Jontz had been staying at the Altman’s home while engaging in
a dogged door-to-door campaign in the four counties of the Twentieth District.
Altman and her husband asked him if he needed any help. “No, it’s late,” Altman
remembered Jontz responding, “but there’s a laundromat up there that’s still
open I think I’ll go hit before I quit for the night.”
The next day Jontz, a twenty-two-year-old Indiana University
graduate with an unpaid job as a caretaker for a local nature preserve,
defeated his heavily favored Republican opponent, John M. “Jack” Guy, Indiana
House majority leader. “I must have knocked on half the doors in the district,”
Jontz said of what he called a “shoe-leather” campaign. “And I found that
people like to have someone come to their door and talk to them, even if it is
a young kid. I told them that I wasn’t a lawyer or politician, but that I was
interested in people, in dealing with them personally. And that was about it.” Jontz
had entered the race in the majority Republican district in large part to
oppose a multi-million-dollar U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam project on Big
Pine Creek near Williamsport, Indiana. He had gone to bed on election night
believing he had lost after hearing a report from the final precinct in Warren
County indicating that he had been defeated by a scant two votes. The next
morning he awoke to learn that there had been an error and he had won by the
same slim margin. “One more vote than I needed to win!” he later exclaimed. The
unexpected result stunned election officials, with one deputy clerk in Warren County
marveling, “I never before realized just how important that one vote can be.”
Jontz’s initial run for office, which saw him survive two
recounts to secure his legislative seat, set the standard for his subsequent longshot
political career. As a liberal Democrat (he preferred the term progressive)
usually running in conservative districts, Jontz had political pundits predicting
his defeat in every election only to see him celebrating another victory with
his happy supporters, always clad in a scruffy plaid jacket with a hood from
high school that he wore for good luck. “I always hope for the best and fight
for the worst,” said Jontz. He won five terms as state representative for the
Twentieth District (Benton , Newton ,
Warren , and White counties), served two years in
the Indiana Senate, and captured three terms in the U.S. Congress representing
the sprawling Fifth Congressional District in northwestern Indiana
that stretched from Lake County in the north to Grant County
in the south. Jontz told a reporter that his political career had always “been
based on my willingness and role as a spokesman for the average citizen.”
Jontz managed to win re-election in the Republican district thanks
to a combination of tireless campaigning; a relentless focus on serving his
constituents through such activities as town hall meetings, a toll-free number
for those wishing to question their congressman, and face-to-face encounters at
neighborhood coffee shops at all hours of the day; and a willingness to listen
to dissenting opinions. “You have to disagree sometimes,” he noted. “But you
have to disagree agreeably.” Tom Sugar, a longtime Jontz aide, called the
congressman “very, very politically savvy, not in a sense that he manipulated
voters, I don’t mean that. What I mean is, he knew the people he cared about
and learned their issues very deeply. And he sincerely fought for their
interests. And he fought for the interests of his district.” Tom Buis, an
agricultural policy expert on the congressman’s staff, remembered returning
late at night to the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, D.C., only
to find Jontz still at his desk reading every letter that went into and out of
his office. “If his constituents were paying him by the hour, he was working
for less than minimum wage,” said Buis, “because he worked around the clock.
They got their money’s worth.”
Each election season voters in Jontz’s congressional district
could count on hearing a knock on their front door and seeing the rumpled, tousle-haired
Democrat ready to promote his candidacy and talk about whatever issue that
might concern them that year. “Jim believed in knocking on every door that was
knockable,” said Sugar, who went on to serve as chief of staff for U.S. Senator
Evan Bayh. Whenever a community in his district hosted a parade, Jontz could be
found riding the route on his sister’s rusty, old blue Schwinn bicycle with
mismatched tires, waving to the crowd lining the streets, his tie flapping in
the breeze—an effort that won him the title of “best congressman on two wheels”
from one Indiana reporter. (Jontz’s record was riding his bicycle in seven
Fourth of July parades in one day.) The national media also paid attention,
finding Jontz to be a good story, noted Scott Campbell, who served as the
congressman’s press secretary. “There were other liberal Democrats in the U.S.
