Posted on 06/03/2007 9:02:29 PM PDT by Baladas
Eunice Mixon of Tifton is the kind of Democrat even Republicans love. She’s not really a Democrat, though. As U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) pointed out, she represents the “South Georgia Party.”
“Politics,” said Miss Eunice, “is a way to decide who gets what, and I wanted my area to get as much of the ‘what’ as we could … and good government.”
To suggest that Miss Eunice is not really a Democrat is editorial exaggeration of the highest order. Maybe even outright lyin’.
“She’ll die a Democrat, but she’ll work with anybody,” clarified Boston City Councilman Mark Saunders. He is of the Georgia Bostons, not the Kennedy-Massachusetts Bostons. The occasion for the conversations was a ceremony at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, honoring the longest-serving member of the Georgia Student Finance Commission with a named scholarship, endowed initially at $50,000.
“This is like getting to heaven — all the people you want to see are here,” she declared, in looking out over the assembled crowd.
For some 30 years, dating to my days as a regional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, the farmer’s wife and schoolteacher has been a charming font of information about the mood and politics of the South Georgia Party. She knew people. She knew places. No greater authority existed in her area of South Georgia.
Her political involvement was a grandmother’s midlife blossoming. House Majority Leader George Busbee, unable to recruit a political name to manage his Tift County campaign for a 1974 gubernatorial race that he was expected to lose, turned to Eunice Mixon, a high school teacher active in education causes. He won, and she has served governors since with appointments that included the State Election Commission, the Georgia State Bar disciplinary board and, for 23 years, as a member of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, to which she was last appointed by Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue.
With her puffy blonde hair and parasol and the attentive Albert at her side, they were a distinctive pair at Democratic events. “On the farm, I wore a hat, but it squished my hair so when I went out in public, I took one [a parasol],” she said.
Bill Clinton once took her parasol, thinking it a gift for Hillary. The Southern belle allowed it, but then dispatched Sen. Max Cleland to get it back. He did.
It is no doubt ungentlemanly to reveal this publicly, but she did first. The blonde is from a bottle. Though Albert was 30, and Eunice 17 when they married — “well, at least one of you is grown,” said a tearful mother — Eunice started greying first. “I thought: ‘to heck with that.’ That’s the most undemocratic thing I could think of. I was turning grey, and he was not.” The initial effort produced reddish blonde hair, which Albert liked, so she kept it, though it is now blonde blonde.
She credits Albert with pushing her off to college, first at ABAC and later at Norman Park College and Valdosta State. She also got a master’s from UGA. “My parents were so protective; it’s a wonder I had the confidence to say boo to a goose,” she said. When she expressed to Albert a desire to go to college after the birth of their two sons, Johnny and Jimmy, he declared: “There’s no better time than now, girl.” So off she went.
Miss Eunice was a grandmother by the time Busbee recruited her into politics. Just as the farmer’s wife feeds the field hands, her dinner table became a boardinghouse array of the connected and influential, with as many as 105 guests at one time.
Despite her honors and her notable dinner-table guests, it is Albert, the farm, Tift County and South Georgia that dominate the stories of her life. Albert first.
“That man I worked in the sun and sweated for would never have left the farm except to go to church or to town. But you saw him many times put on a tuxedo and go places that he would never have gone because that was something I wanted to do,” she said.
Albert, who died in 1998, took up golf and attempted to teach it to Miss Eunice. “I wasn’t good at it. You couldn’t play 9 holes before the sun came up, … and I said ‘to heck with this.’
“If I am going to be in the sun, it ought to be hoeing peanuts, chopping cotton or suckering tobacco, or doing something that does some good, not just standing out there getting hot for nothing,’” she said.
She never stood in the in the sun “getting hot for nothing.” She had her parasol and her purpose.
She sure seems like down-home folk.
And just who does Chambliss represent?
“Politics,” said Miss Eunice, “is a way to decide who gets what, and I wanted my area to get as much of the ‘what’ as we could ...”
Exactly the problem.
Exactly. This is White Trash in a nutshell.
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