Visiting Our Past: The colorful life of legendary Commissioner Coke Candler

When Coke Candler, chairman of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners from 1946 to 1968, registered to vote in in 1929, he played a little game on the registrar.

Marvin Cole, his son-in-law, tells the story in his new book, "The Coke Candler We Knew: A Memoire."

"Do you want to register as a Democrat?" the registrar asked.

"No, wait a minute," Coke said.

He'd responded the same way to questions about registering as a Republican and Independent. Finally, he told the registrar to flip a coin — and it came up heads, Democrat — and he was a Democrat ever since.

Cole gives no source for the story, but it is very much a part of the Coke Candler legacy. In his years serving the county, he instituted a great deal of progressive legislation — establishing Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College; building the Health and Social Services Building and a new county home for children; and funding new schools.

He also helped retire the county's debt from the Depression, and staunchly stood up for keeping county taxes down.

Coke was conservative and liberal, stern and fun-loving, Cole shows through collected stories, which, though reverential are not highfalutin, as the following anecdote reveals.

When a schoolteacher forbade tobacco chewing in one of Coke's classes, "some put the chaw in their pocket, which incensed the teacher who started running her hand into their pockets to remove the devilish substance."

"So Coke cut a hole in his pocket and the teacher grabbed more than she bargained for, and that resulted in the termination of the teacher poking around in pockets."

There was a lot of grief in Coke's life, which required stoic balance. His mother died in childbirth when he was 4.

His older brother, Edgar, died when Coke was 23, in a shooting accident. Coke witnessed their friend working the lever on a jammed rifle after they'd returned to their hunting cabin and Edgar had advised his pals to unload their guns. Edgar was standing up from bending over to pick up ejected shells, when the friend's rifle discharged and shot a bullet that tore Edgar's aorta.

"I am glad that I was present and saw everything," Coke wrote a Maryville College classmate of Edgar, for it saved him from speculating about what had happened. The whole community "made a pact to keep silent about the matter," Cole reports; and grieved for the friend, who condemned himself.

Coke as leader

Coke's good humor remained a necessary part of the leadership roles he assumed, first as a basketball coach and then, at age 38, as chairman of the Board of Commissioners.

When his wife Catherine dinged a car in a parking lot because her discomfort with shifting gears made her driving jerky, Coke wrote the collision victim, Luther Taylor, whom he knew, to resolve the situation.

Using the "Ordinary Prudent Man" measuring stick, he declared that Luther should have foreseen that Catherine would be coming to church "and might hit anything there."

"On the other hand," Coke wrote, the same judicial standard might decide that Coke should never have let Catherine drive. It was a conundrum, and Coke concluded, "Aw — let's forget it!"

Growing up with a strict stepmother, and attending a strict Baptist Church, the Candler children nonetheless obeyed their joyous instincts.

When Coke came down with scarlet fever, he escaped out the window of his bedroom quarantine to affect his own cure playing Tarzan in the woods.

Coke's sister was nearly churched for being elected queen of the Rhododendron Ball and attending a dance. Coke attended dances at the home of Ellis Arrowood, who owned Candler Pool Hall. Coke's sister Mimi said "sometimes after Coke got limbered up he would dance on one leg."

Grandchildren remember Coke playing a hide-the-dollar-bill game. They also remember camping and fishing with him.

When he retired, he said the reason was "the trout in the Smokies and Pisgah Forest told him they were overweight ... and wanted him to devote more time to their welfare by coming out and giving them workouts."

In his office at the courthouse, Coke had an open door policy. When family members called him there, he advised them, "State your business and get off the phone."

His retreat from the press of business was prayerful communion with mountain streams and fish.

"The Lord has been good to me and merciful to me," he said about a year before he died in 1989, "and alone, deep in the mountains and on trout streams, I knew that He had helped me solve many county problems, and personal problems, too."

What's in a name?

Coke Candler was not named after a beverage, but after one of his father's heroes, Sir Edward Coke, an English jurist in the time of Shakespeare and a champion of common law.

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published July 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Buncombe Commissioner Coke Candler's colorful life