Congress, there were other conservative districts in the U.S. Congress, but the
number of solidly Republican districts represented by liberal Democrats was a
number you could count on your hand,” said Campbell .
Christopher Klose, who managed Jontz’s first run for
Congress and served as his chief of staff in Washington , D.C. ,
called his former boss “a true populist,” noting he could be just as
distrustful of mindless government as he could of reckless corporate behavior.
He remembered Jontz saying that issues needed to be examined from “top to
bottom, not left to right.” One of Klose’s favorite memories of Jontz is one
culled from the campaign trail. After another long day and night seeking votes,
the candidate, after packing up his car for the next day’s schedule of events,
uttered what came to be known to his staff as the Jim Jontz prayer. “Jim would
just shake his head and look up and say, ‘Lord, help me win this one, and I
promise next time we’ll do it right,’” Klose said.
This single-minded devotion to serving the voters—he kept a
homemade sign given to him by a supporter in his Washington, D.C., office that
read “This office belongs to the people of Indiana’s 5th District”—came with a
price in his private life, as Jontz endured two divorces. “He always had a
goal,” said his first wife, Elaine Caldwell Emmi, who today lives in Salt Lake City , Utah .
“He knew exactly what he wanted to do.” She recalled one conversation with her
husband as their marriage was falling apart in which she told him that every
morning she awoke questioning if this is what she wanted to be doing and how
should she lead her life. “He looked at me and said, ‘I never ask that
question. I know exactly what I should be doing,’” Emmi said. “I think he
really liked being a public official, a servant of the people—that was really
his goal.” Being a congressman, noted one of Jontz’s aides, became his
“all-consuming passion.”
From an early age Jontz, the eldest of two children born to
Leland, an Indianapolis businessman, and Pauline (Polly) Jontz, displayed a
penchant for organization and a dedication to nature while growing up in the
1960s in the Northern Hills subdivision on the city’s north side—a “semirural
setting” that enabled him to develop his interest in the outdoors. “Mom
encouraged me to chase butterflies, and we bought all the Golden [Nature]
guidebooks,” Jontz said. Polly, who worked at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
and for many years as president of the Conner Prairie Pioneer Settlement,
remembered her son as “a very intense child, very curious, very serious, [and] very
focused.” Jontz’s kindergarten teacher told his mother that he had been the
only student she had taught “who had the dignity to be president of the United States .”
He also displayed the leadership qualities that served him well during his
political career, organizing the neighborhood children for impromptu football
games and bicycle races. “He was a fun young man to know because he was
interested in everything,” said Polly.
On family trips during the summer to historic sites and
national parks, Jontz made sure to add to his growing rock collection by
stopping at every rock store on the route and hunting for geodes along the
roadside with his pickaxe, noted his sister, Mary Lee Turk. His other hobbies
included music (Jontz played the piano, trombone, and French horn) and a
devotion to the ideals of the Boy Scouts of America as a member of Troop Number
117, earning the rank of Eagle Scout while in the seventh grade. “My main aims
now are to receive a good education, to become an asset to my community and a
good citizen, and to live up to the Scout oath and law,” Jontz wrote in his
application for Eagle Scout. When he was older, Jontz continued to support the organization,
working summers at Camp Belzer , a Boy Scout reservation near Lawrence , Indiana .
He also maintained his interest in the outdoors by leading nature hikes through
Indianapolis
parks for the Children’s Museum and serving as a naturalist for the Indiana
State Parks system.
Jontz’s interest in nature meant that there were often wild
animals roaming the family’s home at 1141 East Eightieth Street. Camp Belzer
had a small zoo with rescued wild animals. At the end of one summer, Jontz
brought home with him a de-scented skunk he named Jerome. Although his father
built a cage for the skunk, it sometimes escaped. During one try for freedom
the skunk hid under a bed and bit Leland on the finger when he attempted to
retrieve it and return it to its enclosure. Other members of Jontz’s wildlife
menagerie included a hawk that Jontz fed raw meat and a squirming mass of baby
rattlesnakes. “You never knew what would be in our house,” noted Turk.
