Whatever's Fair

The Political Autobiography of Ohio House Speaker Vern Riffe

Vernal Riffe, Jr.

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612779843
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The autobiography of a legendary Ohio politician and legislator

"The politics that Vern describes—when candidates depended on shaking hands, speaking at every conceivable dinner, passing out literature at the county fair (or fairs, if you were running statewide), and when office-holders worked across the political aisle to get things done for their constituents—belong to a bygone era. This book is an extraordinary window on more than thirty years of Ohio political history and a celebration of a man who loved his work and did it better than perhaps any other member of the Ohio House in our state's history."
— Richard Celeste, governor of Ohio, 1983–91.

For many Ohioans, Vern Riffe is a household name. His thirty-six years of service earned him his legendary status, and he still is described as the most talented legislator in Ohio's political history.

Riffe came to Columbus in 1958 from the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio. He became Speaker in 1975, a position he held for a state record of twenty years. He flourished in this role, during which time no law passed in Ohio without his blessing.

Known for being a pragmatic problem solver and for putting Ohio's interests ahead of regionalism and politics, Riffe counted among his major accomplishments his making the General Assembly a coequal of the executive branch, believing Ohioans expected the General Assembly to be an equal partner with the governor in controlling the state. He also played an important role in the rise of black Democratic legislators in the Statehouse, due to a strong partnership with Rep. C. J. McLin, a Democrat from Dayton. He fought hard to develop his native, impoverished southeast Ohio, which led to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, the uranium enrichment facility in Piketon, and Shawnee State University.

Riffe's popularity led people to speculate about a possible bid for governor, but he was a realist: he knew he was most effective working behind the scenes, and he was unsure of how voters in ethnic northeast Ohio would respond to his unfamiliar name and southern Ohio manner.

This honest and revealing autobiography will be welcome by anyone interested in Ohio and its rich political history.

1

Homegrown Politics and
Other Early Lessons

You can be anything that you want to be in this country. I’m living proof of that. Even a hillbilly from southern Ohio can rise to the top and make a difference. When you get right down to it, success in politics and public service is about working with people, and you don’t learn that from a textbook. It all begins in the family. That’s where the die is cast.

My mother and dad came out of Kentucky. Both were raised on family farms just after the turn of the century in an era when farmers helped one another. They might work a week of plowing or pulling corn, and then they’d go to another farm the next week and work there. Everybody looked after each other. The times were different. They were hard times, but families were closer and people looked after one another.

Dad was born on September 21, 1900, right across the Ohio River from New Boston in Greenup County. His family later moved due west a little to Vanceburg. The first twenty years or so of his life were spent on the farm raising corn and tobacco for income. They also grew a garden for their personal use and had a butchery. The Riffes weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor either.

There were nine children in his family—five boys and four girls. Dad was the second oldest son, and he worked hard, a lot of it by hand or with horse-drawn plows and wagons.

Mother was born Jewell Emma Adkins on November 15, 1901, and raised on her family’s farm in Sandy Hook, about seventy-five miles south of where Dad grew up. She was the oldest of six children—three boys and three girls. Her father died in the great flu epidemic of 1918 when she was only sixteen. It was the worst epidemic this country ever had. More than half a million people died.

Mother didn’t have it easy growing up because as the oldest child, she was really the head of the family too. I’ve often thought that’s where she got her independence. She was forced to grow up in a hurry and make the kind of decisions that a father would otherwise make.

When Mother moved to the Portsmouth area in 1922, she worked at Williams Manufacturing Company, a shoe factory. And after I was born, even after my sister and I were out of school, Mother continued to work. She was a dietitian at the hospital in Portsmouth and didn’t retire from work until she was in her sixties. Today, it might not be unusual, but it wasn’t nearly as common in Mother’s day.

Dad and Mother left Kentucky in 1918 and moved to New Boston, which was surrounded on three sides by Portsmouth and by the Ohio River on the remaining side. The New Boston-Portsmouth area was where the jobs were in those parts. Unless you wanted to stay on the farm, you had to leave. I’d say 50 percent of the people in New Boston came out of Kentucky, maybe more.

