A breeze from the river lifts a corner of my napkin where my sweating glass of sweet tea sits. The air is humid, carrying the scent of mud & pine trees. I look past the house to the geese squawking at each other on the pond.

  Richard Montgomery spears a meatball with a toothpick & plops it on his plate. “Can you believe how hot it still is? Did you get you some of these meatballs? Here, try ’em!” He proffers the blue casserole dish my way. My plate is already full from everything else Ann, his wife of 42 years, has persuaded me to eat. Their hospitality is overwhelming.

  Richard is, in the truest sense of the word, a good ole boy. He’s the current Chairman of Tennessee’s Board of Parole. He served as Sevier County’s House Representative from 2008-2012, & for eighteen years prior to that, proudly chaired Sevier County’s Board of Education. Richard is an institution in this part of the world, & chances are you’ve been in his presence at some point or another, if you ever attend any local fundraisers or social events. He’s an important voice for the local people & always has an ear for anyone who stops him. And boy, do people stop him. Bob’s Mountaineer Restaurant, that once anchored Seymour on its north side, was more a political gathering place than it ever was a family buffet.

  But he wasn’t born into a well-to-do background. You’ve heard the expression dirt poor? That would adequately describe Richard’s upbringing. The youngest of eight siblings, his mother died when he was just a baby, & his oldest sister Connie raised him. If times weren’t hard enough, living in a literal dirt-floor cabin, he was born with a cleft palate that was surgically repaired through the goodwill of a local doctor after he started school.

  Richard overcame many things growing up, the least of them ridicule from classmates. He was a part of the first graduating class of Seymour High School, 1967. Richard attended the University of Tennessee through scholarships & perseverance, & graduated with an engineering degree in 1971. He was then hired by Oak Ridge National Labratories. “I still can’t talk too much about that,” Richard says, rubbing his hand across the back of his neck. He retired from ORNL in 1999, ready to improve his golf game and travel with his devoted wife, who was also recently retired from BellSouth. Their only daughter, Megan, was grown & advancing in the professional world of banking, so they could be almost carefree and enjoy their cabin in Big South Fork without worrying about rushing home for some disaster. Ann found herself cuddling babies at St. Mary’s on days she didn’t fill in at the job she’d retired from after 35 years. “South Central Bell- I can’t help still calling it that- was the only life I knew,” she says, running her hand down an antique phone booth, now stored in their garage. “But I love rocking babies, & when I caught a news story about the {drug}dependent newborns, I knew I could help. It about broke my heart, but I did love it.”

The Montgomerys got a few years off before Richard was approached by the then-mayor of Knoxville to run for the office of State Representative to serve his home county in Nashville. He shakes his head when I brought up several of his accomplishments, including some road improvements that still haven’t come to fruition, six years after the bills were passed. “It was harder than I thought. Two steps forward & ten steps back, seemed like,” he admits. “You want to see change as soon as it’s voted in, but there are so many people & plans to put in place, sometimes it takes twenty years, & by then, it’s antiquated & you just have to start again.”

  But even though he’s seen Sevier County grow by leaps & bounds so that it’s hardly recognizable from when he was thirty years old, an up-and-coming politician, it’s still home. “I won’t leave. I couldn’t if I wanted to. And why would I want to?”

Richard can be found most Saturday mornings at Sevierville Golf Club, & at Golden Corral every weekday at high noon. His grandbabies need held every Sunday afternoon, though, & he’s keeping that day sacred for all the right reasons.