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How did I just come to run for Georgia politics?

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I'm sitting there in December 1969 in my mother's and daddy's house on Main Street, Lithonia, Georgia,

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really.

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And everybody says I'm a war hero and all that kind of stuff, but there's no job offers.

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No concrete jobs at all.

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No firm job offers at all.

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No job offers, period.

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By the spring of 1970, I realized that I'm not going to get any job offers.

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I mean nobody is going to hire a guy with just one hand.

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Even though I had artificial limbs and I was able to drive my car, which by then I had

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purchased with a VA grant to use for some of it--I wasn't going to be hired.

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So I thought, well, no girlfriend, no apartment, no future, no job, no hope, now's a great

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time to run for the state senate.

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How did I decide on the state senate?

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I wanted to run for Congress.

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I wanted to go back to Washington.

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But by then, DeKalb County had turned massively Republican, as Georgia is today.

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And I knew I would lose the race for the Congress.

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But I took a look at the state senate seat and found that it was possible, I thought,

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to run in a race and have a shot to win because it was a marginal seat.

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The incumbent Republican had won just a little bit in the massive Nixon landslide of '68.

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So I decided to announce in April 1970, I was going on 28 years old, for the state senate.

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Nobody thought I had a chance to win.

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No other Democrat wanted to run in that senate seat because they thought they couldn't win.