At one time, Portsmouth was the shoe hub of the nation. It had more shoe factories and made more shoes than anywhere else. At the time the Depression hit, Selby Shoe Company was making nearly ten thousand pairs of shoes a day! The Norfolk & Western Railroad had its western terminal in Portsmouth, making it one of the largest yards in the country. That’s where Dad had his first job in Ohio. Add to that the Detroit steel mill in New Boston, which had more than four thousand employees, and all the brickyards around, and ours was a booming area. There was a period after World War II when things slowed down some, but Portsmouth really didn’t experience real hardship until the 1970s, when employment at the mill dropped to just a few hundred. The general state of the economy and foreign competition combined to hit our area very hard.

When Mother and Dad first met in 1923, he was a car inspector for the N&W Railroad and she was still at the shoe factory. They had gone separately to a big amusement park in New Boston called Millbrook. They made a striking couple. Dad was over six feet tall and, I’ve been told, was one heck of a handsome young man with personality plus. Even decades later, as mayor of New Boston, he would come into the office and some of those women would fall all over themselves.

Mother was a beautiful people person, inside and out, and something must have clicked because they were married the next year on June 28, 1924. On June 26, 1925, almost one year to the day later, I was born in our two-story shotgun house at 4236 Oak Street in New Boston. (They called them shotguns because you could look through the front door and see straight out the back of the house as if you were looking down the barrel of a gun.) And eleven months later my sister, Ilene, was born and that was it; Mother and Dad didn’t have any more children. We moved to Spruce and Cedar streets nearby, and that’s where I spent most of my childhood. I guess the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree because I lived within three or four blocks of the area most of my life.

There was always politics around our household. You could even say I got involved in politics from the day I was born. My middle name is “Goebel,” just like Dad, my son, and one of my grandsons. It comes from William Goebel, a Democrat who was assassinated in January 1900 after running for governor of Kentucky the preceding November. It was an extremely close race, and the results were disputed. Finally the state elections board declared Goebel the winner; he was sworn in and died within the hour. Dad was born September 21, 1900, and it was my grandfather who wanted to name him after Goebel.

New Boston was a good place to grow up. It was small compared to Portsmouth. In fact, New Boston didn’t even become a city until 1940, when its population reached five thousand. Just about all Mother’s family was there; two or three on Dad’s side lived in New Boston and the rest lived outside of Garrison, Kentucky, about an hour away. Sunday supper at our house was like a family reunion. We gathered to discuss family matters and politics.

Most of the people in New Boston worked at the factories, making it a blue-collar town. People worked hard, they played hard, they went to church, and they looked out for each other. That’s the way I was raised. I believe much of a person’s character is set early in life, so I’m glad I was raised in that atmosphere.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of the Depression. We were luckier than most because during those years, Dad worked for New Boston and, as an employee of the city, he made a steady salary and a darn good one too, of $25 to $30 a month, sometimes in “scrip” instead of a check. (Scrip was a kind of credit stores would accept until they got their money.)

When the Depression hit, hardly anybody was working. Our area was particularly hard-hit because we were so dependent on industry for jobs. Everything was down, including the steel mill. There was no unemployment compensation. Nothing. If you earned ten dollars a month it was a big deal because you could buy a loaf of bread for three cents. People were so desperate; they went out and worked on farms for fifty cents a day.

Mother and Dad helped a lot of people who were less fortunate. They were a great pair. If a neighbor needed something, Mother made sure they got it, whether it was clothes, food, or anything else. If we didn’t have what was needed, Mother somehow found it.

I remember Dad going around to the bakeries in New Boston. He would buy day-old or two-day-old bread and drop off loaves for people who didn’t have any. Sometimes those people wouldn’t even know where it came from. It didn’t matter who they were, Dad would treat everyone fairly, honestly, and with respect. I was too young to realize it at the time, but those were the most important lessons I would learn in my lifetime—lessons that would be repeated over and over during my childhood.

