Stephen King: The Dead Zone

Albany he had gone to work for Prudential, and he stayed in the capital city until 1965.

As an insurance salesman he was an aimless sort of success. There was no offer to join the company at the executive level, no outbursts of Christian fervor. During that five-year period, the brash and brassy Greg Stillson of yore seemed to have gone into hibernation.

In all of his checkered career, the woman in his life had been his mother. He had never married, had not even dated regularly as far as Johnny had been able to find out.

In 1965, Prudential had offered him a position in Ridgeway, New Hampshire, and Greg had taken it. At about the same time, his period of hibernation seemed to end. The go-go Sixties were gathering steam. It was the era of the short skirt and do your own thing.

Greg became active in Ridgeway community affairs. He joined the chamber of

Commerce and the Rotary Club. He got state-wide coverage in 1967, during a

controversy over the parking meters downtown. For six years, various factions had been wrangling over them. Greg suggested that if the meters be taken out and that collection boxes be put up in their stead. Let people pay what they want. some people had said that was the craziest idea they had ever heard. Well, Greg responded, you might just be surprised. Yes sir. He was persuasive. The town finally adopted the proposal on a provisional basis, and the ensuing flood of nickels and dimes had surprised everyone but Greg. He had discovered the principle years ago.

In 1969 he made New Hampshire news again when he suggested, in a long and carefully worked-out letter to the Ridgeway newspaper, that drug offenders be put to work on town public works projects such as parks and bike paths, even weeding the grass on the traffic islands. That’s the craziest idea I ever heard, many said. Well, Greg responded, try her out and if she don’t work, chuck her. The town tried it out. One pothead reorganized the entire town library from the outmoded Dewey decimal system to the more modern Library of Congress cataloguing system, at no charge to the town. A number of hippies busted at an hallucinogenic house party relandscaped the town park into an area showplace, complete with duckpond and a playground scientifically designed to maximize effective playtime and minimize danger. As Greg pointed out, most of these drug-users got interested in all those chemicals in college, but that was no reason why they shouldn’t utilize all the other things they had learned in college.

At the same time Greg was revolutionizing his adopted home town’s parking regulations and its handling of drug offenders, he was writing letters to the Manchester Union-Leader, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, espousing hawkish positions on the war in Vietnam, mandatory felony sentences for heroin addicts, and a return to the death penalty, especially for heroin pushers. In his campaign for the House of Representatives,

he had claimed on several occasions to have been against the war from 1970 on, but the man’s own published statements made that a flat lie.

In 1970, Greg Stillson had opened his own insurance and realty company. He was a great success. In 1973 he and three other businessmen had financed and built a shopping mall on the outskirts of Capital City, the county seat of the district he now represented. That was the year of the Arabian oil boycott, also the year Greg started driving a Lincoln Continental. It was also the year he ran for mayor of Ridgeway.

The mayor enjoyed a two-year term, and two years before, in 1971, he had been asked by both the Republicans and Democrats of the largish (population 8,500) New England town to run. He had declined both of them with smiling thanks. In ’78 he ran as an independent, taking on a fairly popular Republican who was vulnerable because of his fervent support of President Nixon, and a Democratic figurehead. He donned his construction helmet for the first time. His campaign slogan was Let’s Build A Better Ridgeway! He won in a landslide. A year later, in New Hampshire’s sister state of Maine, the voters turned away from both the Democrat, George Mitchell, and the Republican, James Erwin, and elected an insurance man from Lewiston named James Longley their governor.

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