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Jim Graham always finished taking his oath as N.C. agriculture commissioner with a flourish.
“I do,” Graham bellowed at nine different January inaugurations, “so help me God — and keep me steadfast.”
Graham followed up by dramatically kissing the Bible.
Later, the commissioner often walked over to the newly elected governor and handed him a fat cigar; then the pair would puff away in delight.
Graham has a knack for creating a stir, as when he kissed a mule’s rear end in Wilkes County to fulfill his losing end of a political bet.
He once wore manure-caked boots into a meeting with farmers as a reminder that he was one of them. The commissioner also conducted a lavish 1987 funeral at the State Fairgrounds for the boll weevil, cotton’s vanquished villain.
In all his theatrics, Graham could never hide the boyish mischief in his eyes.
Even in 1993, at age 72, Graham stopped outside the Agriculture Building in Raleigh one night and put his size 15 bootprints in a freshly laid sidewalk. In between the bootprints, he scrawled his initials, “J.G.”
James Allen Graham has left a huge imprint on N.C. agriculture, politics and people.
Everything about him carries “big” connotations. His big cigars, boots and belt buckles. His husky 6-foot-4-inch frame. The big Stetson hat. The voice that learned to whisper in a sawmill.
The nicknames given him are similar in their authority. Cattlemen called him “The Colonel” when he headed the N.C. Hereford Association back in the mid-1950s. Friends and the media dubbed him the “Sodfather” as state agricultural commissioner.
Others refer to him as “Big Jim.” His lieutenants in the department call him “The Commish.” Late Salisbury Post columnist Homer Lucas labeled Graham “The Big Possum.”
Chuck Miller, head of livestock marketing for the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, likens his boss to a groundhog.
“He’s always got two holes,” Miller says, noting that if a groundhog finds one hole blocked, he always has a second hole from which to escape.
Graham has finally taken the second hole in his professional life. At 79, after 36 years as agriculture commissioner, he decided against seeking re-election this fall.
Democrat Meg Scott Phipps, daughter of one of the governors Graham served under, won the election and will take Graham’s place with his blessing.
When the state’s inauguration day is held this January, Graham won’t be kissing the Bible or handing out cigars.
Today, Rowan Countians have a chance to see Graham as grand marshal of the Holiday Caravan through the streets of Spencer and Salisbury — and bid him their own goodbye salute.
Sole survivor
State political observers have called Graham’s retirement the end of an era, believing Graham was the only survivor of an old-fashioned, good-ol’-boy style of campaigning and governance that will be, in some respects, sorely missed.
Graham clearly became a North Carolina institution more than five decades in agriculture. His 36 years as N.C. agriculture commissioner make him the longest serving state commissioner in the nation’s history.
Along the way, his popularity was such that Democratic gubernatorial candidates sometimes tried to attach themselves to Graham’s coattails.
Graham, at times, seemed to know everybody — more people than the Census Bureau, says Charles Edwards, manager of the Raleigh Farmers Market. Few people could ever work a room like Graham.
“I’m sure he does know more people in North Carolina than anybody else,” says Dorothy Fleming, a longtime friend from his hometown in Cleveland.
Former Gov. Bob Scott once was in a faraway part of China on a trade mission when an American woman approached him and asked if he could deliver a message back to the States — to Jim Graham.
At Democratic political rallies and the many roasts and appreciation days in his honor through the years, people proudly wore their red and white buttons that said, “Jim Graham Is My Friend.”
Some 2,000 people paid $20 a head to salute him last week at a Raleigh dinner in the livestock show barn named after him on the State Fairgrounds — a place entwined with his professional and personal life.
There’s also a Jim Graham biscuit and the Jim Graham Highway — appropriately that portion of U.S. 70 that stretches through the farming country of his boyhood in Rowan and Iredell counties.
Hometown Cleveland has a YMCA branch named for him.
It’s difficult to imagine future politicians ending their public appearances with the kind of donkey bray that made Graham famous. Graham was shameless in its delivery, learned as a boy in the fields of his father’s farm.
Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter even held Graham’s coat in 1976 so that the commissioner could let loose his Democratic victory call. Coiling like a baseball pitcher, Graham often knocked down podiums with the kick that accompanied his donkey imitation.
But Graham pretty much quieted the bray several years ago in preparing to pass his torch. He’s a bit more frail and hard of hearing these days but still an original.
Years of change
Gov. Terry Sanford appointed Graham to the commissioner’s post in 1964 after the death in office of Commissioner L.Y. “Stag” Ballentine. Graham won his first of nine four-year terms that fall.
When Graham took over, tobacco ads still aired on television, and “the golden leaf” reigned as North Carolina’s biggest cash crop, accounting for more than 46 percent of the state’s agricultural income.
By 1999, tobacco’s income share dropped to 11.7 percent, with chickens and hogs far surpassing it as the state’s biggest farm commodities. Graham always defended tobacco and the people who grew it.
