Coker modern GOP pioneer

photo Harold Coker, right, talks to Ron Littlefield before EPB officials announce higher speeds and lower prices for residential internet customers during a news conference in their downtown Chattanooga headquarters building in 2013.

Harold Coker was as much at home taking apart a car as he was putting together a deal for the Hamilton County Commission.

More importantly for area Republicans, he helped build up the local party over the past 30 years so that nearly every county official elected in August wore the GOP brand.

Coker, the businessman, public servant, antique car hound and family man, died Sunday from complications following a Saturday fall at his Tyner farm. He was 84.

"He was one of those people who led the Republican Party from being the minority party to the majority party in Hamilton County, and he gave a lot of money to do that," former Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey told the Times Free Press Sunday.

Coker was a Hamilton County commissioner (1982-2002), a former Hamilton County Republican Party chairman and was the party's unsuccessfully standard-bearer for Congress against popular incumbent Marilyn Lloyd in 1988.

His Standifer Gap Road farm was the scene for many GOP gatherings through the years, including one on a hot summer afternoon in 1986 when the candidates included gubernatorial nominee Winfield Dunn, a former Tennessee governor trying to make a comeback, and U.S. House candidate Jim Golden, a local attorney. Neither candidate won, but they set the table for future Republicans, who would run and win. Even as late as this summer, his farm was the site of the Hamilton County Republican Women's annual picnic.

Although the Tennessee Tech University graduate was unsuccessful in his congressional run, he did well in nearly every other area in which he was interested, from starting and growing a tire business to restoring and showing antique cars (at one point nearly half of them having won Antique Automobile Club of America first prizes) to chairing the Hamilton County Commission (which he did three times).

Along the way, Coker was appointed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission by President Ronald Reagan, received the Entrepreneur of the Year award from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, served as president of the Antique Automobile Club of America, was inducted into the National Tire Dealers Association and Re-Treaders Association Hall of Fame, was a member of the board of directors of the Electric Power Board and was given the Chattanooga chapter of the Freedoms Foundation's Spirit of 76 award.

While on the Hamilton County Commission, he, among other accomplishments, helped the county negotiate to purchase the Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant, which is today known as Enterprise South and is the home of Volkswagen, Amazon and other industries.

Personally, Coker was open, affable and full of stories. One was how his love of purchasing antique cars got him in trouble early in his 60-plus-year marriage to his beloved Lil.

"It almost caused me a divorce," he said in a 2010 interview in his expansive car barn. "We were eating a lot of beans. I had to slow it down."

Coker said in the same interview he learned to be an entrepreneur by selling and buying back a car for less money several times when the buyer couldn't fix it. His father, he said, could fix anything, allowing him to turn a profit each time he sold it.

Several cars in his collection are the last few of their kind. One in his collection four years ago was a bright red 1951 Ford convertible. It was similar in style, he said, to one in which he courted his wife. It was later used as part of the festivities for his granddaughter's wedding.

Active until his death, he earlier this year was a part of his son Corky's Travel Channel show "Backroad Gold," which found the Coker family searching through rural parts of the country to find restorable collector cars. Asked his father's part in the series, the younger Coker said his dad "just likes to bust my chops."

Indeed, as a Republican in a Democrat-controlled county over the last 30 years, Coker must have felt like he had to bust some chops to get his voice heard.

"If I've had any conflict with anybody, it's because I'm trying to do a good job," he said an interview before leaving the County Commission in 2002. "I'm not a white knight in shining armor, and everybody doesn't like me, but you can't always please everybody."

Eventually, Coker's voice was heard, and now his conservative type of politics is the rule rather than the exception.

Upcoming Events