has little to show for his efforts but the label “perennial candidate.” And he’s earned it. He first ran for office in 1975, the year after he became a widower and a single father of two children. Then a city school teacher, Jacox was one of five candidates to challenge incumbent Memphis Mayor Wyeth Chandler. He finished dead last. But he’d caught the bug – or habit, or whatever – and the following year he added unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate and Shelby County Court (now the Shelby County Commission) to his growing dossier. In the last 23 years Jacox has run for almost every office imaginable, often campaigning for several in tandem. He has run for sheriff, governor, county assessor, city council, Public Service Commission, and other posts without ever really coming close. Or even close to close, really. There have been inexplicable strategies and even scandal throughout Jacox’s career. During his very first campaign, the 1975 run for mayor, he was arrested for inappropriate use of the public-address system he had mounted on his car. In 1978, after futile runs for both sheriff and governor, he was relieved of his tenured post as a gym teacher amid accusations that he had touched several sixth-grade girls “in an offensive and inappropriate manner,” charges he has consistently denied. He contends an agreement was ultimately reached regarding his dismissal. Jacox’s political aspirations survived. He ran for city council in ’79 and even for the Memphis school board in 1983, by which time he was going by just plain “Bill.” And on and on. In 1986 he made another set of simultaneous bids for governor and sheriff, and – believe it or not – tried to attract conservative votes by using the Confederate flag as a campaign emblem and wrapping himself in its symbolism. Jacox made the news again in 1995 when he was acquitted mid-trial of pilfering an $88 microwave oven from a Wal-Mart on American Way. Two months later, he’d begun an exploratory campaign for mayor of Memphis. Laugh if you will, and you should, but there’s something Jacoxian about this month’s elections. Futility is in the air, with both Sundquist and Shelby County mayor Jim Rout looking thoroughly invincible. But still they have opponents. True, Rout has only Prince Mongo, while the likes of Virginia Nyabongo and Donald “Rooster” Jackson vie for a shot at Sundquist. But where is the man himself, the dreamer of the impossible dream? Where indeed is Willie Jacox? The election commission has two phone numbers for him: one here in town, the other on the Savannah side of Georgia. At the Memphis number, a woman answers and says he doesn’t live there without seeming surprised by the question. At the other, Jacox answers the phone. He says he’s been working here in Memphis and in Georgia and Florida with grass-roots organizations that provide business and paralegal advice to minorities. We talk about his tabled political career. What’s the most money he ever had for a campaign? A few thousand. What’s the most votes he ever got? A few thousand. What made him run against Chandler back in ’75 when he was only 31 years old? “My first wife had just died, she died young, and I don’t know,” he says, trailing off a bit. “That’s the first time I ran.” And all the races since? “After I kind of got my feet wet I said, ‘Hey, I could do a better job than a lot of these candidates.’” Jacox, furthermore, says he doesn’t consider any of his campaigns failures. “A lot of times you don’t really have to win,” he says. “I’ve always addressed issues that the two major candidates didn’t address.” One such, he claims, was the now fashionable issue of workfare-instead-of-welfare. One reason he hasn’t been on a ballot in a while, he explains, is that he’s working up a legal defense fund. The Wal-Mart arrest cost him money and he has filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the chain, where a security guard asked to see the receipt for the microwave oven and claimed it was a fake. The case is set to be heard in November. Should he win, that money might come in handy. Campaigns can be expensive and, as he observes, “when you get that label ‘perennial candidate,’ then it really takes a lot of money.” Either way, he says, his political career is far from over. “Just like the South,” he says, “I’ll be rising again in the not-too-distant future in Memphis.” Pundits, take heart. You’ll soon have Willie Jacox to kick around once more.