booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

With the battle fully joined, Faulk was on the freeway one day when he spotted
Barlow tooling toward Tacoma. “I’m driving some old damn beater and he’s in his Porsche.”
They pulled to the side of the road. “What the hell you up to?” said Faulk. Barlow grinned
and said, “I’m just bringing down another hundred thousand.”
Booth cashed in on his track record of civic activism dating back to his work
with the kids in Seattle’s Central Area as a college student. He was also the coach of the
Cozars, a girls’ soccer team that had won
the under-19 state championship in 1979.
Faulk enjoyed his own solid reputation in the
minority community and among advocates
for the disadvantaged. He was managing a
non-profit that hired disabled workers.
The black community in Tacoma
summoned Booth to a meeting at the Al
Davies Boys Club. They gave him a seat in
the middle of the court. The audience was
in the bleachers, staring down at the rich
white dude. “This is going to be rough house,”
Booth said to himself. They were making the
introductions when all of a sudden “there was
just a tremendous ruckus out in the hallway,”
Booth consoles a Cozar. Photo courtesy Dick Baldwin.
Booth remembers. “It was three bus loads of black folks from Seattle. They had rented
buses and come down because they heard about the meeting and wanted to give me moral
support. They said, ‘We know we weren’t invited but we knew you were meeting with
Booth Gardner … and as far as we’re concerned this should be a no-brainer for you guys.
There’s not a person in this state who has cared as much for minority people as he has.’”
Both candidates brought in their heavy-hitters. U.S. Senator Henry M. “Scoop”
Jackson attended two fundraisers for Booth. Newly-inaugurated Governor John Spellman
and U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, who had ousted the venerable Senator Magnuson in the
Reagan landslide of 1980, campaigned for Faulk. Noting that he usually abstained from
involvement in county races, Jackson testified that “Booth represents, decency, honesty,
integrity and a decent manager for Pierce County.” Likely licking his chops at the thought
of Norton Clapp and his friends giving money to a Democrat with cross-over appeal, Scoop
declared that Gardner was “manna from heaven.” Faulk’s campaign got some of that, too.
“All the Republican businessmen – the guys who normally would be supporting a Republican
in Tacoma and Pierce County – were getting together” at the landmark Johnny’s Dock
waterfront restaurant to support Booth, Faulk recalls. That “really PO’d” one card-carrying
Republican who resented Clapp summoning the faithful to help his stepson. “He told me
to go see a guy named Dave Ritter, who owned Fick Foundry. He was a solid Republican.
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