Helping people was something Dad loved to do, and public service gave him a way to do it and make a living. He also loved politics. Dad’s first public service job was on the New Boston Police Department. I couldn’t have been but four or five years old at the time, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. Sometimes I’d take his handcuffs and handcuff my friends to the porch rail. Other times I’d disappear so my mother couldn’t find me; then Dad would come looking and take me home on his police motorcycle. One of my proudest possessions is a painting of Dad in uniform on his motorcycle wearing his knee-high boots, pistol strapped to his side, and a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek. Little boys always look up to policemen, so I was especially proud that Dad was an officer.

Dad’s job ended when a Republican mayor was elected. Dad wasn’t the kind to let things happen to him; he was a doer. He’d been on the force for three years, but rather than wait until the first of the year to get fired, he turned in his badge and his gun the day after the election.

About a month later he went to work as a watchman at the steel mill and stayed there until the mid-1930s, when Martin L. Davey was elected governor. Dad, being a strong Democrat, got a job as a “dry officer,” which today is what we call a liquor agent. Even though Prohibition was over, a lot of people got used to making moonshine and other illegal booze. Dad would dress in old clothes and hunt out stills or buy illegal liquor in order to make arrests. It was dangerous business, and he always carried a pistol and kept a shotgun in his car.

By 1940 Dad was back in public service as New Boston’s safety and service director. He had worked hard to elect Mayor Ted Stratton, and it was on that basis that he got the appointment. For nearly eight years, he was in charge of the police and fire departments as well as the service department. Then in 1947, Dad was elected mayor of New Boston after Mayor Stratton had resigned to become county commissioner. Dad served as mayor until 1971, making him the longest serving mayor in Ohio at that time.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons from my dad, but one of the most important was that you can be dedicated to your career and dedicated to your family at the same time. In other words, you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other, not that there aren’t some sacrifices involved. Too many people do that today, and I think it is one reason our society is in such bad shape. Even though Dad’s responsibilities put heavy demands on his time, I always felt we had a tremendous relationship, the same kind I’ve tried to establish with my children.

When I was fifteen, the Detroit Tigers were playing the Cincinnati Reds in the 1940 World Series and Dad was going to the opening game. I wanted to go to the game more than anything, but he didn’t have any more tickets.

“If that’s the way it is, when I get to be twenty-one I’m going to vote a straight Republican ticket.” I wasn’t joking. Man, I was hot.

Dad felt bad about it, and I’m sure he didn’t enjoy the game like he could have because he knew how much I wanted to be there. About 11 P.M. that night, I was in bed when Dad woke me up. He said, “Son, I want to send a note with you to school tomorrow to see if I can get you excused. I’ve arranged for John Counts to take you to tomorrow’s game.”

I couldn’t believe it. I was tickled to death. John Counts owned a bakery in New Boston, and he was a strong Republican. Even so, Mr. Counts and Dad were good friends, because Dad was never one to let politics interfere with friendships. If he liked somebody, he was a friend; it didn’t mean they couldn’t disagree on political matters. I don’t know if that’s something I learned or whether it’s just the difference in the times, but I always had a lot of Republican friends too.

Bucky Walters was pitching the second game of the series, and he won for the Reds, 5–3. Crosley Field was a small ballpark, so you could get close to the game, and we had good seats to boot. I was thrilled just to be there. The Reds ended up winning the series, 4–3. Dad was hurt because he couldn’t take me to the game, but he busted his hump to get those two tickets. From that time on, I told Dad that if it hadn’t been for that game, I might have become a Republican.

Dad was a great baseball fan and a pretty good pitcher himself. He was a lefty, and he could fire the ball. He even organized a semipro team. But one of his proudest accomplishments was starting the first little league program in Scioto County with the first lighted field in Ohio.

Now I was never a great baseball player, but it was in my blood too. I wasn’t but thirteen years old when I helped form a team in what we called the “Knot Hole League.” We sold doughnuts to buy jerseys and caps. Even in those days, once I took on a task, I was serious about it. Keith Gaspich, a doctor back home, still tells the story about how I came over to his house to repossess his jersey and cap because he had the measles.

