Thurmond cut red tape

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But what most South Carolinians like to tell about are the quieter times.

The times they called Strom Thurmond's office, and quietly, out of the spotlight, he helped them. The times he rushed a passport application or jump-started a disability check or flew a serviceman home for a funeral.

Mari Maseng Will never saw anything like it. She worked as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, in the Department of Transportation for Elizabeth Dole, on all of Bob Dole's presidential campaigns.

But never, she said, did she see constituency service done as it was during her 1978 tenure as Thurmond's press secretary.

"People were constantly coming up to him and saying, 'Thank you. You got my son out of the service' or 'You saved my Social Security check.' It was like being with a rock star, almost.

"No detail was too small, but it turns out these details meant a lot in people's lives. I've never seen it before or since."

In Greenville on Friday, the stories flowed as people learned of the death of the man who, as Will put it, "defined how it should be done." They wagged their heads and laughed, glorying in the fact that the mannerly statesman could cut through red tape like butter on a hot June morning.

Especially when it involved the men who waged America's wars.

George Tate and his older brother, Jack Sr., returned from World War II to open a furniture store. But in 1965, Jack was diagnosed with a brain tumor and wanted to be admitted to the veterans' hospital in Asheville.

Normal channels didn't work, said Tate, so Jack's wife, who was a nurse, contacted Strom Thurmond's brother, who was a doctor. The doctor's advice: Call Strom.

"Strom didn't say, 'I'll check to see if there's space,' " related Tate, now 85. "He said, 'You put your husband in an ambulance, which I will provide, drive to Asheville, and we'll have a bed for him when you get there.' "

But Thurmond's interference wasn't always reserved for emergencies. More recently, Tate had an adventurous friend who wanted to ride on a nuclear submarine. Tate took the request to Thurmond.

"I got word from his military attache that if we proceeded to Kings Bay, Ga., we could take a ride on a submarine," Tate laughed. His friend got sick, so Tate took his nephew, Jack Jr., and the two spent the night on a seagoing sub.

A records snafu

Dr. Joe Stephenson's entanglement in red tape was about to endanger his new career.

Stephenson was ending a six-year residency at Fort Sam Houston in June 2000, and he had a job lined up with the Cancer Centers of the Carolinas. He was ready to close on his house in San Antonio, make a decision to buy land in Greenville and give the Cancer Centers a starting date.

Then came the hitch: The Army said he owed two more years.

Though the oncologist knew it was a snafu, a fellow doctor in the same bind had had his senator monitoring the situation for five months.

Stephenson didn't have five months. But he did have Thurmond's phone number.

Within a week, Thurmond met with the Undersecretary of the Army for Manpower, who just happened to be a former staffer, Stephenson said. A staff member told him the discussion took 10 seconds, during which the senator handed over Stephenson's military records and said, "I want this boy back in South Carolina."

"He was a man of action," said Stephenson admiringly. "He ran my problem to the top of the flagpole and acted on it."

During the Vietnam War, Joyce Smith worried when her husband wrote her the combat soldiers weren't getting enough to eat. Smith fired off a letter to Thurmond.

Her husband's next letter, she said, asked what she had done "because there was some type of inquiry into how they were treating the soldiers." Apparently Thurmond had stepped in to see why food supplies were delayed in getting to the combat zone.

'Smooth sailing'

With a longevity extending past most people's memories, Thurmond's influence reached far beyond the military.

Ten years ago, sisters Lorraine Turner and Kelly Roseberry called him when Crossroads at Mountain Meadows, their Travelers Rest group home for sexually abused girls, hit obstacle after obstacle in obtaining licenses from state agencies.

"He, of course, being federal could not do anything statewide," Turner said. "But he could make a few phone calls and express his concern.

"Once he did that, we had smooth sailing. Just a voice of someone of his authority saying, 'Look, these girls are trying real hard. You need to see what you can do to help them.' "

Passports

If Thurmond's response time was legendary in most matters, passports seemed to bring out his personal touch.

In 1991, Clemson University was headed to the Tokyo Bowl, and sports information director Bob Bradley realized at the last minute his passport had expired — jeopardizing Game No. 399 in his streak of unmissed football games.

Thurmond "pulled whatever strings he could pull," reported Bradley's son Robert, "and he got Daddy a passport."

Flying from Washington to Aiken, Thurmond met Bradley at the airport in Augusta, Ga., to hand it over. Bradley took it and raced to the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, making the team plane 15 minutes before take-off.

Without Thurmond's intervention, said Robert, his dad's streak would have ended right there. Instead, he made it to 502 before his death in 2000.

Similarly, Carol Lynn Vrana, 36, said a high school friend in Columbia was about to miss a trip to Europe 20 years ago.

"It was a last-minute thing and she wasn't going to be able to go because she didn't have a passport," Vrana said. "The family called his office and within 24 hours, he hand-delivered that passport to her front door.

"People would always ask me, 'Why is he still in office?' And I'd say, 'I'll tell you why' and I'd tell them that story."

That personal touch extended to staffers who, like Mari Will, are spread throughout all levels of government and the private sector these days.

Robert McAlister, now a public relations executive in Columbia, was 21 when he went to work as Thurmond's speechwriter and press aide. One day, he drove his boss to a meeting with President Nixon.

"We pulled up to the West Wing and I told the senator I would wait for him in the car," McAlister recalled. " 'No you're not,' he said. 'You're coming with me to meet the president.' "

McAlister protested that the Secret Service would never allow him into the Oval Office.

"At that," he said, "the senator grabbed my arm, looked me squarely in the eyes, and said, 'Bob, always act like you know what you're doing.'

"So I did. We were escorted into the White House, the Oval Office doors swung open, and Sen. Thurmond introduced this 21-year-old Greenville boy to the President of the United States. Not many people of his stature would have bothered to be so kind to a lowly staff member.

"The senator took me under his wing and gave me grand experiences I could never have dreamed of. I already miss him."

James T. Hammond contributed to this story.

Deb Richardson-Moore can be reached at 298-4127.