From his parents Jontz learned the lesson of always
following his convictions but expressing disagreement within established
structures. Both Polly and Leland Jontz were staunch Republicans, and were
surprised to hear their son note, after saying something to him about your
party, meaning the GOP, “Mom, I’m a Democrat.” Despite their political
differences, his parents supported Jontz’s quest to find a suitable vocation
for his devotion to hard work and wide knowledge. After graduating from North
Central High School, Jontz entered Williams College, a small liberal-arts institution
in Massachusetts, but spent only one semester there, calling it “too academic”
for his tastes. “I read 12 hours a day there,” Jontz recalled of his time at
Williams. “I had had enough of that, so when I came to I.U. [Indiana University ]
I had some spare time.”
In January 1971 Jontz enrolled at IU in Bloomington , where he majored in geology and lived
in Wright Quad with a freshman named Bob Rodenkirk. A native of Chicago , Illinois ,
Rodenkirk originally had been roommates with a relative of Philippine dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, who very quickly flunked out of the university after spending
more time enjoying himself than studying. Jontz proved to be quite different,
with Rodenkirk describing him as a serious and driven student, especially when
it came to environmental issues. “I can’t remember a time when he didn’t have a
to-do list a half a mile long,” said Rodenkirk. As more and more Americans became
concerned with conserving the country’s natural resources, Jontz responded by
spending a large amount of his time with the Biology Crisis Center, a student
group working on conservation and environmental affairs in the Bloomington area.
With the center he worked on such issues as the belching black smoke from the
university’s coal-fired power plant, a sinkhole that had emerged in front of
Wright Quad, how IU disposed of plastic foodware, the ecology of the Jordan
River, and opposing a dam that threatened the Lost
River in Orange County .
Tracking down Jontz during his days at IU could be
problematic, as he spent little time in his dormitory room, getting by on just
four to five hours of sleep per night—a schedule he kept in later years (one of
his favorite quotes was “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and
organize”). Through his work on environmental issues, Jontz became very
involved in state politics, helping to write the conservation and recreation
platform for the Indiana Democratic Party and serving on an environmental
education task force created by State Superintendent of Public Instruction John
J. Laughlin. Even when he was in his dormitory room, Jontz received little
rest, fielding questions from such noted Hoosier political figures as Governor Otis Bowen and U.S.
Senators Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke. “The phone calls I would take from Jim
were amazing,” remembered Rodenkirk. What scared Rodenkirk was Jontz’s habit of
reading a textbook lying open on his lap while driving back and forth from Bloomington to Indianapolis
to lobby on behalf of the environment at the Indiana Statehouse. Jontz always
made it back safely, and Rodenkirk was “amazed at how much information he could
process. He was a born leader.”
Jontz’s work on environmental matters at the university
brought him into contact with another student activist, Emmi, the daughter of
Lynton K. Caldwell, a nationally known professor of political science at IU
famous for being one of the principal architects behind securing environmental
impact statements for federal projects. Although Emmi had observed Jontz in
geology and folklore classes they shared, the two did not become close until she
helped arrange a trip with other IU students to Washington , D.C. ,
to lobby on wilderness issues before a U.S. Senate subcommittee for an environmental
law class she was taking. Through her father she was able to find
accommodations for the group in the basement of a church on Capitol Hill for
just seventy-five cents a night. “He really wanted to make a difference,” Emmi
said of Jontz, whom she married in June 1973.
Although she hated public speaking, Jontz relished such
events. “And he got better at it every day,” she said. “He remembered
everyone’s name and took delight in walking into a room full of people as no
one was a stranger—there just were people he hadn’t yet befriended.” Although
it might sound too grandiose to say that Jontz wanted to save the planet, Emmi
noted “that was his ultimate goal, to be a spokesman for those that couldn’t
speak—the trees, the animals, the air, the water.”
