STARKVILLE – When I learned Saturday night that state Sen. Jack Gordon’s brave battle with brain cancer was mercifully finished, my first thought was not of sadness but of raucous laughter.
My mind went back to a stiflingly warm evening in the early 1990s on the front porch of our Neshoba County Fair cabin with a large group of revelers. With me were my friend and business partner Gale Denley and his wife, Jo Ann, state Sen. Terry Jordan of Philadelphia, Gordon and a half-dozen others.
Earlier that day, Jordan had given the toughest, meanest speech I ever heard at Neshoba. It was harsh even by the fair’s old-school political oratory standards. Jordan stripped the bark from then-Lt. Gov. Eddie Briggs’ political hide in the famous “Nurse Dixie” speech.
Jordan used his fair speech to lambast Briggs on everything from accusations of embellishing his fair speech (“He’s got a basic character flaw in that when things do not go just exactly as he wants them, he just makes up whatever suits him. I thought if he’d had another two minutes yesterday, he’d have taken credit for founding the Neshoba County Fair,” Jordan thundered) to failing to support teacher pay raises, trying to close the Vet School at Mississippi State, vacillating on committee assignments and other perceived shortcomings.
Then there was Jordan’s reference in the speech to a Jackson party Briggs allegedly attended that Jordan claimed featured a female exotic dancer.
“He (Briggs) said he was a victim of circumstance,” Jordan said. “What he forgot to tell you was that he was the one who introduced ‘Nurse Dixie.’ You know, every time Pinnochio told a lie, his nose got longer and longer. Every time Eddie Briggs lets one slip, a hair falls from his head.” Briggs is about as bald as I am.
As I recall, the Jordan speech was predicated on a personal and political falling out between Jordan and Briggs over a Senate leadership appointment.
Gordon and Jordan were roommates in Jackson during the legislative session and kindred free spirits. Gordon spent that evening on the porch regaling us with the blow-by-blow on Jordan’s “Nurse Dixie” speech. Denley and I both laughed until we cried. It was a memory we later discussed during Denley’s last visit to the Fairgrounds in 2008.
Jack loved life, and he loved to laugh. He was a master storyteller and had a great memory for jokes. Jack’s reputation as a rascal was never quite as bad as advertised, but let’s say he was not above pushing the envelope.
But during the total 12 years he served as Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, there was no better friend to public education, mental health, highways and other programs he supported. Gordon battled governors and lieutenant governors hammer and tong to protect what he believed to be necessary spending, but he was also a realist about cutting spending when there were no other options.
The current Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, Doug Davis, R-Hernando, counted him a mentor. That’s good, because no one in state government knew more about where the little “pots of money” (as he called them) were hidden in the complex state budget than did Jack Gordon.
Gordon was a master of finding “one-time” money to prop up budgets even during the leanest of times. It was a “rob Peter to pay Paul” orchestration of state government finance that might not have been pretty, but it kept the wheels turning.
I liked that fact that if you didn’t want to know what Jack really thought about an issue, don’t ask him. A straight, frank answer was always forthcoming – even if that answer was at times to Jack’s political detriment.
• Sid Salter is journalist-in-residence at Mississippi State University. Contact him at ssalter@library.msstate.edu.