Until it’s illegal, he said once.
The big cigar in his mouth was as much a statement as it was a habit.
More motivator than bureaucrat, Graham preached a gospel of optimism, progress, diversity and appreciation of agriculture. On his watch, farming became agribusiness — rural family farms giving way to massive chicken and hog operations, for example.
But Graham brags about any N.C. farm product. He trumpets that the state is No. 1 in the country in sweet potato and turkeys. North Carolina still ranks first in the nation in tobacco, despite attacks on many fronts.
The state comes in second in Christmas trees, hogs, cucumbers and trout and third in poultry and egg products.
From 1964 to 1999, total cash receipts in North Carolina agriculture increased six-fold, from $1.2 billion to $6.7 billion. Graham did much to open international markets to N.C. products.
Gov. Jim Hunt says Graham believes every N.C. farm product is “sound, healthy and approved by God, and he markets it that way.”
“We owe him a great deal,” Hunt adds.
Boll weevils, cholera
Graham’s department grew to some 1,300 employees in 17 divisions, overseeing everything from propane tanks, to fertilizer plants and seafood inspections. Every gas pump and truck and produce scale in the state has Graham’s name on it.
Graham breathed new life into the State Fair, making it one of the better agricultural fairs on the East Coast. He built four new structures on the grounds and annually set up a temporary office in the fairgrounds’ Kerr Scott Building to conduct business and meet guests.
This fall, North Carolinians set a new attendance record at the fair, which included a life-size butter sculpture of Graham milking a cow.
Graham receives credit for boosting net income for N.C. farmers to fifth in the country.
“Jim did two things, if he did anything,” says Salisbury friend Charlie Peacock. “He got rid of the boll weevil and hog cholera. You can’t believe what that meant to the people of North Carolina.”
The infestation of boll weevils limited growers to harvesting only 42,000 acres of cotton in 1978. Graham declared the state boll weevil-free in 1987. By the year 2000, growers had increased their planting of cotton to 940,000 acres.
Graham declared his program to rid the state of hog cholera a complete success by 1974.
But Graham has had his detractors. Critics say the agriculture department has had a poor environmental record, especially in relation to river pollution coming off huge hog farms.
They also say Graham has been too cozy with big business, at the expense of small farmers.
But Robert Knox III, who grows Holstein replacement heifers in western Rowan County, says Graham always provided an important personal contact for his farming family and others.
“I think he’s very sincere,” Knox says. “When he says Jim Graham is your friend, he truly means that.”
‘Born politician’
Born April 7, 1921, in Cleveland, Graham is the fifth in a line of James Grahams. His father, J.T. Graham, was a farmer and Rowan County commissioner. His mother, known hereabouts as Miss Laura, gained fame as one of her community’s best cooks.
Their son went through his boyhood as “James Allen,” and people who have known Graham most of his life still call him by both names.
As a boy, Graham recalls, he noticed the commissioner of agriculture’s name on a bag of fertilizer and thought to himself that it might make a good job for him some day.
J. Allen Knox grew up with Graham. They attended the same church, Third Creek Presbyterian, and Knox often had Sunday dinner at the Grahams. J.T. Graham invariably would have somewhere to go, allowing the boys to tag along.
“Everywhere I went, Jim Graham knew everybody,” Knox recalls, remembering the commotion Graham could make in a store, even in his youth. “I was always amazed.”
It was as a boy that Graham started a lifelong practice of committing names to memory or poking his friends in the arm and asking them to identify people he didn’t know.
“Once he learned who they were, he’d make a point to go speak with them,” Knox says, recalling how Graham might call out their names and approach the strangers as if they were great friends, which they would become, of course.
“He was a born politician,” Knox says. “He always spoke to people. He never failed to speak.”
‘Square Meal’
Page Graham, no relation, played on the same Cleveland High School football team with Jim Graham, side by side on the offensive and defensive lines. He says friends nicknamed Graham “Square Meal” in high school, thanks to a Future Farmers of America summer camp in White Lake.
On his way back home, after a week of eating all the food there was in camp, the always hungry Graham declared that he’d be glad to return home for a square meal.
Jim Graham graduated a year ahead of Page Graham and entered State College (now N.C. State University in Raleigh). Meanwhile, Page Graham became president of his high school senior class. The class invited then Gov. Clyde R. Hoey to speak at its graduation, and the governor accepted.
Jim Graham learned of the governor’s planned visit and, as testimony to Graham’s resourcefulness and people skills even as a young man, he somehow caught a ride home to Cleveland with the governor.
Graham had another important ride home in his life.
As a senior at State College, Graham met his future wife, Helen Ida Kirk of Salisbury, at the State Fair. She was a young teacher, chaperoning her home economics class. Graham struck up a conversation and eventually persuaded her to give him a ride home on the school bus.
Graham conveniently failed to mention that he had a car at college, and he had to hitchhike back to Raleigh the next day.