Graduating from IU in 1973 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, Jontz
worked for a few months in Chicago as program director for the Lake Michigan
Federation before returning to his home state as conservation director for the
Indiana Conservation Council, where he also edited the organization’s monthly
newsletter. A potential ecological threat in Warren
County , however, soon drew Jontz and
his wife to northwestern Indiana .
As far back as the 1930s, there had been proposals to build a dam and reservoir
on Big Pine Creek, which flowed from southwestern White
County south through Benton and Warren
counties before entering the Wabash River near Attica ,
Indiana . Along its route the
creek flowed along scenic sandstone cliffs and Fall Creek Gorge, noteworthy for
the large potholes carved into the floor of the steep-sided canyon. In October
1965 Congress, in its Flood Control Act, authorized the Army Corps of Engineers
to build an earth and rockfill dam on Big Pine Creek at an estimated cost of
$28 million. The resulting reservoir would cover more than a thousand acres northeast
of Williamsport , Indiana .
The project, which received support from Republican
congressman John T. Myers representing the Seventh Congressional District, drew
protests from state environmental groups and several citizens in Warren County
(a mail poll taken by a local newspaper has residents against the dam by a
ten-to-one margin). Local groups opposing the project, including the Committee
on Big Pine Creek and the Friends of the Big Pine Creek, charged that the dam
and its reservoir would engulf sixty homes, ten commercial properties, 2,347
acres of cropland, 2,200 acres of pastureland, and 1,995 acres of woodlands.
Hoping to protect a portion of the area from destruction, the Nature
Conservancy, with the help of a $20,000 loan from a Purdue
University janitor, bought a forty-three-acre
site in Warren County , property that included Fall
Creek Gorge. The conservancy hired Jontz to serve as caretaker and program
director for the property. He lived in a handmade house near the preserve with Emmi,
two dogs (Brother and Sister), and two cats (Vance and Birch, named for Indiana ’s two U.S. senators at that time).
Often dressed in his trademark blue-jean overalls, Jontz
quickly became one of the leaders in the fight against the Big Pine Creek dam, dominating
a Corps of Engineers hearing on the project and appearing in the forefront of a
protest held during a fund-raising golf event for Congressman Myers that saw
dam opponents cruise around the country club in a mile-long caravan of cars,
pickup trucks, motorcycles, and farm implements. Protestors confronted Myers
with signs reading “Only You Can Prevent Forest Floods” and “Dam the Corps.” Bill
Parmenter, who served as president of the Committee on Big Pine Creek, remembered
Jontz as outgoing, friendly, and possessed with real leadership qualities. “He
could make people do things—more than they thought they would be able to do,”
said Parmenter, who lived to see the federal government finally abandon the dam
project for good in the early 1990s.
To help give voice to those opposing the dam, Jontz
attempted to find someone to run for the state legislature against incumbent
Guy, a Monticello attorney, in the rural district. Unable to secure a candidate
for the Democratic nomination, he approached party leaders in the area and told
them he wanted to run. “They were tickled to death that someone wanted to do
it,” Jontz said. With help from his wife and a few friends, Jontz began a shoe
leather, door-to-door campaign, visiting every house in such small communities
in the district as Boswell, Brook, Brookston, Chalmers, Fowler, Goodland, Kentland,
Monon , Morocco ,
Otterbein, Oxford , Otterbein, Reynolds, West Lebanon , Wolcott, and many others. He also attended
every fish fry he could find and three straight weeks of county fairs, shaking
hands with countless potential voters. “I campaigned on the personal attention
idea,” Jontz said. “Issues are important to people, but more important to them
is feeling that government is responsive.”
