Huckabee Page 5

  What Mike’s father did pass down to him was family stability paid for through hard work and personal sacrifice. He desired to see Mike succeed and find all the happiness America offered to those who would strive for it. He considers himself to have grown up privileged, not poor: “Privilege is not about money. Privilege is about being loved. It’s about having two parents who would sacrifice their very lives to give my sister and me all the things that they didn’t have.”6

  Neither Huckabee nor Clinton grew up with wealth, but the stability of the Huckabee family stands in sharp contrast to the home life the former president experienced. “Even though we were born in the same town, we grew up in very different environments,” Huckabee said. “The president has told the story of how he grew up with an abusive, alcoholic stepfather. I was fortunate to grow up without that sort of family tension.”7

  Huckabee comes by his “common folk” populist routine honestly—it’s not a pretense. And yet, his family was at least stable and respectable. Their low economic status wasn’t foisted on them because of drink, gambling, bad debts, profligacy, or divorce. Even so, when you don’t earn much to begin with, when you’re generous with what you do have, and when you invest so much in your children’s futures, then there’s not much left over in the bank. “I consider myself a conservative Republican, but I tell people I have a different point of view,” Huckabee said. “[I] certainly didn’t grow up with the silk stockings and . . . the country club crowd.”8

  Another intangible inheritance Dorsey gave to his children was a sense of humor. Mike Huckabee wrote years later that it was a gift he could appreciate only as an adult, when he realized that not every home was so happy: “It’s not that his Irish temper didn’t come through occasionally. But no matter how little we had, we always had a home filled with laughter.”9

  A point Huckabee often makes in describing these years is that they were good because society had not yet imploded on itself. Culture wars and moral revolutions had not yet splashed across the lingering calm of the Eisenhower waters. Huckabee calls himself “a child of the optimistic 1950s” who believed in the vision of a world where everyone “lived happily ever after.” He wrote those words in the opening paragraphs of his 2000 book, Living Beyond Your Lifetime, in a section he titled, “A Legacy Lost.” He wrote, “I dreamed that life might be something like that. No matter what obstacles, dangers, and perils might come my way, in the end we could all ‘live happily ever after.’ ”10

  A few years into the 1960s, portents of future trouble could be felt, even in Hope. In the same month (May 1964) that twelve men publicly burned their draft cards in New York City—becoming the first public act of resistance to the war—the Hope Star printed the Home Demonstration Club’s report for the month: “Mrs. Virgil [Ernie Jo] Huckabee gave the lesson: ‘Food, Feed, and Water During Disaster.’ ”11 That topic certainly sounded more ominous than “How to make a collar” or “Future trends in window treatments”—the topics discussed eight years earlier. With the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination, the Soviet threat seemed imminent. Senator Barry Goldwater promised “a choice, not an echo” in that fall’s election,12 even as nine-year-old Huckabee was being looked after by a grandmother who was teaching ladies how to prepare their homes for disaster. One day, as governor of Arkansas, Mike would play a major role in responding to disaster—though from tornadoes and hurricanes, not Soviet missiles.

  The real gem in the previous news clipping comes in the final sentence: “The meeting was closed with all repeating the club creed.” The club creed? Did a home economics group have doctrine? Yes, in a way, it did. You see, the origins of groups like the Home Demonstration Club can be traced back to President Theodore Roosevelt, who, in the form of a Commission on Rural Life, promoted “life on the farm.” At the turn of the century, people asked prophetic questions about the future of the farm and agriculture in America: “How can we expect intelligent, ambitious, young men and women to remain on farms and make farming their life’s work if farmers and farm homes cannot be held up as an ideal to be attained?”13

  World War I only exacerbated these concerns, as tens of thousands of farm boys, like the famous sergeant Alvin C. York, were shipped across the oceans and exposed to exciting and alluring things. Though York returned back home to his beloved Tennessee hills, others decided that a life on the farm seemed like a dull existence they could leave behind.

