On September 21, 1976, the OWL political party holds its first convention at Thomas "Red" Kelly's (1927-2004) jazz club in Tumwater. The party nominates eight candidates for state office. OWL stands for "Out With Logic, On With Lunacy," and it's a hearty joke; one of the party's slogans is "throw the rascals out." None of the candidates will win in November, but they nonetheless will gather tens of thousands of votes in the general election. State lawmakers are not amused; they will pass legislation the next year implementing stricter standards for parties to qualify for a general election. The constitutionality of the law is later challenged but upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986.
"It Just Started at the Bar One Night"
"It just started at the bar one night, like most political parties do," Kelly later explained ("Give A Hoot?"). He owned a jazz club in Tumwater (Thurston County), the Tumwater Conservancy, which had developed a following of politicians and creative musicians who came to the bar as much for the entertainment and camaraderie as they did for the music. And it was on one of these evenings, after most everyone had had a drink or two or maybe three, that the idea for the OWL Party was born. (The OWL moniker came from Kelly's wife Donna, who referred to some of the club's more outlandish patrons as owls.)
In 1976, it was relatively easy to get on the ballot in Washington state. Minor candidates were not required to participate in the primary. They simply held a "convention" whenever and wherever they pleased and drummed up the required 100 signatures of registered voters and filed the certificate with the Secretary of State. On the evening of September 21, 1976, a slate of OWL candidates rounded up the necessary signatures in a happy affair at the Conservancy. "I went to sleep a drunken musician and woke up a drunken gubernatorial candidate," recounted Kelly years later ("Bassist Struck Note …").
Running for governor, Kelly was perhaps the most well-known candidate, but seven other OWLs joined him on the ballot. These included Jack "The Ripoff" Lemon, running for lieutenant governor, whose ballot statement wisecracked, "We are confident we are on the side of history and folly … if you care enough to send the very least, vote for a Lemon and throw the rascals out" (Voter's Pamphlet, p. sw/19). There was Kelly's mother-in-law, "Fast" Lucie Griswold, running for secretary of state, who introduced a new recipe in her statement for "unemployment rolls and using a new and special yeast. You can't raise the dough no matter how much you knead it" (Voters Pamphlet, p. 20/sw). Don "Earthquake" Ober, candidate for commissioner of public lands, advocated for more logging, while the candidate for attorney general, "Bunco" Bob Kelly, argued "(The law's) administration is too important to be left in the hands of attorneys. They can complicate the simplest of issues thereby confusing everyone including themselves" (Voters Pamphlet, p. sw/23). Ruthie "Boom Boom" McInnis ran for state auditor as an OWL, Archie "Whiplash" Breslin was its candidate for insurance commissioner, and Jack Percival rounded out the ticket as candidate for state treasurer.
Most of the campaigning took place at the bar. The party did create a bumper sticker, which read simply "bumper sticker" and came with no glue for mounting. Nevertheless, the effort captured the public's imagination. In the November 2 election, seven of the eight candidates each received between 30,000 and 45,000 votes, representing between 2.25 and 3.35 percent of the total vote in their respective races. The outlier was Red Kelly, who received 12,400 votes, or eight-tenths of 1 percent. "It wasn't that Kelly wasn't a popular candidate for governor," explained the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10 years later. "It was just that lots of people were more concerned about the 'real' contest for governor that year between Dixy Lee Ray and John Spellman" ("Owl Rib…").
The Establishment Responds
Not everyone thought it was funny. By the end of election week, the attorney general's office had opened an investigation into the eight OWL nominees as well as nearly 50 other candidates who had filed as indigents, making them exempt from filing fees. The following week, the OWL candidates received a bill from Secretary of State Bruce Chapman for the fees, leading Kelly to protest: "We didn't file as indigents. We just filed and didn't pay" ("Filing Fee Bill …"). But the coup de grace came in 1977, when the legislature passed a bill implementing more stringent filing requirements to run for office. A candidate was now required to run in the primary, and a requirement to qualify mandated that he obtain one petition signature for every 10,000 votes cast in the state's prior presidential election. To qualify for the general election, a candidate had to win at least 1 percent of all votes cast in the primary for that office.
Had the law been in effect in 1976, the OWL candidates each would have needed 147 valid voter signatures to qualify for the primary instead of the 100 which sufficed at the time. Given their popularity, this would have been easy for them to do. Based on their general election totals, seven out of eight candidates would have received enough votes in the primary to qualify for the general election. The exception was Kelly, which didn't bother him in the least. But it was not a pyrrhic victory for the legislature, because the law otherwise was successful in limiting the number of independent candidates, so much so that in 1983 the Socialist Worker's Party filed suit challenging the statute after its nominee for a U.S. Senate seat failed to qualify in the primary for the general election. The U.S. District Court upheld the law, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court heard oral arguments in October 1986. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who had just taken his seat with the Supreme Court less than two weeks earlier, quipped during the arguments, "I tend to think the Owl Party is one we didn't need on the ballot" ("State Law Barring …"). The court agreed with Scalia, and issued its 7-2 ruling in December reversing the 9th Circuit and upholding the constitutionality of the statute. "It is now clear that States may condition access to the general election ballot by a minority or independent candidate upon showing of a modicum of support among the potential voters for the office," the ruling explained (Munro v. Socialist Workers Party, 479 U.S. 189, 193). In his dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that "the minor party's often unconventional positions broaden political debate, expand the range of issues with which the electorate is concerned, and influence the positions of the majority, in some instances becoming majority positions" (Munro v. Socialist Workers Party, 479 U.S. 189, 200).
Red Kelly's Later Years
Kelly merrily watched it all from the sidelines. However, despite his promises that the OWLs would return in all their glory, they didn't. One problem was that three of the original candidates – Lemon, McInnis, and Ober – had died by the time of the 1980 primary. "It was just too painful to get going this election," Kelly admitted in an interview that year ("The OWL Party Will Fly …"). But Kelly himself had moved on by then. He moved to Tacoma in the late 1970s, where he hosted a radio show and had his own band. In 1986 he opened another jazz club in Tacoma, appropriately named Kelly's, and even as his health deteriorated later in his life, continued to run it until the year before his death in 2004.
He did resurrect the OWL Party one last time, when he ran as its candidate for mayor of Tacoma in 1989. He had much the same zany approach as he followed in 1976, though he did offer a serious idea or two, such as establishing a farmer's market on the Tacoma waterfront. He lost the primary, but had a damn good time doing it.
