Here Comes Trouble (34 page)

He sighed. “We’ve been holding meetings and not telling you,” he said apologetically. “It’s not right and I’m not going to any more of them. I’ve told them we should stop.”

I was floored. Secret board of education meetings were being held behind my back? He said they had met at the president’s house so that no one would know.

I went home, my head in a fog. There was no Internet in those days, so I had no way to look up “How to Make a Citizen’s Arrest.” The next day I drove down to the county prosecutor’s office and told him what happened. He blew his top.

“Those fucking bastards! I’ve had it with them. I’m throwing ’em all in jail!”

I considered asking him if he could say that one more time, just for my own pleasure.

“Kenny,” he said shouting over to his assistant prosecutor, “call the radio and TV stations. We’re bringing criminal charges against the members of the Davison Board of Education!”

And he meant it. And he did. It was only a misdemeanor, but still, he told the media that he was issuing warrants for their arrests. In case they preferred jail time to working with me, he also filed suit to make sure they would comply with state law requiring open meetings. Prosecutor Leonard had had it after the numerous violations of church/state separation, banning tape recorders at public meetings, and now this.

“They’re recidivists!” the prosecutor told the local radio station. “They keep breaking the law—and I don’t know any other way to get their attention.”

The news shook the little Republican town—and the lawbreaking school board president immediately met with the prosecutor and signed an agreement to never ever do it again.

“You brought this on yourself,” an unrepentant Mrs. Ude told me before the next meeting. “It was your behavior that forced us to meet without you. What makes you think that we would want you at our meetings?”

“They aren’t
your
meetings,” I said to her. “These meetings belong to the citizens of this district! And they elected me to represent them. And when you hold secret meetings and don’t inform me, you take away those people’s right to be there.”

“Oh, you!” was all she could say, and walked away.

A few months later, I noticed the school district was handing out contracts for services and construction without taking competitive bids.

“It’s illegal not to do it,” I said, using their favorite “I” word. “State law requires us to have competitive bidding that’s fair for all concerned and will get the best price for the school district.” I sat and wondered why was I having to give people who claimed they loved capitalism and free enterprise a lesson in the competitive marketplace being a good idea for all. But they ignored me, saying it was impractical and unnecessary.

A few days later I set up an appointment with the state attorney general’s office and drove down to Lansing to meet with an assistant attorney general about this illegal practice.

The assistant attorney general looked at the records I brought him and he agreed: the Davison Board of Education was breaking the law.

“Why don’t
you
tell them?” I suggested. “I think they’re tired of hearing that from me.”

“I intend to do just that.”

Word spread through town that now the top law enforcement men in Michigan were investigating the Davison school board. And sure enough, at the next meeting, it was announced that a competitive bidding process was being instituted. We were also told, bitterly, that “being forced to take the lowest bid will not guarantee the best work, and this may end up costing us more in the long run.”

So, what does one do when he is looking to bring the level of animosity down? He writes a one-act play in his spare time and enters it in the school district’s annual community talent show to be held at the high school. And what would that play be about? Oh, say, a little avant-garde number about Jesus’s crucifixion. At the last minute on Calvary, Jesus, high up on a cross wrapped in aluminum foil, decides he doesn’t want to die crucified like this.

“This is where you people want me?” Jesus shouted to the audience on the talent show’s opening night. “Just nailed to a cross? So you don’t have to listen to me anymore about caring for the poor or the sick or the downtrodden? So you can stick little replicas of me on your walls at home, while I’m hanging on this cross, suffering? Well, I say NO!”

And with that, Jesus yanked the nails straight out of his hands and flew down off the cross.

I had a bunch of my friends planted in the audience and, with that as their cue, they randomly stood up and started yelling at Jesus.

“Get back up on that cross where you belong!”

“We don’t want you alive, we like you dead!”

“Back on the cross! Back on the cross!”

Then they all started to charge the stage. One man pulled out a “gun” and “shot” Jesus. The now-dead-again Son of God was dragged back to his cross and left there. The actors then exited the stage cheerfully.

The election to recall and remove me from the school board was set for the first Friday in December. There would be only one question on the ballot: Should Michael Moore be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail? Actually, I believe the official wording was: “Should Michael Moore be removed from the office of trustee of the Davison Board of Education?”

That was it. Just one question on the entire ballot—and the whole town was to show up and vote on just that question. Not exactly a confidence booster, to be sure.

To my credit, it was not easy for the recall committee—consisting of businessmen and friends of the school board members—to gather the necessary signatures in the required amount of time to put the question on the ballot. In fact, when the deadline arrived, they were hundreds of signatures short. So the school board gave the group an extra ten days. When the ten days were up, they were still short by quite a bit. So the board granted another (illegal) ten-day extension. And when those ten days were up, guess what? Still not enough names of people wanting to remove me! So, unbelievably, the board gave them a
third
ten-day extension.