  In the context of these concerns, organizations sprang up to promote and support the ideal of farm and rural life: 4-H (1902), the Arkansas chapter of the Home Demonstration Club (1912), the American Farm Bureau (1919), and Future Farmers of America (1928). Segregated until 1965, Arkansas membership in the HDC grew from 2,083 in 1917 to a peak of 64,863 in 1941.14 Though the organization was created to help promote agrarian lifestyles, the end result was broader, with general instruction in self-sufficiency and sustainable homes. As a result, these ladies would help lead their communities through the hardships of two world wars, a worldwide outbreak of influenza, the Great Depression, and the horrific flooding of the Mississippi River. Because they were “prepared for anything,” the HDC of Arkansas helped alleviate human suffering.

  The text of that HDC creed remained the same in 1964 as it always had been. It stated:

  I believe in the open country, and the rural life in the country. I believe that through working together in a group we can enlarge the opportunities and enrich the life of rural people. I believe that the greatest force that molds character comes from the home and I pledge myself to create a home which is morally wholesome, spiritually satisfying, and physically healthful and convenient. I believe in my work as a home maker, and accept the responsibilities it offers to be helpful to others and to create a more contented family and community life so that in the end farm life will be most satisfying.15

  How can you make them stay on the farm? That’s a good question. But the ironic thing is that Hope’s HDC clubs were meeting each month in homes that, for all intents and purposes, were not rural. They planted backyard gardens, but they weren’t farmers. They cut grass lawns, but not fields of hay. They got their eggs from the grocery store at the end of the block, not out of the henhouse. So the original intent of the organization began morphing into something that better reflected the realities of postwar domesticity.

  By 1960, as young Mike tagged along as a guest for some of these meetings, many of the ladies present were also full-time workers outside the home, like Mike’s mother, Mae. Further, these ladies’ husbands had left agrarian jobs behind to grab better-paying and more stable jobs in town. The world was changing.

  Huckabee grew up just a few blocks off the downtown square in Hope, which was the seat of an agrarian-driven county. Farms and undeveloped land surrounded Hope on all sides, but Huckabee himself lived in town, on a block with other houses. He had neighborhood kids to play with and neighborhood adults to serve as surrogate parents when his own were not around. “A child could leave his house in the morning on a bicycle and not return until after dark, and it caused no one alarm,” Huckabee said. “It was the kind of place where I could misbehave eight blocks from home, but by the time I pedaled back to 509 East Second Street, six people would have called my parents to report my behavior. I am not sure that it took a village to raise a child, but I am quite sure that an entire village did its part to help raise me!”16

  Mike’s sister, Pat, recalls one particular act of neighborhood transgression committed by her little brother. “We had an older lady next door to us, Mrs. Maggie Cole,” Pat said, “and she had pecan trees which we knew not to pick up. They were her pecans, and everybody was supposed to harvest their own. But Mrs. Cole’s always looked better. I remember one time when Mike got into some of Ms. Cole’s pecans and stuffed them into his pocket—he was about four or five. Well, the pecans were full of ants. We joke that he was the original kid with ants in his pants,
because he was hopping all over—and got ant bites on his legs and everything else. That was his first thieving event of his life—and I think that kind of turned a corner for him on that business.”17

  Friends recall Huckabee having a very tender heart—and an insatiable curiosity. These two characteristics collided when four-year-old Huckabee helped his sister bury their recently deceased pet parakeet in the backyard. “Cookie,” the parakeet, had meant a lot to Huckabee. So, after a few days of mourning, he decided he needed just a bit more time with his beloved bird. He went out back and dug up the corpse, but he was shocked by the grossness of what “ashes to ashes” looks like in real life. The family loves to tell these kinds of stories on him, and they’re all as angelic and innocent as these two. Ants in the pants and discovering how a body decomposes—that’s about as sophisticated as his childhood foibles come.

