My introduction to local politics came shortly after I moved to a small city near Boston, where a weekly newspaper was looking for someone—anyone—to cover the Board of Aldermen.  I was interviewed:  Can you walk and talk?  Can you sit on a bench under yellow fluorescents and take notes while people mumble and shout?  Can you tolerate hot rooms with stuck windows and no fans?  Yes, I said.  Yes.  I learned all that in law school.  So they hired me.

Two evenings a week I sat in the press box or at the back of committee rooms and took notes while the men and women who served on the Board debated matters that affected the minutia of all our lives.  I heard about berms, sewer lines, telephone poles, boundary walking, fence height.  To my bewilderment all of it, even sewer lines, made me starry eyed.  Hip guys! Sodium lamps! Parking meters! Granite curbing!  Wow!

This was NOT the way I worked...

It wasn’t all smoothies and skittles.  The aldermen were often outraged, astonished, sadly dismayed, depending on the issue--and no issue was too small to argue.  Cross-branch sniping?  Snide interviews?  Posturing for community cable TV?  Like the Nationals, the executive and legislative branches jostled each other.  Both sides could be goofy.  My disbelieving pencil scribbled phrases like, “The alderman from Ward x abstains on a motion to take no action.”  And from the mayor, “This Halloween I’m going to dress up like an alderman and agitate myself.” 

My own job came with perks: Ticonderoga pencils and thick creamy notepads.   Low-cost coffee and soft drinks.  Smiles and nods from citizens who’d come to City Hall to speak out.  Months went by.  As a newbie in town, I began to feel accepted; as a political novice, more informed.   A crash course in the workings of  local government, sharing information with people who wanted to know--these were the real perks.

Best were public hearings, mostly muted, but sometimes as wild as a night on Bald Mountain.  I listened.  My pencil scratched.  Here was democracy in the raw and I loved every messy, bombastic, repetitive, self-serving, exciting second of it.  I did not suspect, as I took notes, studied the red-faced man who would not stop talking, the soft-spoken woman with clenched fists, the elderly gentleman brandishing his cane, that I would one day join their ranks:

A beloved but down-at-heels Victorian, home to the Boys and Girls Library that anchored one corner of a gem-like Olmsted park, was about to be emptied of books and sold to private developers. The sky, it seemed to us parents and neighbors, was falling.  Or cracking.  Evil bean counters were plotting to sell off our children’s patrimony.  Now I became a red-faced complainer, and I raged around town with the best of them, waving petitions and stuffing mailboxes with flyers.  Victory was inevitable, and as sweet as a good book on a rainy night.

  
            Other fires flared:  parking issues, dying trees, pollution in our little lake. I urged my husband, a mild-mannered academic, to run for alderman.  After all, hadn’t he paid his dues, moderating our neighborhood association, speaking at public hearings, making his quiet, ironic, shank to the jugular points?  Why not take the next step and run for office?

 
             You do it, he said.

But I didn’t like the limelight, or the searchlight, and he could manage both.  I promised to do the grunt work.  I would make the calls, gather the nominating signatures, find the printers, collect volunteers, fund raise, schmooze, stalk the neighborhoods, strategize, pass out bumper stickers, line up endorsements.  I’d even go to parties!  All he had to do was win.   Right?

  We worked hard, did our best, and he lost anyway, by a handful of votes.  But losing taught an invaluable lesson--the difference between “doing our best” and “giving it our all”.  Two years later he ran a second time.  Now real obsession set in.  Nothing was left undone:  no house left unvisited, no phone call not made, no unpaved road passed by, no chit left uncollected.  Turn over that stone, there might be a voter under it, was our operating principle.  We rose at dawn and labored into the night.   Favorite promos were “campaign cookies” which I baked and gave away at the 4th of July fair—Frisbee-sized chocolate chip oatmeal pecan cookies wrapped in cellophane and labeled with my candidate's name.  Worth at least a hundred votes. 

           Dirty tricks beset our campaign:  Our lawn signs mysteriously disappeared.  Wee hours phone calls disrupted our sleep, mostly hang-ups, but once an obscenity and another time, an ethnic slur came rasping down the line.  On election day, double-parked vans blocked access to our home precinct.  A lout from the other side went from polling place to polling place and slandered my candidate at the top of his voice, goading me into my first, last and only street brawl, a screaming match that left me shaking and in tears.  And this was a non-partisan election!

 
         This time my mild-mannered academic swept with a big new broom, winning more votes than any candidate for any office in the city.  Was it the relentless campaigning or the chocolate chip cookies that gave him his edge? I wondered.

              The lesson from this second campaign?  Everyone loves a winner.  Running the operation made me an instant expert.  People who doubted we could win now asked for my help with other campaigns.  Yes, I said.  Yes. 

            And I lasted through three more election cycles, working for other candidates.  Before Facebook, getting noticed big time, all the time, had to happen off line.  A jazz boat cruise on the Charles earned one candidate some press, but through three more election cycles, the basic strategy remained steeped in tradition--spaghetti suppers, village fairs, ice cream socials, candidates nights, meet-and-greets, coffees, post cards . . . . 

            And then I burned out. 

   
            My candidates had won every election but one, and I had no desire to move on to bigger, partisan campaigns for higher office.  I went back to old love, fiction, not only as a constant reader, but as an aspiring author who eventually turned a passion for campaigning into a mystery novel, A Crack in Everything.  Enter Susan Callisto, young, daring, and a much better campaign consultant than I ever was.   Especially when the stakes include murder.