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Wednesday, Jun. 10, 2009

Walker and his works will be missed

A Houston County man who at once made a great deal of political noise and did so with a rarely raised voice looks to be leaving the world of politics which has been his stage for so long. Larry Walker, vice chairman of the Georgia Board of Transportation and former Perry state representative, said last week that he would leave the DOT at the end of the month.

Some will wonder who cares. They would be the new arrivals to the county and those who don’t much care what state government does to them.

They won’t care that in the often callous and nasty world of Georgia politics, Walker was a gentleman who could be mad as the dickens but behave like he had some upbringing. For all of his long public life he was a comfortable and honest reflection of the good people he represented.

They will neither care nor remember that there likely wouldn’t be a Georgia National Fairgrounds (or a Georgia National Fair) in Perry were it not for Walker’s persuasive insistence that such a facility belonged nowhere if not smack in the middle of the state.

Not likely is it either that they will recall how much state and federal funding he has brought to the Museum of Aviation during its first 25 years or the magic he helped make before Frito-Lay could become a major player in this community.

There are others, of course, who will have regrets that Walker may no longer be watching out for them. This number will include the many who took umbrage a few months ago when it was learned that Walker, a sitting DOT board member, had never been advised of a major DOT project intended for his district. We despised the manner in which one of our own was so flagrantly “dissed.” And we perhaps wished that this time when he got “mad as the dickens,” he briefly lost his sense of composure.

But that’s not Larry Walker’s way and that’s one of the reasons he will be very hard to replace.

Contact David Cranshaw at dcranshaw@macon.com.