“I got somebody else to play because you can’t,” I told him.

As long as I can remember, baseball and politics were a big part of the Riffe household. My first memories of politics were when I was five or six. Dad would come home with campaign cards or handbills, and we’d pass them out around the neighborhood. I’d go from door to door, up one side of the street and down the other. People knew they could get a rise out of me by calling me a Republican. I’d get as mad as a hornet and snap, “I’m a Democrat!” I went to political meetings with Dad too, and often I’d fall asleep on the bench right there in the meeting hall.

I always had an inkling that someday I’d be involved in politics. In high school, when we’d have political debates and choose Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other, I’d always head for the Democratic side. But nobody ever would have looked at me then and said, he’s going to be a powerful politician someday. I was an okay student. I made As in math, which was my best subject, and Bs in government, history, and such. When it came to things like chemistry, I was just average, probably a C student.

I also played hooky from time to time. Once while in high school my friends and I were at the movie matinee downtown during school hours. It wasn’t the first time I thought I was getting away with something when I wasn’t. On the way home from classes on Friday of that week, I stopped by Dad’s office to get my allowance, taking fifty cents or a dollar, I don’t remember exactly, because I had planned on taking my girlfriend to the show Saturday night.

“You’re not going to get an allowance this week,” he said. “When you make up your mind to stay in school and quit playing hooky, then we’ll go back to an allowance.”

I always took a girl to the show on Saturday night, and he knew it. That’s the last time I played hooky.

I wasn’t totally dependent on an allowance; far from it. From the time I was able to work, I pretty much always had a job of some kind. My first job was as a paperboy for the Portsmouth Times. What I remember most was getting up at 4 A.M. on freezing cold mornings to deliver the Sunday paper, and afterward going back to bed only to get up again in time for Sunday school. We attended services and Sunday school every week at the Church of Christ in Christian Union. If there was a revival nearby, I was required to go with Mother to hear all the testifying. I can remember going to sleep in the back of the tent while there’d be all this shouting and witnessing.

When I was sixteen, I worked at the Kroger store for eighteen cents an hour; ten hours on Saturday got me $1.80, which was a pretty good day’s work back then. I also used to chop kindling and sell it for ten cents a basket or three for a quarter. After Kroger, I really moved up to big money—eighty-five cents an hour doing construction work.

Those jobs put some spending money in my pocket. I wasn’t thinking about a career though. Nobody was because we knew full well that after high school we’d be going into the service. I was eager to enlist, so much so that I went down to the Navy recruiting office and tried to enlist in the fall of 1942 when I was seventeen. The Navy would take you at that age only if your parents approved, and Dad wouldn’t go along with it. That’s the only time I can remember a big fight between us.

“You’re going to have to go sooner or later, but you’re the only son I’ve got. I want to see you graduate from high school,” he said. I didn’t like it, but that’s what happened. I can see now that he was right, and I would have done exactly the same thing.

Dad never got to go to war. He just missed World War I because it ended before he turned eighteen. Once I was of age he supported me 100 percent, and I joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 right after graduating from high school, even then I was afraid they wouldn’t take me because I was skinny as a rail, only 120 pounds. I would have been devastated if they hadn’t accepted me. It was my generation’s first chance to defend our country, and nobody was trying to get out of it; everybody was patriotic. Fortunately, the Army took me, and before long I was an aerial gunner in a B-17 serving in the European Theater.

There’s no doubt about it: I went into the service a boy, but I came out a man. Like a lot of boys, I was babied at home, maybe even more than most, being the only son in the family. You never saw so much crying when I went into the service. Everybody was really upset—aunts, uncles, and everybody else in the family thought there was nobody like “June.” That’s what they called me, June or “Junior.” Even today, the old-timers down home call me June or Junior. They’ll say, “Junior, I haven’t seen you in a long time … but maybe I shouldn’t call you Junior anymore.” I always tell them, “No, no, no. I wouldn’t think about being called anything but Junior by you.”

The service was good for me because I was forced to take care of myself. At home, for instance, my mother would fry eggs and bacon for me in the m...