Mr. Rhodes often angered conservatives in his own Republican Party with his big-spending ways and his willingness to promise other politicians high-priced projects in exchange for their support.
Liberal Democrats believed he ignored inner-city problems of poverty, cutting the cities out of his “jobs and progress” promises.
But politicians of all stripes ended up liking him on a personal basis because of his homespun southeast Ohio humor and his willingness to overlook party and ideology to make a deal.
“You could not help but like the guy,” said recently retired state Rep. Robert Netzley, R-Laura, one of the GOP conservatives who battled Mr. Rhodes' tax and spending plans over the years. “He was just fun to be around.”
“From the time he took over in 1963 until about 1966, he was the best governor this state had ever had,” Mr. Netzley said. “After that, he had promised so much to so many people, he wasn't as effective.”
Former state Rep. William Mallory Sr., who was the Democratic House leader during much of Mr. Rhodes' governorship, said his first encounter with the governor was in the late 1960s, when Mr. Mallory got a bill passed creating the Ohio Nursing Home Commission, but Mr. Rhodes vetoed it.
“I got the veto overridden, but we became good friends after that,” Mr. Mallory said.
U.S. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who served as Mr. Rhodes' lieutenant governor in his third term, called the late governor his “mentor.”
“They broke the mold after James A. Rhodes entered the political arena,” said Mr. Voinovich, who was governor for eight years in the 1990s. “He will go down in history not only because of his 16 years as governor, but, more importantly, because of the impact he had on the quality of life of Ohio's citizens.”
Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters, a Cincinnati Republican, was in Naples, Fla., Sunday at a campaign fund-raising event with Ohio Republicans when he learned of Mr. Rhodes' death.
“There was an audible gasp in the room when I announced it; and I have to say, I was choked up just saying the words,” Mr. Deters said.
"A genuine Ohio icon'
Mr. Rhodes was born into a world of politics most politicians today cannot imagine. It was a different world in 1934, the year James A. Rhodes' political history began.
When he began his political career, men who had fought the Great War 16 years before were standing in bread lines; and swirling winds were blowing the topsoil of Oklahoma clear to the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind a cloud of dust and thousands of farmers with broken dreams.
Hollywood had yet to discover Ronald Reagan; the St. Louis Cardinals — the “Gashouse Gang” — were the National League champions; $20 would buy a Crosley radio at Pogue's; and the Blue Eagle of Franklin Roosevelt's NRA symbolized hope for millions.
And the 25-year-old Mr. Rhodes, a coal miner's son from the dirt-poor hills of southern Ohio, was making a modest start — election to the Republican Central Committee in Columbus — to a career in politics that would span six decades.
His contemporaries on the Ohio political stage are long dead and grist for the historians' mill - Martin L. Davey, John Bricker, Frank Lausche, Mike DiSalle, C. William O'Neill.
But none dominated Ohio politics and government for so long: and none left so large a mark on the state's political and physical landscape.
No one since Ohio became a state in 1803 has held the governor's office as long — 16 years. The argument, made by his friends and foes, is that no one did more to change the state, for good or bad, than Mr. Rhodes.
“He is a genuine Ohio icon,” said Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who looked on Mr. Rhodes as his political mentor and spoke to him often in recent years.
“What he did as governor, his leadership, will remain the standard for governors for 50 years to come,” Mr. Blackwell said.
Lessons learned in defeat
Eighteen months ago, when the widowed ex-governor turned 90 and friends threw a birthday party for him at the suburban Columbus retirement home where he lived in recent years, he acknowledged the extraordinary hold he had on Ohio voters for decades with his homespun humor and his simple theme of “jobs and progress.”
“People have been good to me all these years; every office I ran for I got elected three or four times,” Mr. Rhodes said in September
1999. “Those people went out in the snow and rain for me.”
The conclusion of most who watched his career unfold for decades - Democrats and Republicans - is that Mr. Rhodes gets mixed reviews for his performance as Ohio's governor: generally good marks for the first eight years (1963-71) and mediocre-to-poor ones for his second eight (1975-83).
It took nearly 30 years of building a political base for Mr. Rhodes to achieve his goal of the governor's office in 1962.
He took his first big step in 1938, with his election to the Columbus Board of Eduction. By 1943, with World War II in full swing, he was the 34-year-old mayor of Columbus.
In 1952, he was elected state auditor, defeating Democrat Joseph “Jumpin' Joe” Ferguson, who turned out to be one of the chief rivals of Mr. Rhodes' political career and whose son, Thomas, later became state auditor, too.
Mr. Rhodes was the Republican candidate for governor in 1954, but he was defeated by Frank Lausche, the Clevelander who dominated Ohio politics in the 1940s and 1950s.
The defeat at the hands of Mr. Lausche taught Mr. Rhodes lessons about how successful politicians build a power base that he never forgot, much the same way Dick Celeste says he learned from Mr. Rhodes when Mr. Rhodes defeated him in 1978.
“I learned more about politics from Frank Lausche than anybody else,” Mr. Rhodes once said. “I went to school on him.”
"Jobs and Progress'
& Mr. Rhodes continued in the state auditor's office through the late 1950s, seeing his opening when the Democratic governor, Michael V. DiSalle of Toledo, appeared vulnerable because of state tax increases.
