Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

If you’re going to be a joke, the least you can do is be funny. Shorty Price understood that. I wish more people did. 

Well-known in the state of Alabama, Ralph “Shorty” Price ran unsuccessfully for governor as often as possible in the 1960s and 1970s. They called him the “Clown Prince” of Alabama politics and declared him a “self-appointed cheerleader” for his beloved Crimson Tide. But for all his buffoonish antics, Price was also a country lawyer and a working-class hero, often using wild behavior and outlandish sentiments to draw attention to real problems. Below is a posthumous tribute to Price by local commentator Bob Ingram, which ran on Montgomery’s WSFA-TV in the early 1980s. 

They say that every joke has a grain of truth in it. In the clip above, Price proclaimed that he thought the term for an Alabama governor should be two years, not four. The way he put it: if a man couldn’t steal all he wanted in two years, he wasn’t right for the job. Political pundits in his day presumed that Price just wanted shorter terms so he could run for office more often. Both seem valid. These days, I’d be satisfied if our rolling array of characters in Congress and various state-level offices would limit their time in the spotlight to two years. Or better yet, if, like Price, they only appeared briefly during election season to yuck it up a bit.

I think of Shorty Price when I hear about politicians today who run for public office not to be leaders or problem-solvers, but celebrities or personalities. Unlike today, the voters of yesteryear understood what they saw and rarely voted for Shorty Price. Sadly, many voters today lack that level of discernment. Beyond that, if a candidate is only running for office in order to be a character on TV . . . then for Pete’s sake, be entertaining! As a long-time public school teacher, I can say with certainty that disruption for its own sake is not entertaining. But there is a place for these aspirations. Ever since the invention of screen media, there have been fools wanting to be on it, and if all somebody wants is attention, then do something worthy of attention. For example, a green suit, a funny haircut, and talking puppets worked quite well for Captain Kangaroo. If that idea is too old-school, there are plenty of opportunities for people who lack talent and charisma to achieve fame on reality TV, TikTok, and YouTube. My advice to a wannabe attention-seeker is: if you can’t outdo a man like Shorty Price, then stay in the audience.

Shorty Price died in a car wreck in 1980, and there hasn’t been another one like him. The man had strong opinions and unique ways of sharing them. Once, Price expressed his disdain for the University of Tennessee football team by mooning their band at an Alabama game, and he got arrested for it. After he was sentenced to jail time and was being led away, he purportedly told the judge, “See you next year!” It’s hard to say what Price’s effects on Alabama politics were – did he actually sway public opinion or affect an election outcome? – but that’s not really the point. Somebody has got to say what needs to be said, and often we leave that duty to the clown, because it’s just too hard to take the town crier seriously.