They married in 1942 and became permanent residents of Raleigh in 1956, when Graham became manager of the Farmers Market. Folks knew Helen Graham for her fried chicken and slaw and a personality as outgoing as her husband’s.
The couple had two daughters, Alice Underhill and Connie Brooks, and seven grandchildren. Underhill, of New Bern, recently won election to a state House seat.
Doctors diagnosed Helen Graham with Alzheimer’s disease in 1983, and her health deteriorated quickly. Graham kept a promise to keep her at home, providing 24-hour nursing care. Helen Graham died a year ago, at age 81, and a new waterfall at the State Fair bears her name.
The waterfall is close to where the Grahams first met.
‘Home folks’
Dorothy Fleming of Cleveland and her late husband, Charles, stayed in close contact with Jim and Helen Graham through the years. The Flemings had a vacation home in Blowing Rock that they often shared with the Grahams.
Charles Fleming and Graham were boyhood friends and fraternity brothers at State College. When Fleming was battling colon cancer three years ago, Jim Graham called Dorothy Fleming regularly to ask about his friend and to see how she was doing.
John Steele, a Cleveland commissioner, says Graham always has remembered his “home folks.”
“He never forgot,” Steele says. “We appreciate that.”
Jim Graham still speaks by telephone routinely with J. Allen Knox, Page Graham and many others back home, where he has someone taking care of the old homeplace and his 80 to 90 head of cattle.
Knox has a favorite story about Graham. One day in his early teens, Graham rode a mule or pony — Knox can’t remember which — to the Knox farm about 5 miles from his house.
The still-growing, gangly Graham walked into a nest of wasps in the hog farrowing pen. They stung him all over and, in no time, his eyes had swollen shut.
Graham managed to get back on his ride and speed off for home.
“If that thing hadn’t known the way home, he wouldn’t have made it,” Knox laughs.
It may be the last time Graham went into anything with his eyes shut.
Big appetite
After graduating from college in 1942, Graham became an agriculture teacher in Iredell County through 1945.
A six-year stint as superintendent for the Upper Mountain Research Station followed. From 1952 to 1955, he managed the Winston-Salem Fair, which later became the Dixie Classic.
Graham served as secretary of the N.C. Hereford Association for a year before moving to Raleigh and becoming general manager of the Farmers Market. The appointment by Sanford to the agriculture commissioner’s post followed in 1964.
In Raleigh, the Grahams joined First Baptist Church, where Jesse Helms was a fellow member. Republican Helms eventually won election to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina in 1972, and in the 1980s, he headed the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Graham and Helms had each other’s respect, despite their differences in political parties. No one was a stauncher Democrat than Graham when it came to the campaign season, but he counts many Republicans among his friends, including Helms and former Gov. Jim Holshouser.
“I never once saw him put politics ahead of what was best for N.C. agriculture,” Helms said at Graham’s recent tribute.
Friends have said that Graham can pull a pork sandwich from his hip pocket when he meets a hog farmer and a cheese sandwich from the same pocket when he meets a dairyman.
His rallying cry to a generation of voters and department employees became, “I love my job!”
“The thing about it, though,” says Rowan County friend Ben Knox, “when he said it, he meant it.”
Graham has always had a great appetite for life — and food, often claiming how he could fill buildings with all the N.C. barbecue he has eaten. He reads several newspapers a day and sometimes seems tethered to the telephone.
Charles Edwards, head of the Raleigh Farmers Market, says Graham is notorious for leaving late but expecting to be at the next location early. His standing instruction to drivers: “Drive as fast as you can, but don’t get a ticket.”
Edwards says Graham can fire employees and build them up at the same time, delivering a tongue-lashing followed by an arm around the shoulder.
Through the years, Graham claimed that doing one’s job was 90 percent attitude and 10 percent ability. He routinely handed out gold-colored pins with the word “Attitude” on them.
Friends also say Graham was a workaholic.
N.C. Treasurer Harlan Boyles, who also is retiring, says of Graham: “We get him for half pay, because he works two shifts every day.”
The future
Age has crept up on Graham. Donna Creech, his executive assistant for almost 18 years, became a specialist in hearing aids, eye drops and back braces.
But Graham resists the word “retirement.” He wondered aloud at his tribute dinner whether some place might need a greeter.
He will continue living in Raleigh, where his daughter, Alice, the newly elected state representative, can stay with him when the General Assembly is in session.
On occasion, Graham might travel back to the old homeplace in Cleveland, probably by train and relying on friends such as Charlie Peacock to chauffeur him around Rowan County.
As always, he speaks with optimism about N.C. agriculture.
“The best is yet to come if we all work together,” he says.
Alice Underhill said that, when she moved back to North Carolina several years ago, she decided to live in New Bern, thinking it would be far enough away from Raleigh to escape the influence of her father.
“Little did I know ,” she says, “that his shadow reached all the way to the coast and all the way to the North Carolina mountains.”
The shadow remains big, as everything is with Jim Graham.
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