  At the public pool, Huckabee learned how to swim from David Watkins, an older teen whose father volunteered at the firehouse with Dorsey. Watkins later went on to work in the Clinton White House and became a key figure in one of the initial scandals of Clinton’s first term. “Travelgate,” as it became known, concerned Watkins’s firing of a handful of staff in the White House travel office, allegedly at the vehement urging of Hillary Clinton. Then, in 1994, Watkins flew on a Marine helicopter at taxpayer expense to go play a round of golf. Watkins lost his job over the event and reimbursed the Treasury thirteen thousand dollars, but stated, “I’m not admitting I did anything wrong.”18 Watkins told reporters that he had been scouting out a golf course for the president.

  Hope, Arkansas, has a country club and golf course, but Huckabee has never played the game in his life—not even once. He means it when he says that he’s never been a country-club Republican.

  On the other hand, when he wasn’t yet four, his parents enrolled him in the upcoming summer baseball league. The Hope Star published notice of Huckabee’s being drafted onto the “Giants.”19 If he was destined to play Major League baseball, his parents certainly gave him an early start down that path. For people growing up in Arkansas, the St. Louis Cardinals were the Major League team to root for. Cardinal Hall of Famers Dizzy Dean and Lou Brock came from Arkansas, along with numerous lesser players for the team. “Cardinal baseball is genetically embedded into the DNA of kids born in Arkansas during the baby boomer generation,” Huckabee recalls. “I still remember my teacher at Brookwood Elementary School letting us sit on the playground on a beautiful October day so we could skip class and listen on a cheap AM transistor radio as the Cardinals beat the Yankees in the 1964 World Series. I was a nine-year-old kid, but the memory of that will live with me far more than any of the lessons we would have had.”20

  Be that as it may, it was academics (and ironically, calling play-by-play for local radio), not athletic competition, that became Huckabee’s field of high achievement during his school years. In February 1964, he made it into the Hope Star for “Honor Roll”—a news item that would show up frequently throughout the next decade. And that very same week, something else caught his attention. Together with 45 percent of American households, young Huckabee tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show and watched four flop-haired boys from Britain play their hit songs. The Beatles and the “British Invasion” had arrived, and Huckabee took notice. The only question was how to get his hands on a guitar. Rock and roll was making strong impressions on young people everywhere.

  Five years earlier, in the darkness of a cold February night in 1959, a small Beechcraft airplane crashed into a snow-covered cornfield in northern Iowa. Though eight hundred miles north of Hope, Arkansas, the accident made the front page of the Hope Star:

  Three of the nation’s top rock n’ roll idols were killed during a light snow when their chartered plane crashed shortly after taking off from the airport here early today. The trio, Buddy Holly, 22 of Texas, Richie Valens, 21, Los Angeles, and J. P. Richardson, 24, of Louisiana known professionally as the “Big Bopper” had completed an engagement at the Surf Ballroom in nearby Clear Lake a short time before.21

  A teen from New York state—a huge fan of Holly’s music—remembers reading the shocking headlines as he made his deliveries of the local newspaper. Thirteen years later, he wrote a song inspired by the memory of that fateful day. The singer, Don McLean, released “American Pie” in November 1971. It climbed the charts and hit the number one spot in January 1972. “This idea for a big song about America had been on my mind for a long, long time,” McLean said. “I wanted some sort of a song that summed up the world known as America . . .

  “So all of a sudden this memory of Buddy’s death had the dramatic power that I needed and started my mind operating on a different level. And I was able to see where this song had to go, how big it had to be, how long it had to be.”22

  In 2008, during a presidential campaign event, forty-eight years after Buddy Holly and his fellow troubadours played the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Mike Huckabee’s band, Capitol Offense, had the honor of playing the Surf Ballroom. Hundreds of people came out, many driving several hours to hear the band cover 1950s songs and to show support to Huckabee. On that cold November day, both the music and Huckabee’s underfunded campaign were on fire. Huckabee had just taken a slight edge over Mitt Romney in Iowa polling, and the caucuses were just two months away. Savoring every moment of the campaign trail, he joked about campaign finances—before his band lit into a cover of the Beatles’ “Money.”23

  PART 2

  FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, AND THE BEATLES

  CHAPTER 5

  GUITARS, HOBOS, AND KOOL-AID

  1965–1967

  The guitar was hidden behind the couch. The other gift was just a decoy—the guitar was the surprise, and we were all in on it. We were so happy to be able to get that for Mike.

