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I'm the mayor and I don't have $3

Remembering the time my hometown mayor tried and failed to get into a minor league baseball game, then $3, for free

I was born and mostly raised in Johnson City, TN, a medium-sized town in the upper right corner of the Tennessee parallelogram. It is the birthplace of Mountain Dew and the home of East Tennessee State University, where I was in the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music program for several years but never actually finished the minor. Its city government is run by a five-member board of commissioners, a city manager appointed by the board, and some assistant managers with special areas of oversight. Every two years, the board selects someone among themselves to be mayor, but it’s mostly a ceremonial position, for ribbon cuttings and elementary school visits and that kind of thing. This detail will be important soon.

Johnson City is in a pretty part of the Appalachians; it’s a couple hours either way to Great Smoky Mountains National Park or the Blue Ridge Parkway, but those are about the vibes. It’s enough town that the trappings aren’t that different from any American suburbia — Target, McMansions, chain organic grocery store near the college soccer stadium — but it’s also kind of a hub for people who live up in the hills to come down and do town stuff, so the country element is real, and you're always in sight of of the mountains. (I got vaxxed there while visiting my parents, and the week I flew back to Queens, the New York Times ran one of their glossy anthropological safaris on vaccine hesitancy in remotest Appalachia, the land that modernity forgot, with photo spreads including an empty clinic at the hospital system where I got my shots. That stuff isn’t inaccurate; those places are real. It’s just a choice to run photos of the most preciously shabby buildings you can find when these people also, like, go to Target.)

Still, the region has a character. There is a biker church. There is a cowboy church. There was and may still be a combination vacuum and gun store. There is the Bristol Motor Speedway, which as I write is being set up for Speedway In Lights, a holiday attraction where they put Christmas lights around the track for your family to drive through. And there were, for many years, the Johnson City Cardinals.

The Cardinals were the Rookie-level affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1975 to 2020 (they’re still around as a summer collegiate team). Their field is Howard Johnson Field, but not Howard Johnson like the hotel and also not Johnson like Johnson City, just Howard Johnson, a city employee from the fifties. The big leagues it was not, but to my memory, it was a well-run, well-liked little team, and real players did come through the system. If you're interested in a psychological drama of a baseball story that’s equal parts inspiring and haunting, look into or revisit Rick Ankiel’s biography sometime; Johnson City is where he went when pitching rehab was not going well at the Memphis Redbirds. This story from the period gives some of the game day atmosphere — humble and sincere, if a little homespun — and if it's good to know, things mostly get better for Ankiel from there.

But I am not here to talk baseball. I am here to talk mayoral scandal.

In the summer of 2004, then-mayor Pete Paduch attempted to enter a Cardinals game without paying the admission fee, which at that time was $3. The exact circumstances were a matter of dispute and, for the mayor, soon became a matter of pride — one he would pursue to a permanent place in regional legend and, eventually, the highest levels of American sport.

Archival scans from the Johnson City Press tell the story:

Members of the Johnson City Sports Foundation said Mayor Pete Paduch did not tell the truth about a recent incident in which he was denied free access to a Johnson City Cardinals baseball game.

“What he said was untrue, the statements he made on TV were blatantly untrue,” said JCSF President Jeff Banyas about the way Paduch told the story during Thursday’s meeting of the Johnson City Commission. “As president of the foundation, I will not stand by and let one our members be berated on TV.”

At the close of the commission meeting, the mayor said he was turned away from the entrance to Cardinal Park by a member of the JCSF board because he did not have a ticket. Paduch said he explained that he was not carrying any money, thinking the board member would let him pay the $3 admission fee later.

“It’s not the dollar amount, it’s just the way they approached it. I was very embarrassed, everyone was looking,” Paduch said.

Paduch did not return a phone call requesting further comment.

Staff writer John Thompson is a man at work in the timing and delivery here, and also employing good anti-disinformation practices by reporting the debunking before the spin. I have no explanation for how or why this would come up at a city commission meeting. The article continues:

Robert Branum, the board member who turned Paduch away, says that is not the way it happened.

“I was volunteering my time taking up tickets last week,” Branum said. He said the mayor walked behind him and Branum asked him for his ticket. “He said, ‘I am the mayor, I don’t have to pay,’” Branum said.

In the past, the city ran the Cardinals. City commissioners were issued season passes to all Appalachian League games. When the JCSF took over the operation, it decided all profits from the games should go to area youth programs. The free passes were discontinued.

“I told the mayor I was on the board of directors and I bought season tickets. He said ‘but I am the mayor,’ then turned and walked away.”

Branum said Paduch never said anything about not having any money.

Following the incident, Mayor Pete sent an irate fax (this detail will also be important soon) to the JCSF, which the Press quotes in part: “[The director] seemed to enjoy the situation he had put me in. I do believe as mayor of Johnson City I could have at least been offered entrance my promise to bring the $3 to the next game. I was forced to leave.”

Of course, if Paduch didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of his constituents, he could have chosen not to escalate at any time. Instead, he committed several classic mayoral blunders: never start fights you can’t finish in televised city commission meetings, never fax mad, and never embroil yourself in any scandal with a single comedically perfect detail that everyone who talks about it will mention.

