Sonny Perdue is flying.
The state Capitol spears the distance off his right wing. Stone Mountain scrolls past. It is morning, mid-December, overcast and Yankee-cold. The pilot, who is also the governor of the state below, is bound for east Georgia. A new prison, for which Perdue is attending the groundbreaking, is about to be hailed as a struggling small town’s “salvation.”
Climbing toward 9,000 feet, Perdue pats the plane’s yoke as the sun, a white diamond in a slate-shrouded sky, glints through the haze. An ashen curtain of gray, one that almost matches the cul-de-sac of silvery hair around Perdue’s scalp, soon drops away. The twin-engine Beechcraft peeks through the clouds and levels off.
It is the dawn of another Sonny day, and the governor of Georgia is on top of his world.
There are not many mornings left for Perdue as governor. He leaves office Jan. 10.
Before the sun sets on this day, the governor will confess that these end-of-term hours are not entirely pleasant. Perdue knows that soon, he, the boy from Bonaire, will go back to piloting his own affairs.
For now, though, on this morning a week and a half before Christmas, five days before his 64th birthday, the horizon stretches forever and he is soaring into it, embarking on what amounts to a farewell tour.
There are people to see, moments to savor, speeches to sit through, going-away gifts to open, thank-yous to extend and, yes, a Santa Claus to meet.
* * *
Sonny Perdue is digging.
His shovel is one of a dozen scooping soil in a field where, weeks before, sunflowers stood. “Used to hunt deer here,” a local says of what has become a construction site.
Perdue is here for the ceremonial groundbreaking of a private prison, one that will pump 200 jobs and an $8 million annual payroll into the east Georgia town of Millen. Unemployment has hit 20 percent here in the wake of a mobile-home-building-plant closure.
A little more than an hour earlier, Perdue had arrived and strode toward a big, white event tent. Just then, a woman bolted toward him with a stick-on name tag. She went to slap it on Perdue’s suit, but the governor, a quarterback and defensive safety when he played football at Warner Robins High in the early 1960s, intercepted it.
“Can I just hold on to that? If they don’t know me by now ...” he said as he trailed off into the tent, where a lawman standing sentry told him, “Mornin’, boss.”
Inside were maybe 200 folks, a shin-high stage of local power brokers and state officials, and a refreshment table as wide as the tent spanning the back wall with mounds of doughnut platters, coffee urns and orange juice.
When Perdue took the podium, he would say 200 jobs “may not make a blip in Atlanta, but that’s pretty big in Jenkins County.”
Then in a voice that flies below the radar of twang -- it is more deep-South CEO than country preacher -- Perdue doled out the atta-boys. He praised the white-haired champion of the prison-getting effort who, in her late 60s, chairs the local development authority. He said the area economy might be on the rise, but that now the telecommunications will surely take a hit “because Mabel Jenkins won’t be calling as much.”
Amid nearly an hour of pep talk and a Larry the Cable Guy “git ’er done!” from an old prison warden, it would be Perdue who, unscripted, would serve up the best line of the lot: “Things get done because people care.”
But then, it seems, he always has had that motivational touch. He once coaxed his cousin Larry onto the hood of a windshield-less Jeep. There were three men and two seats. It was freezing out, miserable, and at Sonny’s urging, Larry spread his arms and blocked the wind as they cruised down Ga. 96 to go hunting.
During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Perdue, 17 at the time, was harvesting watermelons with some pals on his family’s farm. The pals, most of them younger than Perdue, had watched the Olympic distance races and wondered how fast they could run a kilometer. One of Perdue’s old buddies, David Davidson, who went on to become a grocer and Houston County school board member, recalls, “We didn’t know what in the hell a kilometer was.”
Perdue told the boys “I do” and unleashed his plan: “What I’ll do is I’ll ride up the road a kilometer and stop. When I blow the horn, y’all start. The first one to the truck will win.”
“That sounded like a thing for us to do,” Davidson says.
So off Perdue drove in a blue Dodge pickup, down a dirt road toward Oaky Woods. A few minutes later, he honked and the race was on. The boys ran, walked and ran some more. By the time they reached the truck, Davidson in the lead, they were spent.
