Dispatch - Strickland’s concern for others springs from his family and faith

(Dispatch)

LUCASVILLE, Ohio — Ted Strickland laughs when asked whether there one day might be a historical marker outside the modest home on Duck Run where he grew up.

Boyhood home of Ted Strickland, Ohio’s 68 th governor.

Two markers already stand nearby, outside the homes of cowboy singer and actor Leonard Franklin Sly, better known as Roy Rogers, and Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager who broke baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.

But there’s not much outside the sixroom Strickland homestead where his niece now lives, just the old well where the family drew water and the area where the outhouse once stood.

Out back are the 16 acres where the horses Strickland loved in his youth grazed, as well as remnants of the chicken coop where the family stayed after the house burned when he was 5.

Strickland grew up as the secondyoungest of nine children in this hardscrabble part of Appalachian Ohio, where going to college in the 1940s and ’50s was like going abroad. He says he never imagined he’d get three academic degrees, much less go to Congress and become the Democratic nominee for governor.

Still, the seeds were planted on Duck Run in rural Scioto County by Orville Strickland, his steelworker father, and Carrie, his homemaker mother. While not well-off or well-educated, they paid attention to current events and politics.

"I grew up in a family where everyone talked at the same time and everyone had an opinion about everything," Strickland said recently after taking reporters on a tour of his boyhood haunts.

Strickland, who turned 65 in August, has his doctorate in psychology and has walked the corridors of power in Washington. And although it makes him sad to come back to Duck Run now, flooded with memories of his parents and three brothers who have died, Strickland still feels he belongs here.

He talks often about Duck Run in his stump speeches, how times were tough but there was a pervasive sense that things were getting better. He talks about wanting to get that feeling back for Ohio.

It was a religious experience that led Strickland away from home and to college. His mother was a Baptist, but he attended a Methodist revival meeting with a high-school teacher, Frankie Edwards, and said he "felt like I had given my life to God."

Edwards took him to visit Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history as well as his master’s in divinity from the Asbury Theological Seminary.

Nearby was the University of Kentucky, where Strickland pursued his master’s degree in guidance and counseling, following up on his college minor of psychology.

Church leaders assigned him to Trinity Methodist Church in Portsmouth for a year, and then asked him to return to the Methodist Home for Children in Versailles, Ky, where he had worked and boarded off and on.

Over the course of about a decade, Strickland served at the home as assistant superintendent, campus chaplain, youth minister and even bus driver.

"Ted taught us that we could make a difference," Marty Fetter, who was placed at the home with two brothers when he was 3 years old, said in a blog posting earlier this year on Strickland’s Web site. He grew up to be an engineer, as did one brother who works for NASA, while the other brother is a psychiatrist.

Three professors at the University of Kentucky persuaded Strickland to return to pursue his doctorate in psychology and counseling, which he completed in 1980.

As for what spurred him to run for Congress, Strickland, who was president of his senior class in high school, points to watching the Watergate hearings during graduate school. He also mentions the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War and the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.

"All of those things, I think, perhaps without me being consciously aware, were having an effect on my thinking," Strickland said.

But he was a political novice who had no idea about how to run for office. Strickland even paid a lawyer $50 to draft candidate petitions before realizing he could get them free at the county board of elections.

He lost his first race for Congress against Republican incumbent William Harsha in 1976. He then lost a rematch in 1978 and lost again in 1980 to Bob McEwen after Harsha retired.

Strickland figured his days as a candidate were over, and he worked at a few different jobs after that, including as a consulting psychologist at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville and as an assistant psychology professor at Shawnee State University.

He even did a few television commercials, after a talent agency he used to help pass a Franklin County mentalhealth levy in 1984 thought he had the right look.

Art Tate Jr., who was warden of the Lucasville prison for two of the years Strickland was there, remembers him as an excellent psychologist with strong people skills.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, Strickland’s Republican opponent Nov. 7, apparently implies something negative by saying in his press releases that Strickland is a "former prison psychologist." But Tate’s view is that not everyone could thrive among Ohio’s worst criminals.

"It’s a test of character when someone can go into the state’s toughest correctional facility and be successful, and Ted did that," said Tate, who left Lucasville after the 1993 riots and now works in the Ohio Department of Youth Services.

Although Strickland says he was enjoying his work, politics continued to beckon. Congressional redistricting and the House banking scandal prompted him to try another run for Congress in 1992. This time, he won.

But he tried to get by without a chief of staff and ran an inefficient office that first term, recalls Lynn Grimshaw, a former Scioto County prosecutor and county Democratic chairman.

Strickland lost his bid for re-election in the 1994 Republican tsunami to Frank Cremeans but beat Cremeans in a rematch in 1996. He’s been in Congress ever since.

"I’ve used Ted as an example of perseverance," Grimshaw said. "You just plug away, and you are consistent in what you do. Maybe initially you won’t attract attention, but if you’re solid and good, eventually you’ll succeed."

Still, it was Frances, Strickland’s wife of more than 18 years, who saw the potential for her husband to become governor before he did.

They met in 1974 at the University of Kentucky where Frances, who grew up on a Kentucky dairy farm, and Strickland shared a "closet-size" office together as graduate students in psychology.

Frances says she knew early on that she wanted to marry Strickland because "When you’ve got a guy who will take you as you are and enjoys your differences, then it’s hard to find someone else who measures up to that."

But Strickland wasn’t interested in marriage right off. They kept in touch after graduate school, and she even came to Ohio to work on his congressional campaigns when she wasn’t pursuing her work as an educational psychologist.

Frances, 65, recalls that one breakthrough in the relationship came when Strickland got a dog. Because the apartment where he was living didn’t take pets, he bought a house and "The nesting was starting," she said.

The other push came when Frances, looking to stretch herself professionally, started talking about moving to Colorado, where she had previously done graduate work for a year.

He suggested that she move to Ohio, but she wanted more of a relationship first. He then suggested marriage, and they wed in 1987, when both were 46.

"It was kind of like a little negotiation between us, if the truth be known," Frances said. "We knew that we mattered in each other’s lives, (and) it was just making it formal that was the problem."

Talk to Strickland’s family and friends, and a common theme you’ll hear is that Strickland is driven by a genuine desire to help people.

"The thing about Ted is that he is a true altruist," said John Corrigan, 53, a psychologist and professor at Ohio State University who is one of Strickland’s closest friends.

Frances tells the story about being puzzled by seeing a bill for oxygen shortly after Strickland was elected to Congress for the first time. It turns out Strickland bought it for a woman he met who couldn’t afford it.

"I said, ‘Ted, you’re serving 500,000 people. You can’t buy things for everybody when they need something,’ " Frances said. "He said, ‘I could not turn away from what I saw, and you couldn’t have, either.’ "

Strickland figures that desire to help people came from his mother back on Duck Run. He says he got his work ethic from his father, whom he calls the hardest-working man he’s even known.

But Strickland vividly recalls his mother’s capacity to care about people, saying she was "indescribable in her giving attitude."

"Anyone who came to our house, she wanted to give you something before you left, even if it was a banana," Strickland said. "She was just that way. And hopefully, I absorbed some of that."