EDITOR At LARGE

There was a time when the men who ran the city were power hungry and wealthy. Today they may net even be men at all. Portsmouth seems to be bucking the political tide by electing likeable citizens to office. The editor welcomes in the new and remembers the old.

In Portsmouth the Councilor with the Most Votes is Mayor

I met incoming Mayor Thomas Ferrini for the first time just outside my house the day before the recent election. I was walking the dog. He was stumping for votes. Ferrini had been by a few weeks earlier too and left a campaign flyer and a scrawled note wedged in my screen door. Five other people running for city council showed up on my doorstep during the election. This is, after all, a pretty small city.

The mayor-to-be and I chatted for a few minutes, mostly about the destruction of the Italian North End and my hopes for turning the old library into a new Cultural Center. He seems like a nice guy. I liked outgoing mayor Steve Marchand too. I met him one day while standing in line for a burrito outdoors at a Fourth of July festival. Something was wrong with the burrito makers and the mayor and I got stuck talking to each other for almost an hour. I rambled on and on about why Portsmouth needs the Cultural Center and the mayor talked politics – city, state and federal. He reeled off more statistics than Josh Lyman on the TV series West Wing. I predict we’ll be hearing a lot from him in the future.

I always got along with Mayor Evelyn Sirrell. People used to joke about her day job as a parking lot guard at the bank. I thought that was very cool. City governments are filled with lawyers and white-collar professionals, but how many mayors really worked for a living? The only thing cooler was when former Portsmouth Mayor Eileen Foley applied for a job as an airline stewardess after retiring from politics in her mid-70s. I once told Mayor Sirrell that I was having trouble renting affordable office space downtown. "Why don’t you borrow my office at city hall?" she said with her unforgettable high-pitched Portsmouth accent. "You can use it in the morning when I’m not there. No sense in letting it go to waste." Where, outside of Mayberry RFD, could one get an offer like that?

I didn’t get along with every mayor. Back when I was a real journalist, I got in trouble for doing a little investigative journalism. The articles I wrote on the front page got just about everybody in city government riled up. One local official got so mad that he issued a memo telling city council members not to talk to me anymore. He sent the memo on city stationery, as I recall, and someone leaked a copy to me. I tried to publish the memo in the paper, but the editor got cold feet. That kind of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. Investigative reporting went out the window when chain-store newspapers an checkbook journalism came in. We all seem to be working for the same corporation these days.

I’m not sure who had the idea that the councilor with the most votes gets to be mayor. It isn’t in the original City Charter, but I like it. This ruling makes so much sense, you wonder how it ever passed.

Historian Ray Brighton told a great anecdote about a standoff election in 1960, before the highest vote-getter became mayor. Back then the city councilors selected the leader from among their own ranks. Attorney Robert Shaines and attorney John Wholey both wanted the gavel. With one councilor too ill to vote, Shaines and Wholey were deadlocked at four votes each. A Portsmouth Herald reporter suggested that the two lawyers flip a coin. The idea was a little too much like gambling for the halls of justice, so the council members retired to the basement of city hall. Shaines called "heads." The coin was flipped. It bounced off the knee of another city councilor and landed in the dirt heads up. Shaines won the toss, and Wholey followed him as mayor two years later.

Nice mayors, nice reporters – it’s all so "transparent" and squeaky clean these days. Modern politics is all about leverage, public relations and consensus. It used to be about power. You wouldn’t catch the Hon. Frank Jones (mayor 1868-69) knocking on doors for votes when he could just buy them for a mug of his famous ale. Jones’ opponents called his administration a "Rumocracy," but since he already owned most of the city, Jones moved on to become a NH congressman in Washington, DC.

Millionaire lawyer and real estate mogul Charles Dale parlayed his terms as mayor (1926-1927, 1943-44) into two terms as the governor of the Granite State (1945-1949). Then there was FW Hartford who managed to act as both the mayor (1921-22, 1928-32) and the publisher of The Portsmouth Herald at the same time. Not surprisingly, his administration was highly praised by the local newspaper.

Glad I wasn’t the investigative reporter back in those days. I might have been the journalist in the cement sneakers at the bottom of the Piscataqua. Writing about nice people is so much easier, cheaper -- and safer.

Copyright © 2007 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.