After his razor-thin win over Guy in the general election,
Jontz worked as hard during his days as a legislator as he had during the
campaign. When the legislature was not in session, he could be found back in
the district, attending meetings of service clubs and any other local event he
could find. Jontz often talked with voters and turned their concerns about
issues into legislation. After speaking with a grade school teacher in Wolcott,
Jontz introduced a bill requiring reading and writing tests for high school
graduates, an idea that became law. He and his wife also scoured every
newspaper in the four-country district, clipping out articles about people in
the news, pasting them onto official stationery, and having Jontz write a
personal note congratulating them on whatever honor they had achieved. “Sometimes
we would be up very late at night and get really silly,” Emmi said, “concocting
imaginary headlines—‘County Commissioner Arrested for Stealing Hubcaps’ or
‘Honor Student Arrested for Prostitution Ring.’ You can imagine the gales of
laughter that resulted.”
As a full-time legislator serving in a state where most
members of the general assembly have other jobs, Jontz worked long hours when
the legislature was in session. Many of his fellow Democrats sought his
expertise on such issues as the environment and health care. Stan Jones, who,
like Jontz, won his first Indiana House race in 1974 while in his twenties,
noted at first the two of them were sometimes mistaken for young pages by the
older lawmakers. He called Jontz a “very responsible legislator. He didn’t miss
votes, he came to every committee meeting, read bills—not every legislator read
bills.” Frequently, at the start of a day’s work in the House, Jones said that
Jontz would walk in with eight to ten amendments for legislation he would then parcel
out to other representatives to introduce. During one session in the 1980s, Jontz convinced another Democratic legislator to introduce an amendment
forbidding utility companies from charging their ratepayers for unfinished
power plants—a feature that became law.
Other issues Jontz found success with included nursing home
reform; child, spouse, and elder abuse laws; preventive health screening; solar
energy tax credits; a state cancer registry; residential programs for the
chronically mentally ill; and the state’s unified tax credit for the elderly.
“I think people [legislators] were pretty frustrated with him, but he was very
effective,” Jones said of his fellow Democrat. “He was just determined to get
things accomplished and it really didn’t matter to him that they might be upset
by that.”
In 1986 GOP congressman Elwood “Bud” Hillis, who had
represented the Fifth Congressional District since 1971, announced he would not
seek re-election. Jontz captured the Democratic nomination for the position and
faced fellow state senator James Butcher of Kokomo . Sugar, a Howard County
native whose parents supported Butcher and even held a fund-raiser for him in
their home, recalled receiving a call from Alan Maxwell, his political science
professor at IU Kokomo, saying there was a candidate running for Congress who
needed his help in organizing the county. His first meeting with Jontz occurred
at the Howard County 4-H Fairgrounds. “I’d seen a
photo of Jim in the paper before and, bless his heart, he wasn’t the most
telegenic guy in the world,” said Sugar, who had never participated in a
political campaign. Impressed by the candidate’s passion for issues, he agreed
to help with his door-to-door efforts in the county, assisted by local members
of the United Auto Workers and environmentalists from Indianapolis .
On a typical day, Jontz started knocking on doors on one
side of the street beginning at three in the afternoon, with Sugar or another
campaign aide taking the other side. The usual spiel included introducing
themselves, telling a homeowner that Jontz was campaigning in the area, and
giving them material on his candidacy. If someone did not answer, Jontz would
leave behind his literature with a note signed, “Sorry I missed you, Jim.”
Sugar said that the rule of thumb was that the campaign did not “stop knocking
on doors until people started showing up [dressed] in robes.” After completing
their first canvas of the county, every house that could be visited, Sugar
quoted Jontz as indicating, “‘OK, let’s do it again.’ So we did it again.” Two
days before the election, the second canvas had been completed, but Jontz
decided to do it again. “He believed in working until the last dog died,” said
Sugar.