“I got home that night,” Davidson says, “and my daddy asked me why I was laying down. I said, ‘Daddy, I ran a kilometer today.’ He said, ‘You run a kilometer every day. What’s the big deal?’ Then he said for me to show him where I ran.”
Davidson’s father measured their run at nearly four miles -- more than six kilometers.
Davidson, 61, says the governor, having grown up in melon, soybean and peanut fields, can speak intelligently on agriculture issues, a subject politicians tend not to know “sheep dookie from apple butter” about.
The way Davidson tells it, some of the governor’s charisma no doubt finds its origins in Sonny’s father, George Ervin Perdue Jr.
“Mr. Ervin,” or Ernie, as many called him, died in 1998, a decade and a half after Perdue’s mother, Miss Ophie, died. In the late 1960s, as neighbors recall, Miss Ophie would sometimes halt traffic out on Ga. 96 in front of the Perdue homestead so her Sonny, returning home from the University of Georgia in a single-engine plane, could land and taxi into their driveway.
Late in his life, Perdue’s father was still selling melons. Davidson says Mr. Ervin was fond of telling pretty ladies, whom he would sometimes give the fruit to for free, that he’d “fertilized them with sugar just for you.”
One day outside Davidson’s Bonaire grocery store, Davidson stepped outside to pump gas for a woman. Mr. Ervin’s melon truck was parked nearby. The woman noticed the green beauties stacked high in the bed. She asked about buying one.
Davidson told her she might be in luck, that any woman who looked halfway decent could usually get one for free. Davidson saw Mr. Ervin headed back to his truck and informed him of a potential customer. “What’s she look like, boy?” Mr. Ervin hollered.
Then Mr. Ervin stepped up to the car, eyed the woman and kindly told her, “That’ll be $5.”
Before driving off melon-less, the woman huffed, “You ought to see me when I get ready to go to church.”
As his friend’s governorship draws to a close, Davidson wonders how Perdue will fit in back home.
“It’s not the same Sonny that left here. When Sonny lived here and was growing up here, he belonged to Bonaire. But Sonny belongs to the world now, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. That’s just the way it is. Folks like me and ... the others out here that grew up with him realize that. He’ll always be looked at differently,” Davidson says.
“It won’t change the way we feel about him, of course, but he’ll always be ‘the governor.’ ”
* * *
Sonny Perdue is done shoveling.
Having taken two scoops from the former sunflower field, he is ready to go. A luncheon in his honor at a tech school on Deepstep Road in Washington County awaits.
Other shovelers stream back to the tent for coffee. Perdue shakes a few hands and takes in a “how ya doin’, governor?” before an aide signals that it’s time to head for the airstrip.
Perdue is wearing a dark, window-pane suit, a white shirt and a lime tie speckled with tiny peaches. He also sports a pair of black, ostrich-skin Nocona boots.
A patch of just-shoveled, loose earth stands between him and the car. Everyone else has walked around the pile. Ever the farm boy, Perdue, saving himself a dozen or so steps, tramps straight through the dirt and is gone.
“If it had’ve been cow patties we’d been shoveling,” he says later, “I would’ve gone through there,” too.
* * *
Sonny Perdue is reading.
On his way from Kaolin Field Airport to Sandersville Technical College, the governor flips through prepared remarks. Puzzled, he turns to an aide in the back seat, unsure of a passage that begins, “Surprise! The media isn’t always that friendly.”
It’s a throw-away line that, as prepared remarks can be, rings flat on the page. The aide says, “I think it’s supposed to be a joke.”
To which Perdue replies, “I can be funnier than that.”
In an auditorium at the school, it soon becomes apparent that much of a governor’s job is anything but funny. It involves sitting on stages as speech after speech devolves from speech to public reading. Think dull church minus the choir.
A woman on stage thanks Perdue for his “vision and tenacity.”
Someone mentions how fine it’s been having “a Southern gentleman as a governor,” how Perdue’s recently unveiled official portrait, one that will forever hang in the state Capitol, is the first to feature a governor and his wife.
“The governor has truly been our friend,” someone else declares.
“This is a celebration of eight years of Governor Perdue,” pronounces another.
