Courtis Fuller has been doing the TV news in Cincinnati for 14 years.

        He's been a constant on the city's charity circuit, as emcee at events from the Senior Citizen Hall of Fame to the Black Achievers Salute Banquet.

Fuller

        Now, he's running for mayor in a high-profile race that is drawing national attention, and could be the most important in Cincinnati's history.

        Still, while his face is among the most recognizeable in the city, most Cincinnatians know Mr. Fuller only as an image on a television screen.

        While he's been a very public figure, he can also be an intensely private person.

        Even those who know him best say he can be a difficult guy to get to know.

        It's a perception Mr. Fuller acknowledges, but he insists there's not much to know.

        “I would say the biggest misconception about me might be that I try to come across as anything more than I am,” he said. “Some people may try to reconcile the TV guy with the candidate guy. Really, I'm the same person I always have been.”

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        But just who is that person? He is:

        A violinist.

        A Pittsburgh sports fanatic.

        A devout Baptist who describes his campaign as a “walk of faith.”

        A stubborn campaigner who plays by his own rules and takes advice from few people.

        And a man whose ability to talk has opened doors his entire life.

Pittsburgh roots
        Courtis John Fuller was born on Jan. 26, 1957, in a poor neighborhood of Pittsburgh known as the Hill District — but sometimes called “little Harlem.”

        He owes the unusual spelling of his first name to his father — the first black crane operator for U.S. Steel in Rankin, Pa. — who died when Courtis was six months old.

        “My mom said my dad named me. Maybe that was just her way of deflecting the blame,” he chuckled.

        He talks very little about his humble upbringing, but does confess to idolizing Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh right-fielder who died in a 1972 airplane crash while delivering relief supplies to Nicaragua.

        And while he now professes to be a Reds fan, his Pittsburgh colors still show in his choice of yard sign colors (yellow and black, like the Pirates and Steelers) and even the name of his white bichon frise, “Clemente.”

        His mother, Dorothy Fuller, said her son was “always a talker.”

        His neighborhood was 95 percent black and 100 percent poor.

        And if he hadn't picked up a violin at age 7, Mr. Fuller said he would have ended up like many of the youths in the neighborhood: jobless or in jail.

        “Let me tell you a secret about years ago,” said Sister Francis Assisi Gorham, who ran a music program for inner-city youth in Pittsburgh for 16 years. “Those kids did not have a bunch of choices like they do today.”

        Sister Francis described the young Mr. Fuller as a talented violinist whose gift for music was surpassed only by his gift for gab.

        “He was an extrovert. He could talk to anybody,” she said. “He had this quality. ... Leadership. That's it. What I recognized in him from day one was his leadership qualities. He rose to any occasion. He was an ambassador for the program.”

        But with that strong charisma also came a sort of shy stubbornness. “He's very strong-headed,” Sister Francis said. “Sometimes he would learn from his mistakes. ... But sometimes?”

Nun's influence
        Mr. Fuller credited his relationship with Sister Francis — “here was this white nun teaching violin to little black kids,” he said — for his early understandings of race relations.

        But that's not to say that race wasn't an issue.

        When Mr. Fuller came back years later to become business manager for Sister Francis' Ozanam Strings group, the two developed a race-conscious but practical fund-raising system. When they needed a black person to raise money, Mr. Fuller went. When the situation called for a white person, Sister Francis did the work.

Education, first job
        Mr. Fuller went on to engineering school, dropped out, and then studied journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

        He got his first on-air job as a traffic announcer for a country music station.

        From there, a Milwaukee television station gave him a break.

        “He was green as a reporter, but he had a great heart and he was a sponge for learning,” said Jill Geisler, who was the news director and now serves as a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a center for journalism education in Florida.

        Ms. Geisler said some people go into television news to become celebrities, and others to become journalists, “and I always thought Courtis got into it for the right reasons.”

        Mr. Fuller jumped from market to market, as many young reporters do. He went from Peoria, Ill., to Orlando, Fla., to Macon, Ga., to Cincinnati, where he was known to local viewers from his work at NBC affiliate WLWT-TV, Channel 5.

        Along the way he got married (to his Peoria co-anchor), had a baby girl, and got divorced and remarried.

        He came to Cincinnati in 1987. He started as a street reporter, with occasional fill-in shifts as anchor. But he never broke through to the top anchor job.

        When Jerry Springer left for Chicago, Mr. Fuller was passed over — first by Jim Watkins, then by a former politician by the name of Charlie Luken.

Standing by principles

        Mr. Fuller never complained — unless it was a matter of principle.

        When the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court died in 1993, a producer wanted to bury the segment at the end of the newscast.

        “If I have to explain to you who Thurgood Marshall is, then I've already lost the argument,” he told the producer.

        The justice's death became the lead story.

        “I was critical of the business when I had to be,” Mr. Fuller said last week. “There were problems in the broadcast and news industries, and I spoke out on issues of hiring and coverage of the black community.

        “That's why I take the position I do now in dealing with the media on the flip side.”

        It's no secret that Mr. Fuller has been stand-offish to the local media — even his former colleagues in television.

        In many ways, he's been his own campaign manager. Campaign staffers provided by the Charter Committee in June have been replaced with Mr. Fuller's own people.

        He sets his own schedule, attending events away from television cameras, and rarely talks to reporters.

        It's worked so far, Mr. Fuller notes. He won the Sept. 11 primary by 16 percentage points.

        Mr. Fuller calls it a “walk of faith.”

        “When you walk by faith, you collect 5,000 signatures in a number of hours. When you walk by faith, you win an election on the most horrific day of our entire history by 16 points — even when your opponent has an 11-to-1 fund-raising advantage,” he told a Carmel Presbyterian Church dinner last month. “With God on your side, all things are possible.”

        Themes of Christian faith predominate in the campaign.

        When he sat down early in the campaign to draft a multi-point platform, he decided on a biblical number.

        “The number seven just sort of leaped out. There's a thousand other things. I could have kept on going. But there was something powerful in the number seven. I can't add much to it.”

        What resulted was a “seven-point covenant” with voters, covering neighborhoods, crime, gay rights, the arts, downtown, education and governance.

        At 44, Mr. Fuller has a long career ahead of him — win or lose. But right now, he has few plans beyond next Tuesday.

        If he wins, he will go to a special seminar for new mayors at Harvard University. He will be sworn in on Dec. 1, and the first words of his inaugural speech will be, “It's a new day.”

        And what if he loses? Will he go back to anchoring the news? Or, having gotten a taste of politics, will he run again?

        “I really haven't thought a lot about that. I will start thinking about tomorrow when tomorrow ... comes,” he said, dropping into his deep, poetic voice. “I have some options floating around in my head, but I've locked them in a compartment that says, "Do not open until Christmas.'”

        COMING FRIDAY: A detailed look at Mayor Charlie Luken.
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