Fixing TVs wasn’t enough for my grandfather.

He had to run for President.

March 10, 2023
By Vicki Entreken

In 1950, Carroll Shaw (1908-1983) was a radio repairman working 60 hours a week. He was 42 and lived in South Florida with his wife and four kids. Two years later, my grandfather ran for President of the United States.

I knew he ran for mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida because in 1979, I was around for that. He lost to incumbent Corrine Freeman. Horrendously. In fact, he lost so badly (by 85% of the vote) that Freeman said, “With that percentage of the vote, I’m going to raise some kind of hallelujah in City Hall.”

Tampa Bay Times still mentions his name from time to time, the last being in 2005. Carrie Johnson wrote of Rick Baker’s win:

Baker got 22,785 of the 32,367 votes cast Tuesday. According to city records, he is the second mayor since 1975 to win with more than 70 percent of the vote. In 1979, Corrine Freeman collected 85 percent of the vote, winning 30,078 of 35,574 votes, defeating challenger Carroll S. Shaw.

What a great way to be remembered.

A few years ago, I found out he ran for the U.S. presidency. My father says he ran because it was cheaper than running for the senate, and that he never intended to win. He wanted free publicity for his television repair business. Perhaps, but I’ll always remember my grandfather, I called him Papa, as an idea man.

This is a man who built a roof over his swimming pool with planters along the windows so his wife could swim and garden safely from the SW Florida heat. This is a man who after losing his wife and mother of their four children, after a long battle to cancer, got remarried in a campground the day after Thanksgiving because his family was already gathered.

When the pool became too cold to swim in, this man built a solar heating system on a platform in the back yard where he pumped water through PvC pipes painted black, and it worked. This was in the 1970s, way before solar companies were cold-calling you repeatedly to sell you panels before the government discount runs out. When Papa wanted something, he did what he could to get it, or build it, or he at least tried. I believed there was more to his run for the presidency than free publicity.

I looked online for anything about his campaign. At that time, I found one mention in a South Florida newspaper calling him a “little-known man named Carroll Shaw” and another in an online database listing all presidential candidates by party and year. He ran in 1952, the same year that Dwight D. Eisenhower won by a landslide. I didn’t find much else. And I didn’t stop believing.

Fast forward a few years. Now, more newspapers have been digitized and guess what I found? The man had a plan!

‘Plan X’ to be exact. The article above shows that Papa, a self-proclaimed progressive, was heading for the Democratic National Convention to share his Plan X. In my opinion, Plan X may have sounded better than Plan B, or Plan C, but it was probably the first plan to be Xed out at the convention.

Remember when 2016 presidential candidate Andrew Yang campaigned with the idea to give every citizen $1000 a month and everybody laughed? This wasn’t new. Papa campaigned with the same idea in 1952 promising $200 for all. He didn’t win, obviously, but I don’t think the $200 was the main reason.

The clip below explains more of Plan X:

If my grandfather didn’t really want to be president, he would have quit when he finished last in the Presidential Preference Primary race in Florida with 128 votes. He wouldn’t have continued on to the convention with such slim chances saying, “If anyone is going to be a dark horse, I am certainly going to be it.”

The previous article gives Papa’s brother Byron some of the credit as the “brains of his political machine.” I’d like to think the ideas in Plan X were Byron’s and not my grandfather’s, but I can’t know that for sure. They were out there. Here’s what Charles S. Miley of the Fort Pierce News-Tribune thought of Papa’s Plan X (2nd column):

It was the currency idea (expiring every month??!) that killed his campaign. Had to be. Papa wanted to get rid of grifters, and today more than ever, I wish he could have. He also didn’t want people to suffer hardships or go hungry. He meant well, but he didn’t see the full implications of what he was asking Americans to vote for.

When I asked my dad about it recently he said, “Oh, he was a communist. Dean and I had to sit down with him and tell him you can’t control people’s money as a government.” Dean is my father’s twin brother. They were 14 at the time their father ran for president. To give people money and then take it away, that was an issue in this capitalist country. He wasn’t actually a communist in the political sense, as in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Papa wasn’t stupid, he was a dark horse. Even though he lost big, he meant well.

My grandfather may have never had a chance at the American presidency, but he tried, and I’m proud of him for going after something he believed in, even if it was, according to Miley, wacky. It doesn’t matter. He will always be Papa to me.