It was getting to
be something of a well-kept secret — Tuesday’s special general election for the
District 89 state House seat. Only 250 people had taken advantage of early
voting, and that was low, even by special-election standards.
That fact concerned the partisans of Jeanne Richardson (the spelling is meant to
be pronounced simply ‘Jean,” but her friends have always said it as ‘Jeanie,’
and she has accommodated herself to the fact). As the Democratic nominee in a
heavily Democratic Midtown district, Richardson was favored, but her primary
contest against Kevin Gallagher had seen bitterness among the two camps, and
with the early-voting totals so meager, the Richardson camp got worried.
So, among other things, they held a rally Friday night at the Hunt-Phelan home
to get the troops juiced up for Tuesday’s showdown against Republican Dave
Wicker and write-in candidate Steve Edmundson. To judge by the conversation at
the well-attended Richardson affair, the main concern was Edmundson, a sometime
civic activist and high school teacher, and the owner of the fashionable Kudzu’s
bar.
But earlier in the year Shelby Democrats had seen their Republican counterparts
sandbag a special election until just the last minute, giving Beverly Marrero,
the previous District 89 House incumbent, a scare in her ultimately successful
race for the vacant District 30 state Senate seat. So not even Wicker, still an
unknown quantity, was being taken for granted.
Democrats was gathered at the Germantown home of Chris and Candi Schoenberg for
a fundraiser on behalf of Bill Morrison, a Memphis city teacher who had run for
Congress in the Seventh District lat year and was announcing a bid for city
council.
Morrison, who had long been rumored as a candidate for the Super-District 9,
Position 3 seat now held by Jack Sammons, informed his group of supporters that
he would be seeking the District 1 seat being vacated by incumbent E.C. Jones
instead. Amid new reports, now confirmed, that Sammons would not be seeking
reelection, Democratic activist Desi Franklin had filed for the super-district
seat, and Morrison — on the theory, as he put it, that “two good Democrats
shouldn’t run against each other” — opted to make his race in District 1.
That put him into a hotly contested race that also included School Board member
Stephanie Gatewood, Antonio Parkinson, Keith Ferguson, and W.B. Bates II.