I knew Ross Perot and he knew me.
Not deeply. I wouldn't say we were friends. That would be pretentious on my part. But we had a common interest: Texarkana.
We had lunch a few times and he dropped by the Gazette on occasion-almost always unannounced.
Mostly I would call myself a resource. I had access to bound files of the Gazette and our microfilm collection. I knew a little bit about what was going on here.
He would call up looking for some obscure bit of information from his childhood. I would help him find it.
Others in our front office helped him find artifacts from his childhood: A bicycle, a desk, a newspaper bag like the one he used to carry.
Once he called me and wanted to know what it cost to go to the movies in a certain year. He also wanted to know when the Paramount Theater got air conditioning.
I don't know why he wanted to know these and other tidbits. But I do know he was a stickler for accuracy. If he was going to share a memory, in a speech for example, he wanted to make sure his memory was accurate. I got to be his fact checker from time to time.
We talked about the Highland Park neighborhood once. He grew up there and I live there now, several blocks from his boyhood home. Once he asked me about a driveway at a certain house where he remembered a group of neighborhood kids scratching their names in the wet cement.
I had never heard of this but went looking for it, thinking how cool it would be to find his name carved indelibly into the neighborhood groundscape. Alas, the old driveway had been torn out and replaced. There was no permanent marker-at least none that I could find.
My most interesting time orbiting on the outer fringes of the Perot universe was during his first presidential campaign in 1992.
Because Perot popped onto the political scene unannounced and without a typical resumé, his candidacy brought a lot of attention to Texarkana from the national and international press who were trying to figure him out and discover what mysteries might be lurking in his past. Everybody knew he was rich, but what else? He had never run for office before.
At one point in June he had better poll numbers than both the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, and the Democratic challenger Bill Clinton.
I spent the first half of that year giving tours to visiting media from the U.S. and abroad. I had a checklist of important points, places and people here to interview who knew Perot when he was growing up here. Josh Morriss Jr. and Mitchell Young topped this list.
I did several interviews for international publications-though I had no firsthand knowledge-and saw my quotes printed in languages I couldn't even read. I hope they got them right.
The late Wilbur Smith, a long time banker, Texarkana ambassador, historian and friend, was another local connection these journalists sought out. Smith, a Perot contemporary, was a lot like him, small, feisty, charming. But he was hardly the stereotypical image of a Texan.
But these visiting journalists needed a backdrop to background Perot's childhood, so they would set Smith up as representative of all of us here. One film crew bought steaks and had Smith cooking them in the hottest part of the day-something, at his age, he would never have done. When the image doesn't fit, then fix the image, I guess.
Smith was a good sport. Pretty much everybody in town was. It was a fun summer while it lasted.
I even had an appointment with a Newsweek magazine reporter. We were to meet at the Gazette presses late one night so we could do an interview and get some photos of it running. Later, I believe, this reporter had arranged to meet with some of Perot's old childhood friends to show him around his old newspaper route and the neighborhood.
It never happened. A day before it was scheduled, Perot announced he was leaving the race. The reporter canceled and I had my night back.
Things slowed down after that. But between his February announcement on Larry King Live and his step-back on July 16, it was a busy time for me.
Perot, of course, got back into the race in October, having qualified on all 50 state ballots. He did not win but he ran the most successful third-party campaign since a Roosevelt named Teddy tried a "Bull Moose" comeback as an independent 80 years earlier.
Perot ran again in 1996, but the thrill was gone.
Perot was fond of his hometown and came back many times after he left the political arena. He happened to be here once when the C-SPAN bus was in town and then popped into nearby City Bakery when it was still open
downtown.
These little interactions seemed just as important to him as the big ones he is known for.
Because my dealings with him were never scripted and almost always unexpected, they always made me smile.
Deep in my state of adulthood, I still got a little giddy when I got a call from the billionaire.
I suspect my response was similar to the feelings he had when he came back to his town and had a chance to poke around, visit old friends and old haunts.
Texarkana couldn't have asked for a better son to carry its banner.