James C. Gardner

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James reswell "Jim" Gardner, I
In office
November 9, 1954 – 1958
Preceded by Clyde Edward Fant, Sr.
Succeeded by Clyde Edward Fant, Sr.
Shreveport City Council
In office
1978 – 1982
Preceded by New position
Succeeded by Dee Peterson
In office
1952 – 1954
Preceded by Edwin Ford Hunter, Jr.
Succeeded by Frank Fulco, Sr.
Born June 17, 1924 (1924-06-17) (age 83)
Shreveport, Louisiana
Nationality American
Political party Democratic Party
Spouse (1) Mary Ella Buchanan Gardner (deceased)

(2) Mary Ann Welsh Gardner
Children Ellen Buchanan Gardner Caverlee (born 1946) and James Gardner, II (born 1950)
Occupation Power company executive
Religion Methodist
(1) For most of the half century since he was mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, Jim Gardner has been known as "Mr. Shreveport" because of his civic and community activities.

(2) Gardner has written his memoirs of Shreveport -- personal and political -- in two volumes, which cover much of the city's growth during his lifetime.
For the Republican former U.S. representative and lieutenant governor of North Carolina, see James Carson Gardner.

James Creswell "Jim" Gardner, I (born June 17, 1924) is a retired power company executive and a former Democratic mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, having served one term from 1954 to 1958.

Sometimes called Shreveport's "First Citizen," Jim Gardner was still twenty-nine when he was elected mayor and thirty when he assumed the office. His progressive and independent politics in a decade of general conservatism is generally believed to have been a key factor that resulted in his defeat for reelection in 1958 by his predecessor as mayor, fellow Democrat Clyde Edward Fant, Sr., (1905-1973).

Gardner joined the administration of Southwestern Electric Power Company, which serves parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, in 1959. He retired as company vice president in 1987.

Between 2002 and 2006, he penned a two-volume 800-plus-page autobiography of both a personal and political nature about life in Shreveport during most of the twentieth century and the start of the 21st century. The work is entitled Jim Gardner and Shreveport (Ritz Publications of Shreveport). Vol. I covers 1924-1958; Vol. II, 1959-2006.

Contents

[edit] Early years and family heritage

Gardner was born in the Schumpert Sanitarium in Shreveport to Arvill Pitt Gardner and the former Marie Creswell. Gardner's maternal grandfather, James Pleasants Creswell, owned the Creswell Hotel in Shreveport. James Creswell's wife died when daughter Marie was an adolescent, and he did not remarry. Father and daughter worked together in the management of the hotel. The hotel was sold long ago. Arvill Gardner, who was born in 1892 in Carroll County, Tennessee, moved to Shreveport in 1914. He perished in a house fire. James Gardner's maternal great-grandmother, Julia Pleasants Creswell, the mother of James Pleasants Creswell, wrote several books about life in the American Civil War era, one called Callamura, an autobiographical novel first published when she and her husband, Judge David Creswell (Gardner's great-grandfather), lived in Greenwood, a Caddo Parish community west of Shreveport. Callamura was republished by Ritz Publications in 2003, after having been found dormant in a library in Indiana.

Gardner was also a distant ancestor of Thomas Bibb, the second governor of Alabama, and Pierce Mason Butler, the governor of South Carolina from 1836 to 1838. Julia and David Creswell were married in 1854 at Bibb's Corinthian-column house at Belle Mina in Madison County near Huntsville.

In 1944, Gardner married the former Mary Ella Buchanan. They were childhood sweethearts, both were only children, and they met when each was thirteen. They graduated together in 1940 from C.E. Byrd High School in Shreveport. They were twenty at the time of their wedding.

Gardner first went into basic training in the United States Army and then was admitted to Officer Candidate School, having procured the beginnning rank of second lieutenant. He was stationed abroad during the latter part of World War II.

After the war, he obtained a bachelor's degree in history from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. In 1963, at the age of thirty-nine, Gardner passed the Louisiana bar exam after four years of self-study, an option no longer available to potential lawyers who must complete law school before taking the qualifying examination.

Mary Ella died of cancer on December 28, 1976. Two years later, Gardner married the former Mary Ann Welsh (born 1928). She has three children from a previous marriage.

