Meet the Public School Teacher Challenging Sen. Ralph Hise: Interview with Frank Patton Hughes

 

I invited Frank Hughes, 38, to my back deck to discuss his candidacy this year for the NC Senate seat held since 2010 by the very powerful chair of both NCSenate Appropriations and Redistricting, Ralph Hise. I heard Frank coming from some ways off. His '04 Subaru with broken shocks, peeling paint, one missing headlight, and a muffler that doesn't deserve the name could be heard for a quarter-mile. When he pulled into my driveway, I commented, "Now that is the automobile of a public school teacher!" And he laughed that full-throated laugh of a man who loves irony.

"Don' worry!" he said. "The frame may break, but that motor is never going to quit." He knows, because he's the master car mechanic who keeps it running. He knows cars. He knows greasy and hard work, a public school teacher who didn't go to college until his late 20s, who had by then spent years working with his hands and his wits, as a roofer, a landscaper, a roust-about, a maker-do of limited means but with boundless optimism.

He learned how to work from his Methodist minister father, who was something of a wizard at motivating his son. Frank told me how his father bought a power mower when Frank was seven, took him outside, said, "Now, let me show you how you prime this." Frank was flattered to be treated like an adult. The lesson went on: "Now, let me show you how you start it. Here's the throttle, like this, and this is how you push it. You take it a round and see how it feels." Frank took it a round, while his father disappeared inside, and Frank was suddenly, as slick as that, forever in charge of mowing the grass.

I asked, "So did you start mowing other lawns for money?" Frank's laughter boomed. "No, no, I'm kind of 'money averse.' If something promises to make me money, I probably won't do it." Take school teaching, for example, especially public school teaching under the regime of Mr. Hise and his fellow Republicans, who have been busily re-appropriating the money from public education and shoving it at private schools.

Frank is what anyone who knows him for five minutes would describe as a happy warrior. He's got a broad smile, even when he's not laughing at the vicissitudes of modern life, an engaging and open personality that it would be awfully hard to dislike, let alone hate. He's singularly appealing as a fellow human being who understands struggle.

Frank was diagnosed at age seven with A.D.D., attention deficit disorder, and was put on two daily doses of Ritalin for years. The drug "dulled me down" with a relentlessness that he now describes as not feeling "sober," but it did focus him in an often unpleasant way. On Ritalin, whatever caught his attention would hold his attention for hours of not quite manic but not quite normal activity. "I constructed a lot of model cars!" While he was being controlled by Ritalin and in the 7th grade, his parents divorced, and Frank began a long period of "ping-ponging" between different households in many different places in North Carolina. The divorce caused a new and intense connection to his two siblings, an older sister and a younger brother, who were sort of thrown into being each other's best friends. The divorce also forced Frank to become much more independent -- that, and a new step-father who practiced a "be prepared for anything" kind of tough love that Frank both resisted and learned from. The step-father was ex-CIA. Frank thought him needlessly mean, but now he appreciates the lessons he learned -- "You've got to look out for yourself, and be prepared for anything!"

After high school, Frank chose to go cold turkey on Ritalin, used marijuana for a time to even out the inevitable cascade of withdrawal, went to work in construction, met his future wife and moved in with her, and married her when he was 21. She was a college graduate and urged him to go, but it was several years of working the furniture market in High Point and putting roofs on high-end construction projects (look at the roof on St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Boone. Frank did that) before he enrolled in Caldwell Community College, got his associate's degree, then attended Appalachian State as a history major and earned his teaching certificate. Both his mother and his maternal grandmother had been teachers. It was in his heritage, and he always had a knack for instruction, showing his younger brother the moves to survive the step-father, for example, and he had taught all his friends the chessboard and its classic strategies. He cites Dr. Tim Silver of the history department at AppState as a major influence on his appreciation of historic perspective and thinking critically. 

WataugaWatch: I mean no disrespect, but what possessed you to take on one of the most powerful Republican senators in a district with a Republican lean of 61.9%? 

