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State Republican Party Chairman John Thrasher told GOP nominee Rick Scott that “we will be the first party to elect a bald guy to governor” of Florida.  Not so, says the Truth-O-Meter at PolitiFact Florida, operated by the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald.

PolitiFact checked with the curator of the official portraits exhibit at the Museum of Florida History and learned that the first bald governor of Florida was, in fact, Harrison Reed, the state’s 15th governor, who served from 1868 to 1873.  PolitiFact even turned up a passage in a book describing Reed as “a little man, slightly built, with a big, bald head and a bushy beard.”  So, PolitiFact declared that Scott would not be Florida’s first bald governor.

But that might be splitting hairs — or tenses.  Chairman Thrasher said the Republican party will be the first to elect a bald guy governor in Florida  Well, it was, 142 years ago.  Harrison Reed was a Reconstruction era Republican.

To become the second bald-guy governor, of course, Rick Scott has to first defeat Democrat Alex Sink, who is not bald and is currently Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, in November, and there’s considerable question as to whether the controversial hospital mogul can do that.

More Southern oddities and entitites:

Is that a banana in your pocket or a Glock 9mm? Hoping to guide people in Nashville, Tennessee, looking for a place to eat and drink without getting shot, a Vanderbilt University management professor and his daughter have started www.gunfreediningtennessee.org, a website listing establishments that have opted out of Tennessee’s new law allowing folks to carry guns into restaurants and bars that don’t specifically ban guns.  An attorney helping with the website told The Tennessean, “The founders of Gun Free Dining Tennessee want their website to be the go to source for reliable gun-free dining information.”  Meanwhile, an unidentified server at Jackson’s Bar and Bistro in Nashville has filed a complaint with the state claiming that the law allowing guns in bars creates an unsafe workplace.

Sometimes, you can’t keep a dead man down: Efforts of a Hickory, North Carolina, family to bury Daniel Scott Lasky at sea off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, where he loved to vacation, failed miserably.  Last weekend, Lasky’s body bubbled to the surface and was discovered by a fisherman thinking he had uncovered a mob hit.  Authorities were called.  Apparently, the burial was legal,  but authorities were investigating whether any environmental regulations were violated.

Dew Droplets: Chattanooga now has the fastest broadband service in the nation with the launch of America’s first gigabit broadband by the city’s Electric Power Board, but will anybody pay the initial rate of $350 a month? … The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis planned to exhibit  photos by the late Ernest Withers despite a report by the Commercial Appeal outing Withers as an FBI informant … A teacher in Brooksville, Florida, has been reprimanded for recommending for optional reading to his advanced psychology students The Heroin Diaries, a memoir by Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx … Sonya Thomas of Alexandria, Virginia, won the National Buffalo Wing Festival eating contest by downing 181 chicken wings in 12 minutes … In a come-to-Democrats moment, Gov. Charlie Crist, the Independent candidate for US Senate in Florida, said he supports civil unions for gay couples, adoption by same-sex couples, and doing away with the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers — all issues he opposed when he was still a Republican … Microsoft Corp. and the chief rules enforcer for Xbox Live have apologized to a 26-year-old gamer accused of violating the online gaming service’s code of conduct by publicly declaring he’s from Fort Gay — the actual name of his hometown in West Virginia.

Check out our News and Opinion Feeds for a lot more Southern happenings.

Ron Taylor

Ron Taylor was born and raised in Georgia and worked more than 40 years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a reporter and editor and as an online producer for ajc.com and AccessAtlanta. He served for a time as the newspaper's regional editor, overseeing coverage of the South. He is co-author, with Dr. Leonard Ray Teel, of Into the Newsroom:  An Introduction to Journalism and has conducted workshops in the Middle East on feature writing.

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