Political Obscurity : Retired Electrician With Little Name Recognition Takes a Very Long Shot at White House

Not every kid can grow up to be President, but Frank Thomas is living proof that any kid can grow up to run.

The 69-year-old retired electrician from Thousand Oaks sat out Super Tuesday, but did snap up 28 votes--three more than former Florida Governor Claude Kirk--in the New Hampshire primary. He captured about 50,000 votes in each of the last two California gubernatorial races, and waltzed away with nearly 200,000 votes in the 1980 race for U.S. Senate.

Yet the garrulous Thomas, who drives a battered old pickup truck and chooses to live without a telephone, is a prophet without honor in his own county.

Most area Democratic leaders have never heard of him. He says the only people who know him are his neighbors, his campaign manager and people to whom he occasionally brings food discarded by supermarkets.

“I have treated so many people so good,” a beaming Thomas says. “I’ve given all this food away. I get so much, and I can’t use it all myself. If it wasn’t for me to pick it up, it would all go to waste.”

The idea of picking up trashed food from supermarkets occurred to him years ago. Thomas drives his Datsun pickup to back doors of local groceries to scavenge through garbage bins. At first, he made the rounds in search of corn shucks and carrots to feed the 22 cattle grazing on his 2 1/2-acre lot. What he found, however, were crates of discarded food, which he hauled home.

Food Search Continues

The cattle are gone now, but Thomas’s food runs continue. What food he does not save for himself, he delivers to senior citizens, churches and poor folks he’s met on the way.

“He brought quite a bit,” said Ruth Parton, director of the Fillmore Senior Center, referring to a couple of loads Thomas hauled to the center last year. “He brought chicken, vegetables, bread--things along that line. It was very nice and everyone appreciated it.”

Some of that appreciation, Thomas hopes, will be translated into votes in the June 7 California presidential primary.

Thomas is serious about politics and that mystifies local Democrats. If he is serious, they ask, why doesn’t he join their Democratic clubs or come to their meetings?

“I can’t tell you a thing about him,” said Terry Grando, president of the Democratic Club of Conejo Valley.” He came to talk to me one day last year. He asked if I would support him. I said I wouldn’t. I was not impressed with him when I met him, his whole persona. No one else I know has ever heard of him or seen him.”

Jim Clark, chairman of the Democratic Party of Los Angeles County, said: “He was definitely someone not active at all with the party.”

Of course, Thomas does not expect to win the 1988 presidency. He never even campaigned in the 20 states up for grabs in this week’s Super Tuesday primaries. He did not have the money. In fact, the former North Dakotan has never even been South, the site of most of Tuesday’s action, except for stints as a soldier during World War II.

But this summer, Thomas did drive to New Hampshire with the borrowed $1,000 he needed to get a spot on the ballot. He spent two weeks talking to people, hoping they would remember him when at voting time.

“I did pretty good in that darn New Hampshire election,” Thomas said with a chuckle. His platform? Making life better for senior citizens, free legal service, road improvements, a strong national defense, a national driver’s license and subsidized car insurance. “Our insurance is so uneven, so unfair,” he says. “People just can’t buy insurance.”

Inside the cluttered house he’s inhabited for 37 years, Thomas keeps clipboards listing his food deliveries. Some names on the list become part of his master political mailing list for his typewritten newsletter, Western Nues, which describes his political stances. He frequently corresponds with federal and state officials and senior-citizen advocacy groups.

Ideas and Makeshift Cabinets

Other clipboards of Thomas’ ideas are arranged on cobwebbed shelves full of dusty lawbooks. The legal process intrigues Thomas. In 1985, he chronicled his views of it in a 68-page pamphlet called “Our Judicial System in Operation--Book One.”

“‘Our Judicial System in Operation’,” it begins, “is hereby given to show the way in which your typist has been treated by the courts in the State of California.” The cases involve, among other things, traffic accidents and weed eradication. The reader is reminded up front that “a rattlesnake gives warning before it strikes, but not the County of Ventura.”

Mark Sellers, Thousand Oaks city attorney, said the city currently is trying to condemn a portion of Thomas’ land in order to widen a road. “He is well aware of our court system and litigation process,” Sellers said.

Cartons of canned goods line Thomas’s floors and tables. More grocery cartons, emptied of food, serve as filing cabinets. Labeled boxes are stacked in every corner of every room.

Outside, crates of onions and potatoes have taken sprout and mold has grown over oranges. Fruit flies and gnats fill the air above the yard, where neighborhood dogs, in search of chicken bones or meat scraps, sniff around rusted mattress coils, wet wooden ladders and garden hoses.

