Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - The Shorty Price story

  Since this is Alabama vs. Tennessee week and we have a governor’s race in three weeks, allow me to share the story of Shorty Price.

  Alabama has had its share of what I call “run for the fun of it” candidates. The most colorful of all these perennial “also ran” candidates was Ralph “Shorty” Price. He ran for governor every time. His slogan was “Smoke Tampa Nugget cigars, drink Budweiser beer and vote for Shorty Price.”

  In one of Shorty’s campaigns for governor, his campaign speech contained this line, “If elected governor, I will reduce the governor’s tenure from four to two years. If you can’t steal enough to last you the rest of your life in two years, you ain’t got enough sense to have the office in the first place.”  He would use recycled campaign signs to save money, and he rarely garnered two percent of the votes in any campaign.