When his turn at the podium comes, Perdue says, “You all have said some very kind things today. I’ve been looking around to see who you were talking about.”
Later, in the lobby where Perdue will grab lunch -- mostly veggies, though nothing similar to his staple cabbage salad (“that stuff,” a staffer calls it) he has most days at the Capitol -- a woman with some dog pictures can’t resist showing them off. Her name tag identifies her as a “field representative” for U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson. The photos are of her 18-month-old beagle, McCoy, a pup that Perdue, a licensed veterinarian, neutered as part of a Humane Society campaign in Augusta last year.
“I don’t call him the governor,” the woman says. “I call him the Govern-arian. Arnold (Schwarzenegger) is the Governator, and, well, he’s the Govern-arian.”
Perdue hears none of this. Nor does he hear his pilot, the state-employed aviator charged with flying him -- when, that is, the governor himself isn’t at the controls.
“It’s been fun,” pilot Warren Watson says. “I’m gonna miss him.”
Watson recalls the first time he flew the Perdues, Sonny and first lady Mary, after the 2002 election. They were bound for Savannah. Watson planted a device under the governor’s seat. Nearby was a plastic box with a button on it. “What’s this?” Perdue asked. Watson told him it was the latest in audible warning technology. “Go ahead,” he told the governor, “press it.” So Perdue did, and from under his seat ripped a flatulent rumble. The governor’s reaction to the gag? “OK, game on.”
Watson, who also will serve as incoming Gov. Nathan Deal’s pilot, similarly welcomed the new governor, uncorking the gas-breaking gizmo on a flight a few weeks ago. Deal fell for it, too.
“You’ve gotta break ’em in right,” Watson says.
* * *
Sonny Perdue is talking.
On his cellphone.
A state trooper is driving him back to the airport. In 10 minutes, Perdue will be in the air, bound for Dublin.
“Hey, Kate,” he tells a woman who answers the phone back at his office, “it’s Sonny Perdue.”
Here he is, after eight years in office, still telling folks who probably hear his voice in their sleep who he is. An aide traveling with him says, “You know, he could probably just say, ‘Hey.’ ” But that wouldn’t be Sonny style. His unpretentious manner is something you just about have to be born Southern to fully appreciate.
As a boy, he found the Lord at Bonaire Baptist Church. He is said to have, at age 10 and in open church, told the preacher baptizing him, “I’ve been on the crooked road long enough.”
Something Perdue said more than three decades ago, when he and his brother-in-law opened Houston County’s first grain-liquidation outfit, hints at his own allure, his sense of the lay of the land, of small-town loyalty and the power of its broad currency.
In a 1977 Telegraph article telling how, thanks to his company, Houston farmers could now take their crops to market without hauling them to other counties, he said, “We’re hoping to appeal to the farmers’ provincialism.”
Perdue has -- if his election and re-election and the “Sonny Country” campaign signs that can still be found in his hometown are any proof -- tapped what you might call the good ol’ us network. Not that he is bereft of ego. He just seems more in his element empowering others, the quintessential players’ coach. Bobby Cox in boots.
Later this day, after finishing his business in Dublin, he will tell a reporter traveling with him how being governor really “was not a job that I aspired to.”
“But,” he will say, “it is one that I have absolutely embraced and enjoyed essentially every moment of.”
* * *
Sonny Perdue is drinking.
Diet Coke.
He is at the controls of the state plane, the Beechcraft King Air, sailing south-southwest. Halfway into the 10-minute hop from Sandersville to Dublin, he has asked for a drink. Someone in back of the plane hands it up to the cockpit.
The governor pulls out a packet of Georgia Peanuts and, peanuts in left hand, cola in right, proceeds to dump them into his Diet Coke and drink up.
A teetotaler’s delight.
* * *
Sonny Perdue is landing.
Then he is whisked to a OneGeorgia Authority meeting at the Heart of Georgia Technical College.
When the meeting starts, in an auditorium full of community leaders from around the state who are on hand for economic-incentive handouts, veteran lawmaker DuBose Porter stands up, microphone in hand, and salutes a solar-panel company the state has attracted. Porter, referencing his bald pate, says he and the governor have been using “solar panels for some time.”