When he’s not on the stump, he says he’s prospecting for oil and gold in the backcountry. When he’s not prospecting, he’s tinkering with the engines and electronic gizmos that compete for space in his house and yard.

“It’s a crappy place I got here,” acknowledged Thomas. “But I get ideas like mad around this place. I’m an idea man. But, since I’ve been campaigning, all my ideas sit in the background. I usually got so many irons in the fire, I can’t make them all burn at the same time.”

Thomas’s first electoral endeavor was in 1976 when he ran for the U. S. Senate against John Tunney and Tom Hayden. Although he expected only 1,000 votes, he received 53,843, or 1.6%, according to a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, which compiles election statistics.

“That was a victory for me,” Thomas said. “I got third in some places, fourth and fifth in others. How did I do it? I don’t know. I talk to people, just like I’m talking to you.”

In 1978, Thomas ran for the Ventura County Board of Supervisors from the 2nd District. He received 1,528 votes in the June primary, but failed to make the runoffs. Former Supervisor Edwin Jones won that year.

“He lived right near me,” said Jones, a Thousand Oaks resident at the time of the election. “I remember him at one debate put on by the League of Women Voters. He didn’t seem to be too aware of the issues. But he’s very sincere, a very nice man. He’s well-meaning. He’s a fellow who likes to run for office.”

Lost to Cranston, Deukmejian

Thomas came in third behind Alan Cranston in the 1980 U.S. Senate race with 195,351 votes, or 6%. In 1982, he was pitted against George Deukmejian in the gubernatorial race and received 51,158 votes, or 1.8%. In 1986, he ran for governor again, but finished last with 48,007 votes, or 2.2%.

One Democrat believes fringe candidates like Thomas get their votes when a small percentage of the electorate picks any name on the ballot, as long as it’s not the front-runner. “In any election, 20% of the people will not vote for you,” said Clark, the Los Angeles County Democratic Party chairman. “You could run Lassie or Rin Tin Tin on the ballot, and people would vote for them.”

Lassie would not find it difficult to get her name on the presidential ballot. All an individual has to do to become a candidate is file nomination papers with petitions bearing 10,000 signatures, or file papers and pay the $1,000 filing fee. In New Hampshire, 37 individuals took those steps to get their names on the ballot in the recent primary, according to a spokesman for the New Hampshire Secretary of State.

Still, Thomas says, it’s difficult rounding up enough money for filing fees.

So, when election time rolls around, even if he is one of a dozen candidates on the ticket, Frank Thomas takes the game seriously. When he loses a race, he wonders what went wrong. Perhaps he is not reaching enough people, or he isn’t flashy enough. Perhaps his senior citizen-oriented message isn’t hitting home. If he thinks these factors cost him elections, Thomas gets angry at himself.

But if vote tampering is to blame for his poor showings, as he claims, he gets furious at the political system. “That’s why I got into this presidential race. We have to get rid of this cheating and voter fraud.”

Some of Thomas’ friends tell him to quit his foolishness, sell his property and really retire. Thomas ignores the advice. If his 1988 presidential campaign fails, the 1990 gubernatorial race is his next.

His campaign strategies are straightforward. “I go to little cities like Stockton and have breakfast. I’ve campaigned in 45 of 58 counties. I go visit people. I go, go, go. I’ve talked to some of the best listeners you’d ever find. If I ever got in as President, I always tell people, I won’t forget them.”

“He’s like the Lone Ranger,” said Bill Cooper, Thomas’ assistant campaign manager, who lives in Fillmore. “He does much of his campaigning himself. He takes food all over.”

John Mott-Smith, an analyst for the secretary of state’s elections department called Thomas a “regular Harold Stassen,” alluding to the legendary 80-year-old former governor of Minnesota who has lost eight presidential elections, a Pennsylvania gubernatorial race in 1958 and a race for mayor of Philadelphia in 1959. Stassen is running for the presidency again this year.

Not Like Stassen

But Stassen, who won 130 votes in the New Hampshire primary, is no stranger to public office, unlike Thomas. Stassen still holds the record for being the youngest governor in history, when at age 31 he won the first of three two-year terms as governor of Minnesota.

“The whole process that we go through requires losers as well as winners,” Stassen has said. “You have to be a candidate. Regardless of ridicule, you have to step into the arena in order to present your views.”

But Thomas acknowledged that his views are not yet bandied about over the average American dinner table. “Unless you’re a front-runner, you don’t get much notice. Those big guys have the money to spend. I just don’t.

“But, one of these days, you’ll hear where I found a nice piece of gold,” he said, grinning and fingering the imaginary nugget in his hand. “I’m looking for it.”