Walking away from personal defeat murmuring “but I am the mayor” like you're Miss Vanjie is very funny. But for Paduch, I’m convinced, it was the $3. The smallest cash denomination there’s no American bill for. An amount I wouldn’t have sent a Venmo request for at my brokest. Just catchier, somehow, than $2 or $4. Everyone in town knew this story, and they knew how many dollars it was. A city attorney was still riffing on it years later when Paduch was embroiled in another controversy:

"We're going to be closing our file on this matter," Herrin said. "However, I'll be sure to get that $3 refunded to Mr. Paduch before the start of the Cardinals' season."

Amid all this, the neighboring Elizabethton Twins organization did give him a season pass to the remaining Appalachian League games. But for Paduch, it was bigger than the Appalachian League and, I have to suspect, bigger than baseball. And his passion on the matter was still very much live when sent another fax, handwritten, to the St. Louis Cardinals central office.

In a heroic moment for local journalism, the Johnson City Press somehow got a copy of this and ran it in the paper. I reproduce it in full for you now.

St Louis Cardinals (Management???)

The Elizabethton Twins have taken care of the Johnson City Cardinals attitude with the following “Courtesy Pass”. It’s good to know that Professional baseball has one “class” organization.

Hopefully the Twins under their outstanding manager Ray Smith and coach Jeff Reed can pull off another championship. To the Cardinals “Top Brass” don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Mr St. Lewis Cardinal if you raised the price of the peanuts at the ball park here in Johnson City to $3 which is a 5¢ increase you could generate more profit.

Hopefully the next time your upper management comes to Johnson City I can be notified so I can welcome them to our great city. I also have a message on fan courtesy I would like to share with them.

MAYOR
Pete Paduch

The record is silent on whether this got a response.

As for the local Cardinals organization, they handled it all in the best way possible: a promotional night where you got in free if you claimed to be the mayor. It's a family story now that one of my younger sisters refused to do this, out of loyalty to the facts, and despite pressure from parents and siblings. "But I'm not the mayor," she protested. Which is pretty respectable commitment to principles for a three-year-old, I think. A Tennessean of integrity. Maybe even mayor material.

(Big thanks to my dad for help retrieving archival content.)

Poem: “Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare” by Wendy Pratt

I will tell you how it was. I slipped
into the hare like a nude foot
into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones
to one side to make room for my shape
so I could settle myself like a child within her.
In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing
it apart across my fingers to web across my palm.
Here is where our separation ends:
I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm
down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this […]

→ Continue reading at April Is

The Rest

• Have you seen the size of the crowd from the Palestine rally in DC this weekend? I mean have you really seen the whole crowd, because it's hard to; even high aerial shots seem to cut off so many people at the edge of the frame. This timelapse from the march portion probably gets as close as anything. I couldn't see any of that on the ground — you could have told me 40,000 and you could have told me 200,000 — because when you're a small person moving in a crowd, the crowd is ambient noise and pressure, but it's mostly the people around you, what they're doing, how you interact. So what I remember most are the kids. There were so many: some fully locked in, shouting and singing and waving signs; some kind of waiting out a parent's errand with their own activities, which is fine; some tucked in strollers under blankets or flags. A boy in a blue jacket giggling and weaving through people's legs while a man did his best to corral him. A teen girl helping some older women hand out snacks. A baby crying and crying out of sheer overstimulation and you know what, kiddo, I get it. A girl in a pink hoodie holding what looked like a child-made sign that said NOT ANOTHER SREBRENICA. A little boy on a man's shoulders during the march, leading chants. You've never seen a kid look more proud and loved, and he was loved. The whole circle of people within sight or earshot of him loved that kid. His voice called and ours called back, a ripple or halo of voices around him, moving along the streets at the pace of the march. He grinned and we grinned. Nearby, demonstrators carried a long, too long, scroll with the names of Gazan children who have died in the last few weeks. Call your reps.

• This will go out on Election Day, so go vote if that's available in your area. I'll be working the polls again, a 17-hour day that runs from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. with limited breaks, but typically a worthwhile and interesting experience. During the primaries, for example, my check-in table partner told me thrilling stories about her adult children and particularly her adult son, who got a settlement after being injured in a weird way while working at Rikers and is now spending the money in ways she isn't sure are wise. Then, on her lunch break, she retrieved the contents of a long-lost family safety deposit box and brought them back in a plastic bag to the school gym we were working at. She looked through it the whole rest of the day between assisting voters, pausing to show me nightclub souvenir photos from the eighties or notes from her late dad handwritten on Colombian money. Anyway, please vote.

• Had a good Halloweekend and a good Halloween. I kind of imagined strolling around the city in full makeup and a wig would make me feel sexy and confident, but turns out my basic personality is still the same with a wig on it. But I do have this wig now, and it is at risk of coming out again if I have a few drinks at home and get to FaceTiming people over the winter.

• I keep thinking "Mr St. Lewis Cardinal" in the exact cadence Marianne Williamson says "Mister President — if you're listening" in this video of her from the 2020 debates set to Twin Peaks music and now you can too.

• To end on another northeast Tennessee legend, here's a pickup truck my family sees around the area every once in a while and excitedly texts each other about.

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I'm reading: Agents and Books | Anxiety Shark | Ask a Fuck Up | Bitches Gotta Eat | The Breakside | Bring Me Giants | Channel 6 | Craft Talk | Defector | The Ed’s Up | Garbage Day | Hell Gate | ¡Hola Papi! | Hung Up | Life Is a Sacred Text | The Lost Songs Project | Making It | The Melt | Ordinary Plots | Pome | Rax King | SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE | The Small Bow | Something New | Starting Out | To a Green Thought | Unsnackable | Walk It Off | Welcome to Hell World

Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.