Pierre Pelham, whose voice once emptied the Alabama House chamber because members crossed the hall to hear him speak in the Senate, died in early December 2009 at the age of 80, a couple of weeks after a fall that broke five ribs.
Pelham, a two-term state senator and a political ally of both the Kennedys and George Wallace, was to be buried in Chatom, the Washington County town where he was born. The family received visitors at 10 a.m. Tuesday, with services following at 11 a.m. at Chatom United Methodist Church at 20 School Street and burial at Chatom Cemetery.
Chatom to Cambridge
To say that he was among Washington County’s few cum laude graduates of Harvard Law School is only the beginning of the story. Pelham attended Marion Institute, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Alabama, where he was a member of the SAE fraternity, and went on to Harvard.
Mobile attorney John Tyson Sr., who was the fraternity’s president when Pelham arrived, later became his law partner — a partnership born at the Cawthon Hotel during the campaign season in which John Patterson was elected governor, when the two men, both on losing sides, decided their strengths might complement one another.
“He had unusual tastes,” Tyson recalled. “He would take cases that no one else wanted. He didn’t want run-of-the-mill business. But he was brilliant.”
One such case became legend. Alabama was then known as a haven for quick divorces, and when the plight of Tina Onassis reached Tyson through a referral from the attorney general’s office, he handed it to his partner. “I said let’s give it to Pierre; he’s single and this is the type thing that he likes,” Tyson said. Pelham traveled to France to meet the client and her lawyer, and before long the Onassises were divorced in Washington County, Alabama — another day in Chatom.
Politics
Pelham was drawn into national Democratic politics, ran for the Democratic National Committee, and in 1962 came close to unseating the legendary Congressman Frank Boykin. He succeeded Tyson in the state Senate, arriving after reapportionment replaced Mobile’s single senator with three — Mylan Engel, Bob Edington and Pelham — and served from 1966 to 1974, becoming president pro tem in his second term.
“He was Wallace’s guy,” Tyson said. Ray Jenkins, the longtime Alabama journalist, put the paradox more sharply: “The improbability of a Harvard Law graduate serving as George Wallace’s Senate floor leader.” With the state all but leaderless while Wallace pursued the presidency, Jenkins said, Pelham tried to fill the vacuum where he could.
Former state legislator Bill Roberts credited Pelham with rescuing his air pollution bill, which had passed the House and was expected to die in a Senate hostile to it. “Pierre was president pro tem and he walked over to Jimmy Clark, who was chairman of rules,” Roberts said. “He came back and said, ‘yeah, we’ll pass it,’ and he got it passed.” The steel industry, Roberts noted, usually got its way. “Pierre had a big populist streak.”
He also had a hand in the legislation that established the medical school at the University of South Alabama — an institution that has shaped medicine on the Gulf Coast ever since.
The man himself
Nearly everyone who spoke of Pelham returned to the same two qualities: the intellect and the impatience.
“He had a mind so acute, you didn’t want to light matches around him,” Tyson said. Roberts said Pelham “worshipped at the altar of rationality,” prized honesty to a fault, and disliked the retail side of politics. “He didn’t suffer fools very well. I’m going to miss him.” Champ Lyons, a justice of the state Supreme Court, offered the same verdict in a sentence: “Pierre was truly one of a kind. He was very bright. The ability to suffer fools was not one of his virtues.”
Mobile attorney Jim Atchison, who worked with Pelham on campaigns in the 1970s, said he was the best speaker in the Senate. “I don’t know what his IQ was, but whatever they say it was, I would add 30 or 40 points.”
Jack Edwards, who represented the area in Congress from 1964 to 1984, recalled that his own campaign committee was “always nervous that I would have Pierre as an opponent, but fortunately that never happened.”
Former Gov. Don Siegelman remembered meeting him as a student body president at the University of Alabama, addressing the Senate on lowering the voting age from 21 to 18: Pelham leaned back, put his alligator tasseled loafers on his desk, and asked questions that Siegelman said made him feel inadequate and unsure — and who later became a supporter and adviser.
Mobile businessman David Cooper said Pelham, as president pro tem, was a master at bringing factions together and “always, always thought of Mobile and south Alabama counties first.”
Roberts believed Pelham eventually withdrew from public life less from ambition than from disgust with the process. “He really retired from public life because he became so disgusted with certain areas of it,” he said. “He just had a keen sense of right and wrong.”