James and Mary Gardner had two children: Ellen Buchanan Gardner Caverlee (born 1946), a former teacher who is married to the prominent Shreveport attorney and Monroe native Samuel William Caverlee (born 1945), and James Creswell "Cres" Gardner, II, a former teacher who became an oil and gas landman in Shreveport and is married to the former Sharon Wait (both born 1950). Namesake grandson James Creswell Gardner, III (born 1975), was hence a year old when his grandmother Mary Gardner died. He works in real estate management, CCIM, in New Orleans.

Gardner has four other grandchildren. Megan Elizabeth Gardner (born 1979) is (2006-2007) a student at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport Medical School. Michael Wait Gardner (born 1984), is a Petroleum Landman in Shreveport. John Gardner Caverlee (born 1971) and James B. Caverlee (born 1974) were both valedictorians at their grandparents' Byrd High School. John Caverlee is an accomplished young attorney in the Dallas area. James Caverlee is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

[edit] The progressive mayor

Gardner had an interest in politics from childhood. Native Shreveporter Stanley R. Tiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner now based in Biloxi, Mississippi, who is also a former editor of the since defunct Shreveport Journal, recounted a tale in a 1982 editorial that Gardner, at the age of five in 1929, came across Governor Huey Pierce Long, Jr., in the First National Bank of Shreveport. "My name is James Creswell Gardner. I voted for you, but my mom and dad didn't," the child supposedly told the startled Louisiana legend. Tiner was so impressed with Gardner's talents that he once offered the power company executive a job writing for the Shreveport Journal. Gardner declined in part because he could not take the pay cut involved and was not yet then fully vested in his SWEPCO retirement. He continued to write occasional columns for newspapers over the years.

Gardner saw politics as a means to improve the lives of citizens in the community. He was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1952, when he was twenty-seven. He left the legislature after his election as mayor two years later.

In the Gardner administration, Shreveport took the initial steps toward the development of the Red River waterfront and Interstate 20, launched during the administration of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The interstate system is also named for Eisenhower. There was a large bond program to finance massive overhauls and modernization of the Shreveport water and sewerage systems and streets, substantial urban renewal projects, important annexations, and general civic growth and development.

Though he served only one term as mayor, Gardner is remembered for laying the groundwork for bringing Shreveport into the modern municipal era. Later mayors did not hesitate to call upon Gardner to promote civic issues. He was also designated "Mr. Shreveport".

Over the years, Gardner was called upon for many public duties. In 1965, Governor John J. McKeithen named him the vice-chairman of the newly-established Louisiana State Science Foundation, which located funding for promising research endeavors to improve the state economy. Gardner moved up to the chairmanship in 1966, when Baton Rouge attorney Theo Cangelosi stepped down after a year because of temporary health problems.

[edit] Gardner writes his memoirs

For years, Gardner has fought heart disease. He had bypass surgery in 1978 and again in 2006. His physician, Dr. Michael Futtrell told the Shreveport Times that he recommended the surgery because he considers Gardner to be physically younger than his chronological age.

As he recovered from the surgery, Gardner finished his second memoir: "I've felt blessed to have had the mental and physical health to allow me to finish. I have always been blessed with an exceptional memory for details."

The second volume traces Gardner's relationship with the City of Shreveport and examines his personal life since 1959, when he had vacated the mayor's office to Clyde Fant. It covers family, marriages, births, and deaths. It includes Gardner's relationship with such political personalities as U.S. President William Jefferson Blythe "Bill" Clinton, Governors John McKeithen, Edwin Washington Edwards, and Charles Elson "Buddy" Roemer, III, and New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Story "Chep" Morrison, Sr. Fellow "progressive" Mayor Morrison attended Gardner's inauguration on November 9, 1954.

While a Democrat, Gardner has been politically independent. He supported Richard M. Nixon for the presidency in 1960, 1968, and 1972 and also backed the Republican congressional candidate Charlton Lyons in a 1961 special election. He took no public position in either the Democratic gubernatorial runoff primary or the presidential election in 1964.