 

FRANK PATTON HUGHES:What’s funny is that I don’t think about him in that way. I view Ralph Hise as a danger to our public schools, and therefore this is a cause worthy of a fight. I understand that the district is heavily Republican, but I feel that having strong public schools is a non-partisan issue.

 

WataugaWatch: New and apparently some experienced public school teachers appear to be leaving the profession in significant numbers. Can we blame the attitudes and the poor budgeting on the NC General Assembly?

 

FRANK PATTON HUGHES: Yes, we can blame the General Assembly. They have ignored public school teachers and staff who have been wanting a pay increase for 20 years. The increases we have received have been small and were negated by our loss of Master’s pay, loss of free healthcare, increasing workload, and increasing class sizes.  In short, those issues, and the General Assembly's ignoring research-based knowledge on the negative impact of class size --it  adds up to disrespect, even contempt.

 

Frank Hughes has been a dedicated and apparently effective high school teacher for about a decade, and his philosophy of teaching is based on his own memory: "I didn't like going to class in high school. I was often bored, and I found it a stifling environment." He connects now with students who are just like he was, the "veering off" ones and the already lost ones, the kids who've never had their native abilities challenged and appreciated, like young Frank Hughes with that new mower.

Frank and I talked about being "a P.K.," a preacher's kid. I went to a Southern Baptist college in West Texas with a sufficient number of them, and I knew them as usually the first offenders, if there was any prohibited activity afoot. Frank tells me, "On my 18th birthday, my dad sent me down to go register for the draft. Said, 'If you ever get arrested, don't call me.' So I kept my nose clean. Though the people who knew me in Avery might dispute that."

He also talked about the differences between the Methodist Church and the Southern Baptists, the dominant themometer of the political heat in Western North Carolina: "The message for Methodists was more often about helping one another, being a good person, learning how to stay humble. I went to a Baptist church once. They talked an awful lot about going to hell."

 

WataugaWatch: Your opponent Ralph Hise is acknowledged as one of the most powerful Republicans in the General Assembly. Can you sum up his career, and its effect on Western North Carolina, in one sentence? Or go ahead and use a paragraph!

 

FRANK PATTON HUGHES: Hise is a legislator who doesn’t visit his district and passes unwanted legislation, including unnecessary redistricting. To put it another way, he is not a representative. He does what he wants or what the party asks him to do with little regard for his constituents. I don’t believe the voters know what Ralph Hise is doing, because he’s not present. There are many in the district who have attended certain functions at the General Assembly and tried to speak with Hise, only to be ignored.

The decision Frank made last December to go into the Avery County Board of Elections office, pay the filing fee, and sign up to run against Ralph Hise in 2024 was actually prompted by Hise's own dark arts for gerrymandering legislative districts, numerous county school boards, and very recently the districts for the Watauga County Commission. Frank lives in Avery, which was not in Hise's Senate district, but teaches down the mountain in McDowell County, which is. Frank had heard Hise talk about the terrible evils of the mysterious "critical race theory," and he wanted to understand what that is "so I could avoid it." Frank called Hise's office numerous times, asking for an explanation. He called repeatedly, leaving messages with Hise's legislative assistant. But Hise never called back. Total silence, which seemed like total arrogance.

Then suddenly and very recently, Hise moved Avery County into his own District 47, along with Watauga County. Frank had become in the meantime the chair of the Avery Democratic Party, and he had been preaching to his flock that people needed to step forward as Democrats and run for office. Someone said back to him, "How about you?" Good point, as it turned out. Frank went down on the very first day and put his name on the ballot next to Hise's to represent all the school teachers and the students they teach and the parents who want their schools public and not private. Frank is running hard, knocking doors, going to where the people are, and next week he'll be back in the classroom with hundreds of other seriously under-appreciated public school teachers.

No worries, says Frank. I can do this, because someone has got to.

NOTE

Frank Hughes is but one of several new blue-collar candidates who have emerged in Western North Carolina to defy the odds and carry the banner of fairness and community values -- Darren Staley in Wilkes, running in Senate Dist. 36; Jon Council, running for one of the gerrymandered Watauga County Commission seats; Tanya Robinson, running for a Commission seat in Ashe. They make me thankful to be a Democrat. And hopeful.