Jerry Huckaby

Jerry Huckaby
Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 5th district
In office 1977–1993
Preceded by	Otto Ernest Passman
Succeeded by	James Otis "Jim" McCrery, III
Personal details
Born	July 19, 1941 (1941-07-19) (age 70) Hodge, Jackson Parish Louisiana, USA
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	(1) Suzanna Woodard "Sue" Huckaby (married 1962-2008, her death) (2) Marie Hammon Huckaby (married 2010)
Children	Michelle Huckaby Lewis Thomas Clay Huckaby (1975-2002)
Occupation	Businessman
Religion	United Methodist

Thomas Jerald Huckaby, usually known as Jerry Huckaby (born July 19, 1941), is a retired businessman who served as a Democratic U.S. representative from the northeastern portion of the U.S. state of Louisiana between 1977 and 1993. He lost his position as an indirect result of congressional reapportionment in 1992, when Louisiana forfeited one of its eight seats in the United States House of Representatives because the state grew in population at less than the national average during the 1980s.

Early years

Huckaby was born in Hodge in Jackson Parish to Thomas Milton Huckaby (1907–1973) and the former Eva Butler (1911–1990).^[1] Huckaby is descended on both sides from original Bienville Parish families. In the 1840s, two brothers, Green and James Huckaby, settled in the community of Sparta, between the village of Bienville and Ringgold. Sparta was the seat of Bienville Parish from its founding in 1848 until 1893, when the courthouse was relocated to the larger Arcadia located off Interstate 20. Nothing remains of Sparta except for two nearby cemeteries. Green Huckaby's son was John Tom Huckaby, and his son, William Huckaby, was the paternal grandfather of Jerry Huckaby. These Huckabys are interred at Old Sparta Cemetery.

In 1942, the Huckabys moved to Minden in Webster Parish when Jerry was six months old. His father operated real estate and insurance businesses, and the Huckabys resided in an upper-middle class house at 1104 Victory Drive. Huckaby graduated fifth in his class in 1959 from Minden High School. He played on the basketball team, performed in the band, was elected to the student council, and edited the school newspaper. He then studied electrical engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, from which in 1963 he received the Bachelor of Science degree. He was student body president of the college of engineering and a member of Kappa Alpha fraternity. Five years later, he obtained an Master of Business Administration from Georgia State University in Atlanta. He was a management executive for Western Electric Company in Chicago from 1963-1973. He returned from Illinois to Louisiana to become a dairy farmer at his former Hallmark Farms in Ringgold.

Unseating Otto Passman

In 1976, Huckaby was elected to Congress from the Monroe-based Fifth Congressional District. First, he unseated incumbent Otto Ernest Passman in a hard-fought Democratic primary held on August 14. Huckaby received 45,589 votes (52.7 percent) to Passman's 40,888 (47.3 percent). Passman, a 30-year conservative lawmaker was a native of Franklinton in south Louisiana and a long-term Monroe resident. Passman had been a supporter of the Vietnam War. A World War II Navy lieutenant, Passman was particularly known for his support of veterans causes and his fervent opposition to most foreign aid programs.

However, Passman was under an ethical cloud. He was engulfed in a bribery, conspiracy, fraud, and influence peddling scandal involving his acceptance of $213,000 from the South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park (born 1935). Passman had not, however, been indicted of anything at the time of the primary. The indictments came two years later, but he was acquitted in a high-profile trial in 1979 in which he retained the services of high-powered Alexandria attorney and gubernatorial advisor Camille Francis Gravel, Jr.

Defeating Frank Spooner

Huckaby then faced a determined Republican challenge from Frank Spooner, a conservative Monroe oilman who had been his state's GOP national committeeman. Spooner was the first Republican even to contest the Fifth District seat since 1900, when Henry E. Hardtner polled 628 votes (9.2 percent) against the Democrat Joseph E. Ransdell of East Carroll Parish, who was elected with 6,172 votes (90.8 percent). Ransdell later served in the United States Senate.

Spooner (born 1937) hoped to assemble a winning coalition based on a strong showing in Ouachita and Lincoln parishes, along with Morehouse, Richland, Natchitoches, and Winn parishes. Former Texas Governor John B. Connally came to Natchitoches and Monroe to speak for Spooner and the Ford-Dole ticket. Former California Governor Ronald W. Reagan, Ford's unsuccessful opponent in the 1976 primaries, appeared in Monroe at a fundraiser on Spooner's behalf. After his failure to gain renomination, Passman never again spoke to Huckaby and "threatened" to endorse Spooner as his successor but never did so.