Just hours after the polls closed on November 4, 1986, with
Jontz defeating Butcher 80,722 (51.4 percent) to 75,507 (48.1 percent), the new
congressman found Sugar as the celebration at campaign headquarters in
Monticello was winding down and told him he wanted to visit a Chrysler plant in
Kokomo the next day to thank the workers for their support. Bright and early
the next morning, after only a few hours of sleep, Jontz stood at the plant’s
gate to greet the groggy automotive workers as they started their early shift,
jolting them awake with his words: “Hey, thanks a lot guys, I won’t let you
down. I really appreciate your support yesterday, I will not forget.” Most of
the workers acted as if this was the first time a candidate had ever thanked
them personally for their vote just hours after winning an election. “It was an
example of everything our campaign stood for,” said Sugar. “We meant it. We’re
really going to fight for working folks.”
Jontz ran his four-room congressional office to emphasize
constituent service, placing more staff members in the district back in Indiana
than in Washington, D.C., helping veterans, Social Security recipients, and
farmers. In comparing notes with other chiefs of staff, Klose found that his
office had a far greater constituent caseload than any other delegation, with
the closest office handling only a third of the casework Jontz’s office did.
“Every time he [Jontz] would go out and say, ‘Tell me your problems,’ there
were plenty of problems people wanted to tell you about,” said Klose.
The congressman remained in Washington only when he had to, spending the
rest of his time back in the district attending to a packed schedule of events;
his staff had to create specialized computer software just to keep track of where
he had to appear each day. The hardest position on Jontz’s staff was scheduler
because of his intense desire to be efficient with his time. Altman remembered
Jontz becoming “totally frustrated” on Mother’s Day because there was nothing
for him to do. “People used to joke . . . if there were two people together,
Jim Jontz would find them,” said Altman. For Sugar, who marveled that the
congressman had town meetings where there were no towns, one of the most memorable
experiences he had while working for Jontz occurred during an early morning
trip from Kokomo to Burket in Kosciusko County to meet with
farmers in a local restaurant. “Those farmers could not believe it,” Sugar
said. “I’m sure they talked about that for the next two years—that Jim Jontz
walked in at five o’clock in the morning and had coffee with them and talked
about agriculture policy.”
The hard work and attention to detail paid off, as Jontz
twice won re-election. While in Congress he worked to make his mark on
legislation in a similar manner as he had while serving in the Indiana
legislature—through amendments, a procedure he used effectively on the 1990
Farm Bill. While other congressmen went home for the evening, Jontz stayed late
until the night, even making popcorn for hungry staffers from other
congressional offices as they worked to settle differences between House and
Senate versions of legislation. The staff members were not only “just floored”
that they got a snack, Buis noted, but there were also astonished that “it was
delivered and popped by a member of Congress. But Jim never thought of himself
as someone with a title above anyone else. That was part of his appeal to
people.” Klose noted that Jontz also made his mark in Congress by working within
the system to earn financial assistance for such projects back in his district
as the Hoosier Heartland Corridor road project, the psychological unit at the
Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, and Grissom Air Force Base near Peru.
Although Jontz attempted to find common ground with
Republican legislators, particularly on agricultural issues with GOP senator
Richard Lugar, he was not afraid to vote his conscience rather than what might
be popular back in his district, including voting against the use of force in
the Gulf War. “He didn’t care because he was doing the right thing,” said Campbell . “Look at the
political landscape these days and ask yourself how many people are doing
whatever it is they are doing, voting however it is they are voting, because
it’s the right thing to do. That’s a pretty small club.”
Jontz’s firm support of environmental issues frustrated and
sometimes enraged colleagues from across the aisle. His sponsorship of the
Ancient Forest Protection Act, which would have forbid cutting stands of
ancient timber in three western states, caused one Oregon congressman to call
him “a rank opportunist,” while another member of the Oregon delegation kicked
him out of his office in the middle of a heated argument. Angered by Jontz’s
successful push to end arrangements benefiting timber companies in the Tongass National Forest
in Alaska ,
Congessman Don Young of that state introduced a bill to establish 35 percent of
Jontz’s district as a national forest. To answer charges that he was meddling
in matters outside of the district he represented, Jontz called the ancient
forests “a national treasure, much as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the
Everglades are. If we cut the last 10 percent of the ancient forests for
short-term greed, they will be gone forever. If we preserve them, future
generations, as well as our own, will be able to enjoy their benefits.”
