Exclusive inside story of mystery man turned legend: Brad Hannah's memoirs...
With prompting from the Stewart Manor History Project, Brad Hannah shares behind-the-scene details of his legendary run for President of Graceland Student Government (GSG) in 1999.
Brad Hannah: It was all Will's fault, really. Will Durman was a hall-mate and my old boss during my brief and unhappy stint working for the school yearbook, Acacia, and he essentially made an off-hand comment that it would be funny to run some completely unknown student for GSG president. Just for a lark, say.
He didn't really take into account the people he was saying this to, namely my old summer camp buddy, Matthew Schipper, and our across-the-hall neighbor, Sean Salter.
I've found in my life that everyone talks about doing weird and unpredictable things, even going so far as to work out how they could conceivably be done, but they don't actually do them. Matt and Sean do. Will had unwittingly set into motion the snowball of an idea that would result in the avalanche of oddity, which consumed my life for about two weeks, two consecutive years.
Sean had previously run for student council at his high school, using the simple yet effective slogan "Vote Sean." Now all they needed was the aforementioned completely unknown student. Now, I try to hold as few misconceptions about myself as possible, so when they suggested that I was the perfect candidate I really didn't argue, not with all the evidence conspiring against me. My one stipulation with allowing them to use my name was that I wouldn't be required to actually do anything (which they later broke, incidentally).
The first step in campaigning, and the first thing seen by the student body is the candidates' profiles in the student newspaper, The Tower, which come out one week before elections. My favorite singular moment was when I saw the write up that Sean and Matt had made for me next to everyone else's serious attempt to engage the voting public's good sense with campaign goals. Instead of a photo, Sean had drawn a cartoon of a guy with a paper bag on his head, waving at the camera, with our campaign platform beneath: "Deny the Obvious." The actual write up, if I recall correctly, essentially said: "We make no promises because we don't want to lie."
After that, Matt and Sean set to work in a furious whirlwind to create as many individual, hand drawn and colored 8 1/2 by 11 inch posters as they could in the three days remaining before the campaign began. They knew that everyone else would just design one poster and make copies of it, which they dismissed as both boring and lacking vision. I think that by the first day candidates were allowed to hang posters, they had created about 75, with the final count being about 150. Ian Brenneman also contributed a few posters or ideas from time to time, but 95 percent of the work was done by either Matt or Sean.
The posters themselves were pretty simple affairs, some random slogan, a cartoon and then the omnipresent "Vote Brad". Some of the ones that I can still remember off the top of my head were: "Deliciously Fruity" (with a dancing orange), "En Fuego" (man on fire), and "Brad and Bread" (which is pretty obvious). Some of them were clever, some of them were cute, some were mildly offensive, (like "Groin kick" which had me doubled over laughing when I saw it) and some were utterly nonsensical. But they were all hand crafted and no two were ever alike.
Sean, Matt, and my roommate at the time Jared Dunsdon, were essentially the three public representatives of the Vote Brad campaign, because they were going around campus the whole week wearing tweed blazers which sported a few hand made "Vote Brad" buttons, continually refreshing the walls with newly made posters. This was a constant process because people kept stealing them to hang in their own rooms, or on their doors, or etc. This led to the poster which read "Steal this sign" (guy sneaking away with a BRAD poster), which someone promptly did.
Apparently there was a lot of rumor around campus as to which one of them was Brad, or if in fact Brad actually existed. I was keeping a very low profile at this point, and I doubt more than 10% of the campus knew who I was. Occasionally someone in one of my classes or in the roller hockey club would ask me "Are you that Brad?" I also saw that someone had written "Who are you Brad?" on one of my numerous posters.
In short, the general public had no idea who I was or how serious I was about my run for president. I can't really even say that I knew how serious I was at the time. Luz Jansky, one of the other candidates actually sought me out at campaign headquarters, A.K.A. my room, to verify that I was in fact a real person, and to ask me that very question, to which I was noncommittal.
Just as the candidate profile stands out as the zenith of my enjoyment of the campaign process, the nadir came with the Wednesday night bearpits (where the candidates answer questions from the student body). In keeping with the "mystery candidate" theme I was wearing a paper bag with eyeholes over my head. We had even prepared a follow-up joke, which up until now, no one outside of the campaign staff ever saw. In case they asked me to remove the paper bag, I was also wearing a Zorro style mask underneath. Of course they would make me remove that one too, but by then we would have already gotten the laugh.
Now the bag on the head joke, while funny, raised a twofold problem. Firstly, I couldn't wear my glasses over the Zorro mask, so I was doing the whole process partially blind. Now you may argue that I really didn't need to see clearly to answer questions, and you'd be right, but not being able to see throws off your whole thought process, so I wasn't at the top of my game. Secondly, I doubt you've ever worn a bag on your head for 45 minutes, but if you decide to try it, you'll realize pretty quickly that 90 percent of your body heat escapes through the top of your head, and only about 20 percent of that can permeate a grocery bag. I had created my own tiny little oven, and was slowly baking my brain.
Now even despite these minor inconveninces, I think I did pretty well, especially given that I had no idea what I was talking about, right up until the final question. The final question came from a fellow Stewart Manor-ite, Webster Mununembe. Now Webster is a prince of a guy, but he has a very thick African accent, and I had absolutely no idea what he was saying about 50 percent of the time. As a result I basically mumbled something completely vague and incoherent and sat down, and that's the only thing I remember clearly from the whole night.
Webster had single handedly destroyed my confidence, and I was quite frankly terrified that everyone thought I was an idiot and was making a big joke out of the whole process, and I seriously thought about dropping out and just putting an end to the whole thing before I could really embarrass myself. I was simultaneously scared of the exact opposite outcome, that I would somehow galvanize enough people who would ordinarily not vote at all to vote for me and I would be swept into this office that I didn't want and had no idea how to do.
I did manage to shake it off in time for the Friday speeches which, not to toot my own horn, but I kicked butt! It's always difficult to judge one's own performance, especially with no record of the event to review, but everyone I talked to said I gave a great speech. Staff members, press members, friends, total strangers, everyone gave me positive reviews, so I took their word for it. I am now done patting myself on the back.
At the final tally that year I won 14 percent of the vote, which out of five candidates isn't too bad. I honestly never got a lot of reaction to the campaign while it was going on, largely due to my aforementioned anonymity. From what I gathered though, the faculty was largely divided, some loved it and some hated it. Our biggest faculty supporter both years was director of Student Activities, Brad Carr, who had an office in the MSC and therefore was front row for our shenanigans.
The student reaction remains largely a mystery to me. I know for a fact that people liked the posters, unless they were stealing them to burn. I saw a lot on people's doors though, so that seems unlikely. I remember fondly the day after voting when we were required to take down all our publicly displayed posters, which meant going around to every hall and stealing back our own property. Shana McCrosky had personally collected about a dozen that were proudly displayed on her door and she physically barred our way from taking them down. Matt finally did negotiate the return of the first poster he drew, which involved me fighting a bear for some reason.
I do know that voter turn-out that year was higher than it had been in recent memory. Whether people were coming out to vote for me or against me, we did manage to increase the total participation level of the campus, which is a decent accomplishment in and of itself. Now it would be easy to say in retrospect that this was our goal from the start, but that, frankly, is not the case. We had no goal or agenda going into the project, it was just something to do, and we were a group of people used to making our own fun. I suppose our intent or lack thereof doesn't change the fact that we did get people to pay attention to something that they probably should have considered important. Better to draw attention to something by mocking it than to let it go ignored.
–Brad Hannah–
Are you a Stewart Manor alumni,
or remember something from this campaign?