THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 16, 1996 TAG: 9604160305
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
More than 400 admirers from throughout Virginia packed the Williamsburg Lodge Monday night to laud Hunter B. Andrews of Hampton, a legislative lion 30 years in the General Assembly.
The lion rampant was a roaring sight all his life, doubly powerful as the Senate's majority leader and chairman of its finance committee.
Of four former governors who came to praise Andrews, Gerald Baliles introduced him as ``the mentor and tormentor of us all.''
His thirst for knowledge led him to listen to the concerns of others, reflect on options, search for a consensus and often come up with solutions that had eluded everyone else.
Linwood Holton, another governor who came to praise him, recalled how Andrews blunted a study aimed at abolishing Holton's Center for Innovative Technology in Northern Virginia.
The study's patron, the secretary of education for Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, asked to chair the study.
``I'll be the chairman,'' Andrews barked. ``Can I be co-chairman?'' the secretary asked.
``No, you'll be vice chairman,'' Andrews said. He saved the center.
``Hunter was as close as anybody in my time to being indispensible,'' Holton said.
Mills E. Godwin Jr. said Andrews played a key role in getting things done in three decades.
``I leaned upon him heavily in bringing together support for the sales tax and in taking the lead in its passage,'' Godwin said.
Sales tax revenues funded progressive advances along a broad front, especially in education.
Former Gov. Charles Robb said he had always been mystified as to why Andrews wasn't among the governors and he figured it was because Andrews wished to serve the commonwealth more than a term of four years.
Dinner chairman Joshua P. Darden Jr. marveled at the thousands of bills Andrews shepherded through the Senate.
In response, Andrews attributed whatever he had done to his able aides.
He said his ``guiding star had been to improve the Virginia educational system and reach at-risk children even before they go to kindergarten.''
To help Virginia meet challenges, ``we should be prepared to do what we think is right for higher education and public education'' and supply the revenues, he said.
After the dinner, Norfolk Sen. Stanley Walker listed the wellsprings of Andrews' legislative career.
``First, his boundless energy. He worked at it full time. I never saw him tire. He was as alert at the end of the day as he had been at the start.''
And then Andrews, who was ``never parochial,'' was always concerned with the big picture and strove to meet the people's needs where ever they lived in Virginia.
The lion's last bout began when Gov. Allen, at a news conference shortly before the 1995 General Assembly, called for a tax cut without consulting chairmen of the fiscal committees.
Andrews was wrathful. He and Walker and Virginia Beach Del. Clarence Holland were in the airport next morning, on their way to the finance committee's annual retreat, this one in Roanoke, when a call came for the majority leader from Allen's secretary of finance.
``Hunter threw the phone down and it bounced all over the counter,'' Walker recalled.
All that day Allen officials were trying, in vain, to reach Andrews.
``Hunter's retreats, which he threw open to everybody, brought everything out in sunshine, really opened up the finance committee,'' Walker said.
``They should have been named advances.''
Democrats were stunned at the governor's ignoring an historic procedure of bringing in legislative leaders to discuss a fiscal issue of such magnitude.
They saw the tax, plus a costly Allen program for building prisons, as two issues aimed at whipsawing Democrats in upcoming legislative elections to win GOP majorities in the House and Senate.
To battle a prison program, however overblown it might be, coupled with proposed tax cuts, would have unnerved many politicians.
Andrews led the opposition with elan, declaring the prison program was bloated beyond population projections and the tax cut was reckless in view of previous reductions in higher education during the Wilder regime.
Democrats, with help from some Republicans, trimmed the prison program, defeated the tax cut, restored reductions in human services and increased money for education from kindergarten to college.
In the November election, the Democrats held their majority in the House, tied with Republicans in the Senate, but the lion king fell, defeated by M.E. Williams, vice mayor of Hampton.
That election night, Sen. Walker, sorrowing over the loss of a giant, said that, at any rate, the legislators could call upon the best possible consultant.
And from the sidelines, when the senators called for help, he gave advice during the 1996 General Assembly.
Told Monday of Walker's looking to him as a consultant, Andrews replied ``I'm available.''
An old lion, young at heart. ILLUSTRATION: Hunter B. Andrews ``was the mentor and tormentor'' of both sides
of the aisle for more than 30 years' service in the General
Assembly.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB