Mecum on making political history

GAINESVILLE - He was an outsider running against a native son and, of all things, he was a Republican. But, when all the votes had been counted following the General Election 26 years ago, Dick Mecum had become the first Republican ever elected to office in Hall County.

Mecum, who was teaching at a nearby police academy at the time, was from Colorado and had lived in Hall County only two years and says it was his wife, Judy, who talked him into running for sheriff.

"She kept saying 'why don't you run for sheriff?'," Mecum recalled in a recent interview. "I didn't have any desire to be sheriff, I had no political ambitions, and, besides, I was making more money than the sheriff made, at that time."

He also knew that Republicans in Hall County and the rest of the South at point in history were few and far in between but he knew that he would not run as a Democrat. Mecum was no Johnny-come-lately Republican, no Democrat-turned-Republican. He says his GOP leanings were formed early in life.

"My mom worked for an attorney who decided to run for...judge as a Republican," he said. "His son was my best friend."

Mecum finally decided to give it a shot but "the first people I talked to were really not that encouraging."

One of them was Ted Oglesby. Oglesby is now a retired, longtime Gainesville newspaperman, who was very active in the Republican Party when, as the saying goes, the Republicans in Gainesville would hold their meetings in a phone booth.

"(Ted) just looked at me and said 'you don't have a chance.' My boss at the time tried to talk me out of it - reminding me that no Republican had ever been elected to office in Hall County. But he was probably trying to talk me out of it so I would stay on the job," Mecum said with a chuckle.

But Mecum plowed ahead anyway. "Something was there that said 'go ahead'."

And, he proved all those skeptics wrong, defeating the Democratic nominee, a native son state law enforcement officer, Ron Angel of Flowery Branch, who began his career with the sheriff's department. Mecum said he feels he won against all those odds because of a more visible campaign.

"Especially during the summer, I could start knocking on doors at 5:30 in the afternoon and still had three or four hours of daylight left and I was not seeing Ron around town."

Mecum says he was reminded over and over during the campaign, by people on the street and those in positions of power, that history was against him. In fact, he says that on the day after the Democratic Primary runoff for sheriff, he hit the campaign trail again, only have people question what he was doing.

"They would say 'sheriff? but that election was yesterday and Ron Angel won.'" For a while he found himself acting as an educator as well as running for sheriff - trying to teach people about the General Election, telling them that it wouldn't be until November when the final election was held.

"So, I just pushed forward with it not really understanding and knowing what I was doing or how I was doing it or whether I was doing it right."

But he must have done something right: he won with 60 percent of the vote.

Mecum says his greatest asset was probably his wife. "Judy was probably related to about 40-50% of the county."

Mecum stayed in office eight years and left voluntarily, having, he said, accomplished his goal of turning the sheriff's department in to a professional law enforcement agency. He then went into the private security business, ran an unsuccessful campaign for State Representative, and served as chairman of the Hall County Republican Party.

Of the part he played in getting the GOP off the ground in Hall County, he says "we began to find people and try to get a full slate of individuals to run for every office we could think of."

And, the rest, as they say, is history.

Soon, there were two Republicans on the county school board and it wasn't long before Republicans soon began winning seats on the county commission and in the local state Legislative delegation. Republicans were elected a number of other offices as well, or the Democratic incumbents switched parties. Bob Vass, a Democrat, succeeded Mecum as sheriff and served twelve years before stepping down. He like Mecum tried and failed in a bid to win a seat in the state Legislature. Vass was succeed as sheriff by a Republican, Steve Cronic, who is in the midst of his second term, and now virtually every elected office in the county is held by a Republican.

What does the man who became the first Republican ever to hold elected office in Gainesville think about politics in this country today?

"Too divisive," he said at the conclusion of the interview, which was conducted before last Tuesday's elections. "The country is too polarized. We need to start acting civil toward each other, respect each other's positions."

Mecum is now in charge of the U.S. Marshals Service for the Northern District of Georgia, a position to which he was appointed several years ago by President Bush. He and Judy still live in Gainesville.