Professionally, Volume II examines Gardner's years as the president of the Chamber of Commerce and his service on the first Shreveport City Council under the mayor-council government, which took effect in 1978, having replaced the previous commission form of government under which Gardner had served as mayor years earlier. Gardner shares his campaign experience, details about his relationship with each of Shreveport's mayors, and an economic outlook on the changes which have occurred in Shreveport over the years.

The volume also offers an intimate look at Gardner's personal life. He discusses Mary' Ella's death and his experience with grief: "One thing I wanted to say to anybody experiencing loss is there is not a set way of handling it. We each handle it in our own way." He also wrote an article for Reader's Digest to explain how he finally managed to cope with the grief of his loss.

Gardner spent some four years writing the memoirs. He considers the books to be an inheritance for his family. Sarah Hudson-Pierce, the owner of Ritz Publications, and close confidante of Mayor Gardner since March of 1987 when they met, told the Shreveport Times that the Gardner autobiography is moreover "a gift to Shreveport. He has given the community and future generations a glimpse back to see how Shreveport operated. He has a more comprehensive memory than anyone [else] in the area. He's always been very active and interested in politics. . ."

[edit] Tiner's analysis of Gardner's leadership

Stanley Tiner, then with the Shreveport Journal, offered his analysis of Gardner's impact on Shreveport when the businessman declined to seek a second four-year term on the city council in 1982:

"Superlatives are used in such profusion these days that they tend to lose much of their impact. For the purpose of my comments I hope you will think of the superlatives used about Jim Gardner with the full value of their meaning. He is clearly Shreveport's 'first citizen'. That truth does not, nor should not diminish any other person, for there are truly others in this community whose contributions have been grand. But Jim Gardner has been a giant in our midst.

"He was the rare combination of theoretician and practitioner. His keen mind developed the ideals to fullness on the frontlines of politics as a legislator, mayor and city councilman. He is a historian, writer, and scholar. He is a devoted husband and father.

"But most of all he has been two things: a thinker and a city's conscience. That fine mind seems to always be alive and vibrant with new thought, new questions, new clarity. It has been the architect of much of the progress of the last three decades in Shreveport. It has been the sounding board against which the ideas of many others have been tested..."

Gardner is a member of the Broadmoor United Methodist Church in Shreveport. Ann Gardner is Episcopalian.

Gardner is a member of the large Shreveport Rotary International and his city's Committee of One Hundred, a civic improvement group.

[edit] Police headquarters named for Gardner

On May 30, 2008, the Shreveport police headquarters, the former City hall and Charity Hospital buildings at Texas Avenue and Murphy Street, was renamed the James C. Gardner Building. In the dedication ceremonies, Mayor Cedric Glover hailed Gardner's "wisdom, vision, dedication, and commitment to the city. We have roads that go north and south and east and west and loops that go around." Glover said that the highway system is the fruition of the city master plan which Gardner developed a half century earlier that has made possible the major highways of the area, including the Clyde Fant Parkway, Interstate 40, and Interstate Loop 220.[1]

As a state legislator, Gardner had authored the bill which shifted the Charity Hospital building from state to municipal control. As mayor, he pushed for a bond election for new construction on the site. Gardner also served on the board for Charity Hospital, as had his grandfather, James Creswell, two generations earlier. The impetus to rename the building after Gardner was pushed by former State Representative Forrest Dunn, the curator of the Louisiana State Museum in Shreveport.[1]

(In Mayor Gardner's opening remarks, at the dedication, he credited Sarah Hudson Pierce, his publisher, for being a force in causing the building to be renamed for him, because she was the one who got a copy of Volume II of his memoirs into Forrest Dunn's hands before the wheels began turning to get the bill passed to name the building for him.)

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Adam Kealoha Causey, "Police headquarters renamed Gardner Building", Shreveport Times, May 31, 2008
Preceded by
Edwin Ford Hunter, Jr., (D)		 Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from Caddo Parish (at-large)

James Creswell Gardner (D)
1952–1954

 Succeeded by
Frank Fulco (D)
Preceded by
Clyde Edward Fant, Sr., (D)		 Mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana

James Creswell Gardner (D)
1954–1958

 Succeeded by
Clyde Edward Fant, Sr., (D)
Preceded by
New position		 Member of the Shreveport City Council (District B)]]

James Creswell Gardner (D)
1978–1982

 Succeeded by
Dee Peterson (D)
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