JACKSON — Few, if any, Mississippi political leaders in the last quarter-century wielded more power and influence over the total realm of state government in Mississippi than the late former House Appropriations Committee Chairman Charlie Capps, D-Cleveland, who held the state’s purse strings as closely as he held his trademark cigar.
Capps, 84, died Friday at Bolivar Medical Center in Cleveland. He served a total of 24 years on the Appropriations Committee — eight years from 1980 to 1988 as vice chairman and 16 years from 1988 to 2004 as chairman.
It was my good fortune as a young reporter to gain the trust of Mr. Capps. He was a frequent and trusted source for more news stories and columns than I can count, and we developed a friendship. His ability to remember the most minute details of the state budget without notes was a source of constant amazement to me.
But it really shouldn’t have been. Whether the topic of conversation was state government or SEC football, Capps listened earnestly — as if life itself depended on what he heard and understood. It was an art he said he learned in the very early years of his political career.
The time is the mid-1960s. The place is a rural Bolivar County cornfield deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
A group of prisoners from the nearby Sunflower County jail are on the loose, and a lone deputy radios for backup when he thinks he spots the escapees hiding in a field of ripe, head-high corn surrounding an empty “shotgun” house.
Summoned by the anxious deputy, Capps, the high sheriff of Bolivar County, arrived at the scene accompanied by a friend with whom the first-term lawman had just attended a funeral. The sheriff was holding a loaded shotgun, and the scene was tense.
A third deputy — an older veteran armed with a Thompson machine gun — arrived at the cornfield. The sheriff announced, loudly enough to be heard two cornfields away: “Deputy, I want you to take that Thompson machine gun and give this corn a good spraying!”
Almost four decades later, Capps took a measured puff on his trademark stogie and recalled in a Delta drawl as deep and cool as a spring-fed water well: “From out of the corn, I heard a voice calling ‘Please don’t shoot, Sheriff, we’re coming out!’”
Capps would only serve one term as Bolivar County’s chief law enforcement officer, but he ranks today in the minds of many Mississippi political observers as the most powerful and effective legislator ever to serve in the Legislature.
Capps was a former president of the Delta Council. “That was a tremendous influence on my life and helped me better understand the need to work together for the greater good of the Delta region and the state as a whole,” he said.
Former House speaker pro tempore and longtime legislative colleague Robert Clark said of Capps in a 2002 interview: “Since Charlie has been in the Legislature, he’s fought for the Delta — not for white folk or black folk — but for the Delta. He’s an excellent steward of the people’s money and property and Mississippi’s lucky to have a man like him overseeing our state’s budget.”
Charlie Capps was a great man who truly looked after the state’s money. As Clark said, he had a strong sense of place and the Delta was his place. He loved the region and did all he could to make it better. I shared my last laugh with Mr. Capps earlier this year at an appropriate venue — the 2009 Delta Council meeting in Cleveland.