Mr. Rhodes moved in, sounding a theme he would continue for the next quarter-century: “Jobs and Progress.”
The first years of the Rhodes governorship were marked by a flurry of activity never seen before or since in Ohio.
He entered office in 1963 preaching (and practicing) austerity, laying off 4,000 state workers and cutting the budgets of most state departments by about 10 percent.
Then, spurred by the passage of massive bond issues, he embarked on a building program - expanding threefold the state park system, creating new universities and two-year colleges, building county airports, prisons, inner=city developments, highways, bridges, state office buildings, a statewide network of joint vocational schools.
Mr. Netzley, who went to the legislature in 1960, had more than his share of disagreements with Mr. Rhodes, but in his first term, “there has never been a better governor.”
“In his second eight years, he was no better than mediocre,” Mr. Netzley said. “The difference was that in the first term, he surrounded himself with competent people - people like (Richard) Krabach (Mr. Rhodes' budget director and later Cincinnati city manager), and (John) McElroy (Mr. Rhodes' chief of staff). They were people who got things done.”
Rising from the ashes
In 1966, Mr. Rhodes was at the height of his popularity and he easily defeated the Democratic candidate, Frazier Reams Jr., then a little-known state senator from Toledo.
In the second term (1967-71), Mr. Rhodes' building programs continued, but the term came to an ugly close in the spring of 1970, when Mr. Rhodes ordered National Guardsmen onto the campus of Kent State University, where the Cambodia incursion had sparked days of student demonstrations.
At the time, Mr. Rhodes - barred by the state constitution from running for a third consecutive term - was locked in a tough battle with Robert Taft Jr. (father of Mr. Rhodes' 1986 running mate and the present Ohio governor) for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination.
Taft won; and political pundits pronounced the end of Mr. Rhodes' political career.
Democrat John J. Gilligan, a U.S. congressman and former Cincinnati city councilman, was elected governor that year. Nothing seemed to work for the Gilligan administration; his aloof manner and actions such as the creation of the state income tax and the closing of the state parks put Mr. Gilligan in a vulnerable position going into 1974.
Still, he was the favorite for re-election, even with Mr. Rhodes as his Republican challenger. That was the year of Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon; Republicans nationwide were staring at a electoral disaster.
But Mr. Rhodes - campaigning on his “Jobs and Progress” theme and attacking the Democratic governor on taxes - squeezed out the narrowest of victories, one he even had a hard time believing himself.
About 11 p.m. on Election Day 1974, Mr. Rhodes stood before a crowd of supporters in the Governor's Ballroom of the Neil House hotel in Columbus and conceded defeat, saying he would fade from the scene and spend his days fishing with his grandchildren. He left his teary-eyed supporters and went upstairs to bed.
A few hours later, he was rousted by aides who told him he had pulled ahead of Mr. Gilligan.
Minutes later, he was back in the ballroom making a victory speech.
Final run a disaster
But the fact that times had changed and that Mr. Rhodes had lost much of his political magic became obvious in November 1975, when a massive bond issue program for rebuilding Ohio's cities was overwhelmingly rejected by voters, despite his vigorous campaigning around the state.
“All of the people who had been so good in the early years had left by that time,” Mr. Netzley said. “Rhodes made the mistake of thinking he had done it all himself; that all these things were his idea and that he could run it all.
“The longer he was governor, the more it became obvious he couldn't,” Mr. Netzley said. “That was when he became foolish and reckless.”
The early polls in 1978 showed him losing to Mr. Celeste, who had been elected lieutenant governor in 1974. But Mr. Rhodes won a fourth term that year by a narrow margin.
In the fourth term (1979-83), economic conditions quickly worsened, a situation Mr. Rhodes blamed on Jimmy Carter and the national economy.
Manufacturing jobs poured out of Ohio bound for the Sun Belt; school financing quickly turned into a full-fledged crisis, with school systems all over the state running out of money and closing their doors.
When Mr. Celeste was elected governor in 1982, he was left with a $528 million deficit, which prompted him to push an income tax increase through in 1983.
Mr. Rhodes in retirement kept a low profile in the early Celeste years, although no one in the Republican Party was surprised when, in 1986, at the age of 76, he announced he was running for a fifth term as governor.
Even Mr. Rhodes' Republican friends say the campaign was a disaster, that he made a mistake by conducting a “negative” campaign in which he attacked Mr. Celeste's ethics and record.
“He had a tremendous record in his first eight years,” said former Ohio Sen. Michael Maloney shortly after Mr. Rhodes' defeat. “A lot of people who've supported him wish he'd quit while he was ahead.”
After his defeat in 1986, Mr. Rhodes kept largely out of the political limelight, meeting from time to time for lunch with members of his administrations at an Amish restaurant in Plain City, Ohio, and showing up occasionally at political events.
In his later years, one of his favorite activities was going to the Ohio State Fair - an institution that, as governor, he transformed from a dusty country fair into a major entertainment event - and driving around the fairgrounds in a golf cart with Republican candidates for statewide office, such as Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Deters.
Mr. Rhodes' wife, Helen, his childhood sweetheart, died in 1987, not long after his final, unsuccessful run for governor. A daughter, Sandra Jacob, died in 1999.
He is survived by two other daughters, Suzanne Moore of Upper Arlington and Sharon Markham of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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