Dispatch - Family ties forged Strickland's spirit

Ted Strickland was 5 when the old hillside house on Duck Run near Portsmouth caught fire in the middle of the night and his 13-year-old sister, Jean, scooped him into her arms and ran like hell.

Out on the gravel road, Orville Strickland pulled up after working the second shift at the steel mill in New Boston and found his wife, Carrie, moments before the house collapsed. He asked if all nine kids had gotten out.

"She said ‘Yes,’ " recalled Roger Strickland, two years older than brother Ted. "And Dad said, ‘Then don’t worry about the damn house.’ "

They didn’t, even though everything was lost and nothing was insured. The family walked a little ways up the hillside to the chicken house, nailed some cardboard on the walls and lived there until Orville and the older three boys converted the barn into a house. Carrie cooked their meals in a smokehouse behind the charred home.

"You see things differently after you’ve lived in a chicken shack," Ted Strickland says, 60 years later.

Even so, he didn’t think he would see a day when he’d be serving in Congress. Or a day when he would not only go to college but also earn two master’s degrees and a doctorate. None of his four brothers and four sisters went to college; Roger was the only other to graduate from high school.

And now here is Ted Strickland, on the threshold of winning the Democratic nomination for governor, and do you know what his dad would say? He would say what he said when he was in his early 80s, about to take his first plane ride to watch his second-youngest child sworn in to Congress in 1993.

"A reporter asked him if he was proud of his son and Dad replied, ‘I’m proud of all my kids,’ " Roger recalled. "Our parents always treated us equally and taught us never to look down on no one, and that’s because we were down, maybe not all the way to the bottom, but we had our share of being down.

"That’s probably one of the reasons our three older brothers got into trouble when they were growing up. When they found somebody was being taken advantage of, they’d stand up for him; didn’t matter if the other guy was bigger or not. I think that’s one reason people like Ted, because that’s just the way he is, too."

Make no mistake, though, Ted was different. Like the rest of his siblings, he attended a one-room school on Duck Run for the first four grades. It’s the same road where baseball legend Branch Rickey and cowboy singer Roy Rogers grew up. His four brothers "were fairly rowdy, not in an unlawful way, but we all drank and did things we shouldn’t have done, and Ted was different in that way," Roger said.

Carrie Strickland was devoutly Baptist, but the family didn’t go to church much, except Ted, who often went with Suter Hoople, an old preacher who spoke with a lisp and owned an apple orchard. There was always a quiet confidence about Ted, "and when something in the family happened, he was the one who I guess held the family together," Roger said. "Even before college, it seemed like he was the one everybody listened to."

During Ted’s senior year at Northwest High School in McDermott, a teacher, Frankie Edwards, invited him to attend a Methodist church service in Stockdale.

"I had a religious experience that was very meaningful to me," Strickland said. "It was an experience where I felt like I had given my life to God."

Edwards took him to visit Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky., with its Methodist theological seminary, "and I just fell in love with the place. I wanted to be in that religious environment."

Until then, Strickland had never considered college. He thought that if he was lucky after high school, he’d get a job at the Taylor Brothers stone quarry in McDermott or maybe the steel mill in New Boston.

"My first quarter, I remember I got four C’s and was amazed," Strickland said. "I thought to myself, ‘I can actually do this.’ I didn’t know anyone who went to college. I thought that was something other people did."

By 1963, he had a degree in history, with a teaching certificate. An interest in politics was aroused by a high-school class trip to Washington, and he headed there for a prospective teaching job. But then came an offer from the University of Kentucky for a grant to study rehabilitative counseling. Going to two colleges at once, Strickland obtained a master’s in counseling from UK in 1966 and a master’s in divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary in 1967.

He first saw Frances Smith in 1974 at UK as she stood at the bottom of a stairwell in Dickey Hall. But she had noticed him before then. "He might have been a little slower to pick up on me than I was to pick up on him. Of course, he’s easy to look at."

Frances had grown up in a strong Democratic and Methodist family on a dairy farm in Simpsonville, Ky., and found herself squeezed into a "closetsized office" with Strickland, a fellow psychology doctoral candidate. They spent hours watching the Watergate hearings on television.

"It was a time when we were together a lot, and it was pretty easy to see what a fine fella he was," Frances said. "He was always fully engaged, and that was one of the most attractive things. He had so much life about him."

Compared with their graduate-school friends, Ted and Frances were conservative for the time, a trait that drew them closer. "We’d go to parties and were the ones who weren’t drinking," Ted recalled. "I drink beer now, but I never thought about drinking beer then. I was really uptight about that kind of stuff."

After graduation, Frances focused on her career as an educational psychologist. She was a volunteer for Ted’s first congressional race; he lost to Republican incumbent Bill Harsha in 1976 and lost a rematch two years later.

When Harsha retired, Strickland tried again in 1980, losing to Republican Bob McEwen. "Then, I thought I would never run again," he said, and he returned to UK to get his doctorate. Through that decade, the newly minted psychologist worked as a psychological counselor for wayward youth and prison inmates and began teaching at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth.

In 1987, when they were both 46, Ted finally proposed. "Frances was offered a position in the western part of the country. We’d always kind of stayed together and so on. I was afraid I was going to lose her if she went out there, so I talked her into staying and marrying me."

Strickland beat McEwen in 1992 but lost two years later to Frank Cremeans. In a 1996 rematch, Strickland beat Cremeans by 2 percentage points and has held on to the swingdistrict seat, in part by appealing to his rural and socially conservative constituency as a strong gun-rights advocate.

Strickland’s voting record has been relatively moderate on economic and social issues and more liberal on foreign policy, including a vote against authorizing war against Iraq. Republicans are prepared to paint him as "a big-government liberal," Ohio GOP spokesman John McClelland said.

"He’s an empty suit without any major record of accomplishment, no executive office experience and a platform of promising handouts to the voters of Ohio."

Strickland supports abortion rights but voted against authorizing late-term abortions, calling it his most difficult vote in Congress: "It was tough because I was struggling with whether or not I was casting a vote that could potentially cost a woman her life."

Duck Run, the hill country and his family are imbued in Strickland, who, nearly 29 years after her death, cannot talk about his mother without choking up.

"The worst day of my life was when the doctor told me my mother had terminal cancer." She died six weeks later.

Roger Strickland wasn’t surprised to hear that his brother still cries over their mother. He does, too.

"It says something about who we are, I guess."

jhallett@dispatch.com