I went and got myself an attorney. By the end of the third ten-day extension, they finally had the signatures they needed. Or did they? As I combed through the names on the petitions, I came across at least a half-dozen people who had died, and a number of people who had signed their names twice. And then there was Jesse the barber. He signed it
three
times! He sure did want me gone.

I sued in the county court to overturn this entire circus. The judge, who shaved his head bald each morning to convey a Kojak-like appearance, issued the following ruling:

It appears that both the recall committee and the board of education have committed a number of irregularities and possible violations of the law. But it does seem to me that the people of Davison want their day at the polls regarding you, Mr. Moore. So, I’m going to go ahead and let the election take place. If the election goes against you, Mr. Moore, then you can come back here to this court to seek relief.

My head was spinning. The judge had just pointed out numerous instances of the law being broken—but he was still going to let the election take place. I was doomed.

Scheduling the election on a Friday during the Christmas season was a genius move by the school board. Have you ever gone to vote on a Friday? Exactly. So who would even know when this particular Friday rolled around that it was “election day”? The haters who wanted me out of there, that’s who.

Each side got to write something on the official ballot. The recallers had a hundred words where they outlined my “crimes.” And I had a hundred words to answer their charges. I decided it wasn’t worth wasting my time. I wrote, simply, “The question that is placed before you on this ballot is a moral question that must be decided between you and your conscience. I sincerely trust that you will make the best decision possible for you and your children. Love, Mike.” In addition to being the youngest elected official, I might have been the first person to inscribe the word
love
on an election ballot.

On recall day I was back in the same gym where I had won the seat two and a half years earlier. When I arrived at 7:00 a.m., the citizens recall committee was already in action. The school board clerk allowed them to sit at the table where the voters sign in and check off who had shown up and who hadn’t. Every half hour or so, they would hand off the names and go call those who hadn’t come in to vote yet. It was quite the operation to watch, and once again I had been outsmarted (and outspent). In the weeks leading up to the election I did what I had done before to win. I wrote up a “Letter to the people of Davison” and went and knocked on every door in the district.

The line snaked the length of the gym to the back by the doors, out through the hallway, and to the front of the school. By the time the polls closed thirteen hours later, it was clear this was a huge turnout.

In the middle of the gym they set up four long lunchroom tables to form a square on which they dumped out the paper ballots. The count began with the “YES” ballots placed on one table and the “NO” ballots stacked on the other. For the next hour and a half, who had the highest pile went back and forth. Higher and higher, neck and neck they climbed. And then something happened. The pile of “NO” ballots kept growing: 100 higher. 200 higher! 300 HIGHER! The final ballot was placed atop the pile favoring me and the clerk declared that the recall had failed and I had won.

On the bleachers on the south side of the gym, where a hundred or so student supporters had taken perch, there was a scream from someone, and then more screams followed. A spontaneous party broke out and there was jumping and dancing all across the gymnasium floor. Me, I was just relieved. The TV cameras were there to record the event and I went live with the anchorman at 11:00 p.m. I thanked the people of Davison, declared the local Republican Party dead, and promised to remain who I was. I also apologized to my parents for putting them through this. It had been especially hard on my mother. The recall committee was made up of the people she had lived with in Davison her whole life. The head of the committee—my dad was his coach in junior high football. The copies of the recall petitions I was able to obtain in court revealed the names of many we thought were family friends. The guy my dad ushered with in church signed it. My mom’s friend from high school signed it. The girl I sat next to in band—her, too. They were all there. And to this day, if you ask my dad (now ninety) if “so-and-so” had signed the petition, he would be able to tell you in an instant.

They call it “Irish Alzheimer’s”: you forget everything—except holding the grudge.

I served out the rest of my term, always voting the way I wanted, but worn down from the whole experience. I was asked to speak to the students at the high school, and I used the opportunity to read an expletive-filled poem I wrote about the genocide of the Native Americans. That resulted in me being banned from the high school for life (I have, to this day, never returned).

I lost my bid for reelection and retired from public office at the age of twenty-two—to pursue a more quiet life. I kept in mind that it took the consent of only twenty people to start me on this road. I realized that this was the big secret of democracy—that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something. You don’t need a whole movement or even a whole school district. It can start with just twenty people. Even twenty stoners. It was a good, but dangerous, lesson to learn at such an early age. The intimidating thing about democracy is that it seems so impossible, so unmanageable, so out of reach to the average person. By twenty-two, I knew that to be a myth. And I was grateful to Davison for teaching me what a great country this is.

But I never got my hair cut at Jesse’s Barber Shop again.

Raid

I
BECAME A NEWSPAPERMAN
at the age of nine. St. John the Evangelist Catholic Grade School did not have a student newspaper, so I thought I would start one. I did not ask the nuns for permission. Why would I? I only wanted to cover our sports teams—mostly. I also wanted to write about what happened during science class last Friday. Mrs. LaCombe had wheeled the school’s one TV set in on a movable cart and turned it on so we could watch a science lesson on NET (National Educational Television), a special channel devoted for use in the classrooms across America (it would later become PBS).