  —PAT HUCKABEE HARRIS, MIKE HUCKABEE’S SISTER

  IF YOU LISTEN TO MIKE HUCKABEE OR HIS SISTER, PAT HARRIS, talk about their childhood, nearly every anecdote contains the common theme of gratitude for their parents. Dorsey and Mae, devoid of great wealth, poured their lives into their two children, hoping that the sacrifices they made would impact their future—and perhaps even the world.

  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that even Huckabee’s well-known passion for music finds its origins in Dorsey and Mae. First, they exposed him to a lot of music. Okay, so it was the music they enjoyed—Big Band and classical—but they kept songs pouring out of the old record player. “I think it would be unfair to say they played it for me. They played it for themselves,” Huckabee said with a laugh on an NPR program where famous people talked about the music they remember hearing in their youth. “They knew that I would have preferred anything rock ’n’ roll, but we had a little record player, and my mother particularly loved music even though she didn’t play an instrument. And she was especially fond of Glenn Miller.”1 Even when people today fail to recognize his name, Miller’s “In the Mood” remains a familiar and favored dance number.

  “To this day, one of the things that appeals to me is the signature sound of the Glenn Miller orchestra,” Huckabee said. “He was the first to combine woodwinds as the primary instrument—in his case, a clarinet, the tenor saxophone playing the same melody line. The moment you hear it, you know exactly whose orchestra that is playing it because of that Miller sound.”2

  And classical music also rang out in Mae’s living room. “I can distinguish between Rachmaninoff and Mozart and Bach,” Harris said, “because Mom made us listen to all that stuff on those old records that she had.”3

  But Glenn Miller couldn’t compete for Huckabee’s attention once the Beatles came to American shores. “Like so many teenagers in that era, I disdained anything that wasn’t filled with a back beat and pure rock ’n’ roll,” Huckabee said.4 He dreamed of fronting his own rock band and playing shows around the world.5

 
The problem was, Huckabee didn’t own a guitar. So, when he was eleven, he asked his parents to buy him the one he had seen in the J. C. Penney Christmas catalog. Ninety-nine dollars would purchase an electric guitar and accessories. But Dorsey and Mae didn’t have that kind of money to spare. Instead, they purchased their son something else—some other present that he’d like.

  On Christmas morning 1965, Huckabee opened up and saw the alternate present. He hugged his parents—the best in the world—and was grateful for them, guitar or no guitar. But then, a surprise awaited him. “The guitar was hidden behind the couch,” Harris said. “The other gift was just a decoy—the guitar was the surprise, and we were all in on it. We were so happy to be able to get that for Mike.”6

  It was one of the happiest moments of his life.

  As the wannabe Beatle began learning his chords, he received coaching from a local Assembly of God preacher. Harris remembers his fingers bleeding from his practice, but he stuck with it and soon began to perform worship songs with church groups. As he did, his earlier struggles with shyness began to melt away. With each performance young Huckabee undertook, standing in front of others became an event he enjoyed rather than feared.7

  Visitors to Little Rock’s Old State House can view that very guitar as part of a display of governors’ memorabilia. “For many who come and see it, it probably represents little more than a kid’s dream to be a musician,” Huckabee wrote. “For me, though, it is a reminder that long before I ever played before an audience and heard the applause, I spent hours and hours in my room hearing only the complaints of a family whose members had to endure the throbbing sounds.”8