Huckaby won the exchange, helped in part by the popularity of Jimmy Carter in Louisiana and throughout the South. Huckaby received 83,696 votes (52.5 percent) to Spooner's 75,574 ballots (47.5 percent). Spooner outpolled Passman's primary showing by 0.2 percent. In a much higher general election turnout, Spooner received some 35,000 more votes than Passman had netted in the primary. Spooner polled 59 percent in Ouachita Parish and also won in Lincoln, Morehouse, Union, and Richland, but his strength was insufficient to overcome hefty Democratic margins in rural districts stretching from Huckaby's Ringgold on the west to Vidalia on the east and the most northern precincts of Rapides Parish on the south.

The 1976 congressional elections were the last in Louisiana under the longstanding closed primary system. Starting in 1978, when Huckaby was reelected, congressional elections went to the nonpartisan blanket primary (or jungle primary), which had already begun for state elections in November 1975. The jungle primary proved beneficial for the popular Huckaby, who was re-elected seven times over the next fourteen years, often with landslides of more than 80 percent. He ran only once in each of those elections against a combined field of mostly other Democrats.

In 1978, Huckaby polled some 57 percent of the vote over several Democratic rivals, including then Louisiana State Senator James H. "Jim" Brown, then of Ferriday in Concordia Parish. The next year, Brown was elected Louisiana secretary of state, when incumbent Paul J. Hardy ran unsuccessfully for governor. Perennial candidate L.D. Knox of Winnsboro opposed Huckaby in 1978, 1980, 1982, 1990, and 1992. He even changed his legal name to "None of the Above Knox" to support his call for the "None of the Above" option being offered on ballots to enhance voter choice.^[2]

In 2008, Louisiana returned to closed primaries for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate but retains the jungle primary format for state and local elections.

Huckaby on Agriculture Committee

For ten years, Huckaby was chairman of the subcommittee on cotton, rice and sugar. His marketing loan legislation was credited with bringing American agriculture out of a major recession during the early 1980s. His controversial legislation defining elgibility for farm payments and limiting the amount of the payments a farmer could receive withstood the test of time and was still in effect twenty years after it was enacted.

Huckaby was a key defender of the sugar industry in the 1990 debate over the farm bill. Louisiana is a major sugar cane state, with some 750 farms that produce hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar. He was even called "Mr. Sugar" in the House. In his last campaign for Congress, Huckaby collected more than $50,000 from sugar interests. "I was in the race of my life, and I went out everywhere soliciting funds," Huckaby recalled. Huckaby said that raising money from Political Action Committees is a necessary evil. "It would be nice if the PAC system didn't exist. It is the most distasteful thing in politics," he said.

Huckaby on Budget Committee

In 1989, Huckaby was the Boll Weevils' choice for a seat informally designated for a Southern Democrat on the House Budget Committee. Huckaby did not shy from highly technical issues, was not afraid to work out compromises, and could serve as a bridge to lawmakers in both parties. The Budget Committee assignment came during his last two terms in Congress.

Huckaby on Interior Committee

Huckaby introduced House-passed legislation in 1988 to require commercial nuclear plants, during any unusual event, to transmit electronically data on pressure, temperature, and water levels to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., so that its experts may monitor and advise on the situation. The national monitoring center has prevented other "Three Mile Island" threats.

Huckaby's seat on the Interior Committee enabled him to secure legislation through the years that created the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge, the Upper Darbonne National Wildlife Refuge, the Poverty Point National Monument, the Saline Bayou Wild and Scenic River, and the Kisatchie Hills Wilderness, all in his congressional district.

A casualty of reapportionment, 1992

Louisiana lost a district as a result of the 1990 United States Census. The Justice Department issued a directive requiring Louisiana to create a second African-American district. The legislature responded by creating a new Fourth District, which received most of the black voters in Huckaby's former district. Huckaby's revised district absorbed a large portion of the former Shreveport-based Fourth District, represented by Republican Representative Jim McCrery, who retired from Congress in January 2009.

