Tandy Little

Background

Reared in Montgomery, Little was a lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He is a former real estate developer in Montgomery. He was among the founding members of the Dixie Sailing Club on Lake Martin, a reservoir formed by the construction of Martin Dam on the Tallapoosa River near Montgomery.

Political life

In 1962, Little was one of three Republicans elected to the Alabama House, when fellow Republican businessman James D. Martin of Gadsden nearly upset the veteran Democratic U.S. Senator J. Lister Hill of Montgomery. In that same election, the Republicans did not offer an opponent to George C. Wallace, the Democrat who for a time became synonymous with the desire to preserve segregation in the American South. The two other Republicans elected with Little to single terms in the House were Donald Lamar Collins (1929–1993) of Jefferson County and John Andrew Posey, Jr. (1923–1972) of Winston County in northern Alabama. Two years later, Little and his wife, the former Ruth Blair (1921–2013), a Montgomery native and a graduate of Auburn University, were delegates to the 1964 Republican National Convention, which met in San Francisco to nominate the Goldwater–Miller ticket, the first Republican slate to win the electoral votes of Alabama since Reconstruction.

In 1965, Little and another Republican representative from Montgomery, Alfred Goldthwaite, who had defected the previous year from the Democrats, fought George Wallace's move to permit governors to succeed themselves, a change finally adopted for the 1974 election. Because Wallace could not run again in 1966, he offered his wife, Lurleen Wallace as his stand-in candidate.

Little, Collins, Posey, and Goldthwaite all left the legislature in 1966, when James D. Martin, by then a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives from Alabama's 7th congressional district, since disbanded, lost badly in the race for governor of Alabama. Martin was defeated by Lurleen Wallace, the first wife and political stand-in of her husband, George Wallace, and the Republican John Grenier similarly failed to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator John Sparkman in a high-profile race. The defeats of Martin and Grenier set back the Republican attempt to gain a permanent foothold in Alabama after nearly a century of one-party Democratic hegemony. The Montgomery Advertiser described the state party's bleak prospects: "The flimsy house that Barry [Goldwater] built collapsed except for a few boards here and there. ... The Republicans have little more than the bare foundations of a party."

In 1968, Little was the party finance chairman when the state GOP failed to mount a serious effort on behalf of the Nixon–Agnew ticket, which had no chance in Alabama against George Wallace's presidential candidacy under the American Independent Party. Nor could Perry O. Hooper Sr., of Montgomery gain momentum in his race for the U.S. Senate seat that Lister Hill vacated, a position won overwhelmingly by James B. Allen of Gadsden, a former two-term lieutenant governor. Of the lack of a Nixon campaign in Alabama, Little said, "We couldn't afford it" because of the decision to concentrate on the successful third-term bids of three Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama, all first elected in the Goldwater sweep of the state in 1964: Jack Edwards of Mobile, William L. Dickinson of Montgomery, and John H. Buchanan Jr., of Birmingham. For years no matter how poorly the state GOP fared, Alabama still had the three Republican U.S. representatives who gained footholds in their districts.

Family

In their later years, the Littles moved to the Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Florida, where Mrs. Little, known as "Teenie", died in 2013 at the age of ninety-one. The couple had four children, three surviving: Linda Little of Lumberton, North Carolina, Tandy Little, III, known as Duncan Little, of Seabrook, Texas, and Ann Little of Washington, D.C.

Another son, Donald Blair Little (1954-2012), was an attorney in Montgomery, who ran unsuccessfully, 61-33 percent, in the Republican primary election in 1998 against incumbent Perry O. Hooper Jr., for the District 73 seat in the Alabama House. Hooper's father was the 1968 U.S. Senate nominee and later the first Republican to serve as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.

The two Little grandchildren are Tandy Little, IV, of Tampa, Florida, and Laura Blair Little, of Clarksville, Tennessee.