Lynn Redmon: The one you wanted on your side

Betty BeanUncategorized

It was a dark and stormy October night in 1997, and wind-driven leaves blew through the door as woman in a trench coat and floppy hat walked into Kinko’s. She told the attendant she wanted to send a fax, pulled a thin folder out of her bag and took out a single typed page.

It was a letter to the editor of the News Sentinel protesting the fraudulent use of the writer’s name in an endorsement ad for a city council candidate scheduled to run a couple of days before the upcoming election.

It delivered a threat to sue and ended with a demand for a call from the editor at …

And there it ended. No page two, no phone number, no signature. The guy at the counter dialed up the number and the woman paid for the transaction and disappeared back into the storm, giggling like a fool.

I know this because she was me. I was her – Lynn Redmon’s flunky in the Danny Mayfield campaign. I’d taken a month’s leave of absence from my job at Metro Pulse to help get Danny elected. He had lots of volunteers, but Lynn was the field marshal, the idea man, the driving force.

The fax was a piece of campaign tomfoolery that had no discernable effect on the election, which Danny won fairly comfortably. But it did cause considerable consternation at the News Sentinel, which was, of course, the intention (we felt the daily paper had been quite partial to Danny’s opponent). Lynn got calls about it from members of the editorial board who were scared they were about to get sued, but the ad ran anyhow. It was a goofy caper that made us laugh for years to come, and we vowed to take our secret to the grave. It was the first thing that came into my mind last week when I heard Lynn had died. I don’t think he’d mind my telling it.

But there is so much more to remember.

There was the “Gentlemen’s Club” that he started for little boys at Norwood Elementary School – most of them immigrants and minorities. He bought them dress shirts and ties and took them on field trips to show them what the world offered while teaching them good manners and self confidence. They’ll miss him, and so will the neighborhoods he helped with zoning issues and the folks who visited the food pantry he’d helped set up at his church, his Friends of the Library colleagues and so many more to whom he gave so extravagantly.

Plus, he was the man behind the curtain in more local political campaigns than I’ll ever know about.

“You know what I tell people when they’re running for office? ‘You know Lynn Redmon? You go see him. Hire Lynn Redmon. He knows everything. He’s got the best lists in the country. I told them he was the best. And he was,” said Mike Chase, who has been formidable fundraiser for candidates on the local, state and national level for years.

Former City Council member Carlene Malone met Redmon when she was fighting the city/county plan for a mass-burn incinerator in the late ’80s. He was on the other side, primarily because his then-employer, the absentee owner of the old Brookside Mills property that the Solid Waste Authority had selected as the site for the big burner, was anxious for the sale to go through. Malone’s side ultimately won, but the fight got ugly and personal and impassioned and dragged on for years. (The site, visible from I-275, is now home to Holston Gases.) Afterward, she started noticing Redmon at public meetings and was struck by his willingness to let bygones be bygones. They struck up a friendship.

“Lynn started organizing in Norwood, and I’d run into him at meetings. I remember one day he asked me if I was interested in running for City Council. I laughed and said no, I could never run for office – I’d never win.

“And he said, ‘You know what that tells me? It tells me you’re a woman. Men say, ‘Oh, do you think I’ll be really great?’”

Malone ran in a hotly contested 1992 special election, and Redmon’s office at creepy, semi-abandoned Brookside became her campaign headquarters. There she got her first look at his soon-to-be-famous data-driven lists that identified the names and addresses and phone numbers of super voters, likely voters and those not worth spending time on. And the two former adversaries became friends.

“We became thick as thieves,” she said. “But lots of my supporters suspected that Lynn was some kind of Manchurian candidate. I remember driving into the parking lot thinking, ‘Oh my God. This is where the incinerator was supposed to go.’ It was really kind of a surreal moment.”

She feels his loss keenly.

“Lynn was just everything the words good friend mean. Just everything.”

Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett called Redmon “LR.” Redmon called Burchett “TB.” Like Malone, he credits Redmon with launching his political career when he ran for state representative in 1994.

“Lynn saw things in people that nobody else ever would and he was willing to take a risk on a young rookie like me. When I heard he was in the hospital, I called him.

“He answered the phone like he always did: ‘What’s shakin’, TB?’

“I said, ‘LR, we’re missing you on this campaign.’” Two days later, Redmon was dead.

Burchett, a tireless shoe leather campaigner who has been elected to serve in the state House, state Senate and now as county mayor – always with Redmon’s help – is running for Congress this year and says Redmon taught him to work smart. Those targeted lists rating primary voters based on their voting histories, sorted street-by-street, block-by-block, house-by-house, changed the way he campaigned.

“Nobody was doing that stuff before he did it,” Burchett said. “Before LR, I knocked on every door, and out of 30 doors I knocked on, three were voters,” he said. “I’ve got that app on my phone now, thanks to him. On election nights, when we won, LR never hung around. He didn’t need all that.”

After he became mayor, Burchett said he advised real estate developers to talk to Redmon, whose influence extended far beyond the Norwood Homeowners Association, which he led for years.

“LR was a worthy adversary. I’d see 20 people sitting out there with little yellow bows on them, and LR’d come in, and I’d think somebody’s getting ready to get spanked. And sure enough, the other side would fold like a cheap suit. I told some of the developers, ‘What you ought to do is hire LR to teach you about all of these codes.’ They never did, but that would have been a wise investment. They’d have been 100 percent better off if they’d listened to him on the front end. There’s never going to be another one like him.”

Redmon took politics seriously, but never personally. Knox County Trustee Ed Shouse, who has served on City Council and County Commission, beat Redmon in a race for an at-large council seat in 1995. He said he and Redmon grew an enduring friendship.

“I contacted him in 2007 after Black Wednesday when I was trying to put some campaign people together. I’d heard he was good at the mail, so we had coffee at Krispy Kreme at Kingston Pike and Northshore and talked about two hours. My race was successful and I give Lynn a lot of the credit for that. He was the best in town.”

Redmon also helped Shouse with a successful race for trustee in 2014, and during campaigns, they’d talk every night.

He said he came to lean on Redmon for advice even when he wasn’t running for anything.

“I talked to him once a month through the year, asking him, ‘What are you hearing?’ We’d talk about critical votes, tax increases, zoning. I leaned on him all the time. I’d see him down there at MPC – he’d tell me, ‘I’m going to get killed in there…’ But he went anyway.

“We became good friends, and he called me, too. He had a great political sense for where elections were headed and could read the mood of public.”

Much as Shouse relied on Redmon’s political advice, he said he’ll miss something else more. He finds it difficult to talk about visiting Redmon after he entered hospice care.

“I’ve lost a friend,” he said.

And so have candidates and neighborhood groups and school children and old people and underdogs across Knoxville. And so have I.

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