The Rose Orphanage on East Wabash Avenue , as shown in a color postcard . ( Courtesy of John Becker )
By late 1967 , Tucker ’ s incredible streak neared its end . Although he wanted to be mayor again , he suspected his days in office were numbered as each of his re-election victories had come by smaller and smaller margins . He decided instead to start his own public relations firm , that coming 20 years after he followed in the footsteps of reforming Republican Vern McMillan . Prior to Tucker ’ s ascension to the office , only Ora Davis had served two four-year terms , and because Tucker believed he just might be able to win again , one Democratic rival , Leonard Conrad , admitted that he diligently watched from his County Clerk ’ s office window
every day right up to the signing deadline suspecting the mayor would eventually sneak over to file at the last minute . Missing the excitement of politics , Tucker openly spoke of running in both 1971 and 1975 too .
While critics slammed him , particularly after “ Sin City ” had been reintroduced as the city ’ s moniker by publications outside of Terre Haute — The Indianapolis Star , Life magazine , and The Saturday Evening Post , for example — Tucker had to face down the reputation of being soft on graft , gambling and prostitution , and the belief that his city was “ dirty ” in more ways than one . He and his supporters pointed out , however , that year after year his administration paved record numbers of Terre Haute ’ s streets , that the city ’ s children were swimming in pools he ’ d built , that he brought considerable urban redevelopment to a tired old river town that always seemed to smell and was known for its open dumps and trashy alleys .
Despite Terre Haute being an infamously tough labor market , Tucker boasted , and rightly so , that he ’ d managed to persuade firms like Bemis , Anaconda , Ethyl Visqueen , Columbia Records and Pillsbury to set up shop here ; he kept taxes down too , and genuinely made an impression on the public when he worked side-by-side with rescue personnel at the Home Packing disaster in 1963 . Yet , even then , one critic referred to Terre Haute under Ralph Tucker as , “ a complex sociological dinosaur .”
Three years after Tucker ’ s death , Lenhardt Bauer , who narrowly lost in the first primary election Tucker won in 1948 , said in an interview with Harry Frey : “… you know , when you get down to it , Tucker was a good mayor . And if he wasn ’ t , what was there about him that was bad ?”
Bauer said Tucker ’ s long tenure was probably his
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54 Terre Haute Living • March 2022