Jontz’s life on the razor-edge of politics came to an end in
the 1992 election, when he was defeated by Republican challenger Steve Buyer.
Several issues hurt Jontz during that campaign, including an antipolitician
mood in the electorate inspired by the independent presidential candidacy of
businessman Ross Perot, opposition from western carpenter’s unions for Jontz’s
stand on old-growth forests, opposition from the pharmaceutical industry after
he held a town meeting to discuss the high cost of prescription drugs, and a
scandal involving the House bank involving a small number of overdrafts of
checks. “It was the death of a thousand cuts,” noted Sugar. Reflecting on the
first defeat ever in his political career, Jontz noted that he had been
“skating on thin” ice for a long time as a Democrat in mainly Republican
districts. “A lot of people didn’t think I was going to last more than one term
in the state legislature,” he told a reporter from the Indianapolis Star. “So I have been living on borrowed time for
years.”
Late on election night, when he knew he had been defeated,
Jontz asked Sugar to take him back to the Chrysler plant in Kokomo he had visited after he won his first
race for Congress. Early the next morning, Jontz was at the automotive factory gates
to thank the workers for their years of support, telling them it had been an
honor to serve them in Washington, D.C. Sugar remembered that some of the
workers refused to shake hands with Jontz, but, now liberated from seeking
their votes, the former congressman responded: “Oh, come on now, be a man,
shake my hand.” Sugar said he was proud of his boss “for not just rolling over
and taking it. He had given his life to their causes.”
In 1994 Jontz made his final try for political office,
losing a longshot attempt to unseat Lugar, a fellow Eagle Scout, who became the
longest serving U.S.
senator in the state’s history. Jontz lost in spite of a humorous television advertising
campaign that poked fun at Lugar’s interest in foreign affairs. The
advertisement had the former congressman jumping into his pickup truck after
learning that Lugar had secured $3 billion for Moscow. Jontz drove to
Moscow—Moscow, Indiana—to ask someone from the community about the money.
“Nope, haven’t seen a cent,” a woman in the advertisement told the candidate
while she stood under the Moscow town sign.
After his defeat, Jontz left
Indiana to battle on behalf of numerous progressive causes in an attempt to
forge coalitions among labor and environmental groups. He led an unsuccessful
campaign to stop the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement with
the Citizens Trade Campaign, served as president of the Americans for
Democratic Action, and worked as executive director for the Western Ancient
Forest Campaign. He participated in acts of civil disobedience, including
blocking a logging road in Oregon ’s Siskiyou National
Forest in the spring of 1995. His parents were
aghast that he was arrested during the protest.
Jontz tried to mollify them by noting, “I had my suit on!”
Jontz moved to Portland , Oregon , in 1999, but Indiana still had a hold on him. He told his
mother that he sometimes thought of returning to the Hoosier State to buy a
plot of land in the Brown County hills, where he could sit back, relax, and
enjoy the trees. He never had that chance, dying at his home in Portland on April 14,
2007, after a two-year battle with colon cancer that had spread to his liver.
Visiting him during the former congressman’s final illness,
Sugar recalled walking into a Portland
hospital room to see Jontz on a conference call with fellow workers in the
environmental cause, offering them his ideas on what to do next. For Campbell , hearing about
Jontz’s death reminded him of campaign stop the two of them had made to one
house in a small town in the Fifth District. “I’ve never had a congressman come
to my door in the twenty-nine years that I’ve been an adult,” Campbell remembered the homeowner telling
Jontz. “When you live in some very small town like Royal Center , Indiana ,
and not just you, but half the town says my congressman knocked on my door
today, that means something.”
1 comment:
Jim Jontz was an inspiration for people who place the environment and health above the greedy push for profit. He was a visionary, especially in a State where corporate dominance is the rule.
Post a Comment