Although the new Fifth District was geographically more Huckaby's district, its demographics heavily favored McCrery. The new district was considerably more urban than its predecessor; due to the presence of Shreveport, 60 percent of the registered voters in the revised district had been represented by McCrery. In addition, the minority population was reduced from 30 percent to less than 5 percent. Thus, despite Huckaby's geographic advantage, the district was Republican-leaning, and McCrery was the favorite in an otherwise Democratic year nationally. Huckaby had the option of retiring and keeping $250,000 in campaign funds, as 1992 was the last year that members of Congress could retire and keep surplus campaign funds for personal use. However, Huckaby chose to stay in the race despite the odds.

McCrery won in a rout, taking 153,501 votes (63 percent) to 90,079 for Huckaby (37 percent). Huckaby carried only a few small parishes.

Huckaby in Virginia

In December 1962, Huckaby married the former Suzanna "Sue" Woodard (October 12, 1943—September 9, 2008), the daughter of farmer Ernest Scott "Scotty" Woodard (born 1921) and the former Molly Covey (1923–1987), originally from Gentry in Benton County in the northwestern corner of Arkansas. Sue died after a four-year fight with colon cancer. She had a brother, Scott Woodard of Sherman, Texas, and a sister, Stephanie Woodard of Ringgold.

Jerry and Sue Huckaby did not return to Louisiana after his congressional defeat. Instead Huckaby became a lobbyist but left after two months. "I was never comfortable sitting on the other side of the table," he said. "I wasn't comfortable asking members like (former U.S. Senator) John Breaux to see such and such a person or (former U.S. Representative) Bob Livingston to go to such and such a reception."

Huckaby instead became president of his wife's residential real estate business in McLean, Virginia. Nationally, Mrs. Huckaby was ranked No. 10 of more than two million Realtors in the United States in sales. For many years, she was the leading Realtor in northern Virginia. In her 30-year career, which began when he became a congressman, Mrs. Huckaby sold more than one thousand homes valued in excess of a billion dollars. Mrs. Huckaby graduated from Ringgold High School in 1961 and attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She graduated with a degree in human ecology from Louisiana Tech in Ruston, where the Sue Woodard Huckaby Endowed Professorship honors her memory. At the time of her death, the Huckabys lived in Great Falls in Fairfax County, Virginia. They had been active members of Trinity United Methodist Church in McLean for some three decades.^[3]

The Huckabys' daughter, Michelle Huckaby Lewis (born 1967 in Atlanta, Georgia), and their son-in-law, Todd Lewis, are physicians of Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, where Todd had a cardiology fellowship at the Penn State University Hospital. Both have undergraduate degrees from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and medical degrees from Tulane University in New Orleans. Both were previously on the staff of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Michelle also has a law degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her specialty centers upon legal issues involving genetic testing of newly-born babies. The Lewises have two sons, Carter (born 2002) and Spencer (born 2005).

The Huckabys also had a son, Thomas Clay Huckaby (January 2, 1975 - June 1, 2002), who was born in Ringgold while his father operated the dairy farm and his mother taught school. Mrs. Huckaby's funeral services were held on September 14, 2008, at the First United Methodist Church of Ringgold. Interment was at the family plot at Providence Cemetery in Ringgold.^[3]

In April 2010, Huckaby married the former Marie Hammon, a retired English professor at Louisiana Tech University and the widow of a former Ruston police chief. The couple resides in Choudrant in Lincoln Parish.

References

1. ^ After Thomas's death, Eva Huckaby was briefly married to Cecil C. Toland (1905-1976), a Minden businessman and a former member of the Minden City Council.
2. ^ "Index to Politicians: Knox". The Political Graveyard. http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/knox.html. Retrieved June 6, 2009. 
3. ^ ^{a b} http://www.legacy.com/shreveporttimes/Obituaries.asp?Page=Lifestory&PersonId=117310985

• http://mindenmemories.com/The%20Grig%201956-59.htm
• http://www.sos.louisiana.gov:8090/cgibin/?rqstyp=elcmp&rqsdta=11039214511053
• http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=H000901
• http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/hubbeel-hudnut.html
• http://www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar03.html
• http://www.fairelections.us/print_article.php?id=226&print=1

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by Otto Ernest Passman (D)	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 5th congressional district 1977–1993	Succeeded by James O. McCrery, III (R)

Persondata
Name	Huckaby, Jerry
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	July 19, 1941
Place of birth	Hodge, Jackson Parish Louisiana, USA
Date of death
Place of death