This is an opinion column.
They don’t make politicians like Fred Horn anymore.
Some would say “good.”
I’m not one of them. Because Fred Horn was a fighter. Fred Horn – one of the so-called “Sin Twins” of the Alabama Legislature, was stubborn and committed and determined to follow through on promises he believed in, even when they weren’t such good ideas. He’d use every tool in his box to get it done, even if it killed him. And it pretty much did.
Politically, anyway.
It took another couple of decades for real death to catch up.
Horn, a Jefferson County educator and track coach and member of the House and then the Senate from 1975 to 1994, died this week at the age of 93. He’d been sick for several years, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t go quietly. It wasn’t in his nature.
I can just see him, standing there at death’s door and refusing to budge. Like he stood up so many times to former Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington.
Or like he did in the Legislature. In 1993, toward the end of his Goat Hill career, Horn decided Birmingham’s school board members should be elected, rather than appointed by city hall.
His constituents wanted it, he said. So he vowed to kill every Jefferson County bill that came before the Legislature until his bill passed.
And his bill didn’t pass.
So he – as Senate Finance and Taxation Committee Chairman – killed bills. Occupational tax bills, city council pay raise bills, a property tax bill, on and on and on. He killed 20 of them, and was outraged when, during a long lunch break, another lawmaker used a slick parliamentary trick to pass three local bills before Horn could hustle back into chambers.
He wanted them all dead. Because he’d promised. Everybody was mad at him. Republicans, Democrats, pundits.
Didn’t much bother me. A Legislature that does nothing is, most of the time, the best Legislature.
It was about that time that Arrington, Birmingham’s first black mayor and head of the Jefferson County Citizens Coalition, the most powerful political organization in the city, chose to back Rodger Smitherman in a run against Horn. Smitherman won, and remains in office today.
Horn was one of the most prominent black elected officials to challenge Arrington at the height of his power, and he would lose. Horn ran several other races. He came close, but did not win.
Rep. John Rogers – the other Sin Twin, because he and Horn pushed legislation that created the Birmingham Race Course and came close on lottery and casino bills – said Horn was a powerful and effective legislator who should be remembered.
He said Horn and Arrington “fell out” for silly reasons, because Horn wanted an appointment for a city board that Arrington didn’t want to give. But it grew into a feud that lasted for years. It was never resolved, Rogers said, despite attempts by mutual friends to bring them back together.
“He thought he could best Dick Arrington,” Rogers said. “He couldn’t.”
So his political career ended, and Birmingham passed him by.
“People forget you when you’re gone” from politics, Rogers said. “He shouldn’t be forgotten.”
It’s not just the politics that are memorable, family friend Cecil Guyton said. When he thinks of Horn he thinks of his barbecue and the sauce he once marketed, of the athletes he trained and young people he prepared for the world.
“I remember a giant among giants,” he said. “He was a man who was not afraid.”
Not afraid.
Like I said, they don’t make politicians like that anymore.
John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.