More than an hour passes, and then it’s time for more than two dozen community delegations to have their pictures made with the governor and oversize, foam-board checks that, one at a time, spell out the industry-luring millions OneGeorgia is dispensing.
A man watching the photo procession and the governor in the middle of it, his reddish complexion beaming, says, “Reminds me of Santa Claus visits at the mall.”
“Just think,” a woman adds, “how many times he has had to smile for a picture since he’s been in office.”
* * *
Sonny Perdue is smiling.
Not for a posed picture.
For real this time.
He is unwrapping parting gifts: hand-crafted turkey calls, a heart-pine box.
“This gorgeous wood,” he says, eyeing the box, “this wonderful wood that represents the history of Georgia, that continues to give and to give.”
Then a man in a Santa suit sporting camo work gloves and tasseled loafers bursts into the auditorium. A hundred or so people are still nibbling cookies, crackers, cheese and fruit.
Earlier, Perdue had asked, “What are y’all celebrating here?”
“You,” a woman who organized the event had told him.
Now Santa has the floor. Cellphone in hand at a lectern, he is pretending to talk to Mrs. Claus.
“Yes, honey,” Santa says, “we’re here now. ... We did have a little heat updraft in Atlanta. ... No, they weren’t in session. ... And, honey, he may be the only governor I’ve ever known that’s gonna leave office leaner than he got here.”
He puts the phone away and says, “Governor, merry Christmas.”
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Perdue replies.
“And I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, too,” Santa says.
“I’ve been a good boy,” the governor says.
“I know you have. We’ve been watching you for the last eight years,” St. Nick says. “Now, I understand that they were just a few minutes ago giving you a turkey call or something like that. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, we know you’ve worked with some turkeys over your years,” Santa says. “It’s good to know you’re gonna get a chance to shoot some. ... But I brought you another gift. ... I know you’re an outdoorsman. ... This is a little gift so you can go over and shoot some quail over in Twiggs County at Chuck Leavell’s plantation. I want to give you some advice on it, and I’ve checked it to be sure, but I’ve been told that Mr. (Dick) Cheney will not be there.”
* * *
Sonny Perdue is reflecting.
It is going on 5 o’clock.
In the center of the emptying meeting hall, he pulls up a chair and explains how, in some ways, these are gloomy days for him.
“Oh, yeah, I’m sad,” he says. “Term limits have a purpose, and that’s probably good, because some of us may never leave. But the fact is, there is a sadness. I enjoy this job. And the quotes should be on ‘job,’ because I have taken it as a job, a full-time job, not a political position, not a title.”
He likens the state to an aircraft carrier with “so many levels, ... so many things going on” and how “getting it safely to its destination on its journey has been a wonderful experience ... being captain of that big ship, the state of Georgia.”
He says that he considers himself still “fairly politically naive.”
He says, “I’d rather be naive and idealistic and hope for the best and hope for the people to be persuaded by the facts of a policy and the persuasion of the right thing to do rather than for political purposes.”
He is asked if, in some small way, tiny Bonaire was his Plains.
“Bonaire is my Bonaire,” he says.
He says the best compliment for him would be if his hometowners were to say he returned unchanged, that he left as a product of their community and came back “not a stranger.”
“Ultimately,” he says, “people in elected office should strive to be one of who they are.”
* * *
Sonny Perdue is hitchhiking.
Not really. But, for an instant, he acts like he is.
His day is done, his work piloting the Peach State complete. At least until morning, when he’ll appear at the unveiling of a portrait of himself at Bonaire Elementary.
Locals seem to have grasped his place in their history. Among the likes of Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn and Carl Vinson, he rates as one the midstate’s most prominent political sons, a household name: Sonny.
As dusk approaches, eyes are still on him as he saunters across a parking lot toward a family friend’s pickup truck that will take him home to Houston County. Some of his closest staffers, a security man among them, watch from a black SUV, fretting as he leaves the nest. They will wait, trailing in the SUV, until he is inside the truck.
Finally, Perdue acknowledges them. He sticks out his thumb as they crawl past. He knows they are watching. His ride-thumbing gesture is his way of signaling that everything is copacetic, that on this evening, Sonny Perdue is back among his own.
To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
E-Mail
Print
Reprint|license
