Farewell to a Legend

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

One never appreciates the true maverick public servant until they are suddenly gone. Just turned 72, in good health, Jimmy Fahrenholtz was working in his yard—and died unexpectedly, leaving countless New Orleanians with memories of an unmatched iconoclast blessed with a giving heart.

When Jimmy first decided to run for the Orleans Parish School Board, he organized a campaign right at the date of qualifying. Only six weeks remained until the election. To say ‘no one gave him a chance’ amounts to an understatement of truly epic proportions. At the time, his district seat had served as the jumping-off point for Republican politicians from Lakeview, allied with the Democratic Morial Administration, to gain some political experience on the OPSB for a few years before running for the New Orleans City Council. It was bipartisan machine politics at its most pronounced.

Jimmy hated it. A former union shop steward who had earned his law degree in his 40s and spent the subsequent years working on behalf of those without much of a voice (topped off with his advocacy work at AIDS-Law), the ‘insider-old-boys-club’ bothered him, to say the least. Fahrenholtz’s campaign strategy was to advocate realistic school reform, focusing on parental empowerment, but with a twist. Whenever his pseudo-conservative opponent would attack him for being pro-gay or supportive of those on the fringes of society, Jimmy would reply, “Yeah, those are my friends.”

Every time an attack was made on his LBTGQ or Black support, Jimmy embraced the criticism, in other words. His victory proved the upset of the political year, and it would kickoff two terms on the OPSB which literally shook the entrenched interests in the school system to their foundations.

And the funny thing is that the crusade was conducted with endless humor. Jimmy was fun—and funny. Fahrenholtz possessed an expansive love of life and particularly everything New Orleans. While other politicians grew “more serious” whilst in office, grim with gravitas, Jimmy’s answer was to build political bridges across the partisan and ethnic divides by throwing wild parties at his house where everybody was invited.

Not not to sound too much like a sitcom character, but they were “legend-ARY”. More particularly, these fetes brought together people of differing backgrounds, political viewpoints, and living standards. With the band playing, and the booze flowing, Jimmy created the most unlikely political salon of all time. Many of the post-Katrina reforms that later would change the political landscape of New Orleans were born in conversations by people-winded and gleeful- right off the dance floor.

There are too many stories to recount about my friend Jimmy Fahrenholtz. For all the praise that has been rendered on the web—and in print— of him in recent days, it’s worth noting that Jimmy had the keenest political radar of almost any candidate whom I have ever met. When he decided to run against Bill Jefferson for Congress in 2008, Jimmy wanted to run as an independent. For a brief time in the early 2000s, congressional elections in Louisiana were conducted as closed party primaries, with the general election won by a plurality between the Republican, Democrat, and any independent who stood. Jimmy, whose politics had always been socially liberal but fiscally conservative, thought his best chance was as an independent.

He was talked out of it. Only a Democrat could win the 2nd congressional District, after all, we reasoned. Jimmy countered that the political environment that Autumn was totally different, and something unexpected would happen. But he heeded our advice and ran as a Democrat— unsuccessfully.

Hurricane Gustav delayed the election until December, and Jimmy proved prophetic. Had he been in the final three with Joseph Cao and Bill Jefferson, Mr. Fahrenholtz would’ve gone to Congress. And Brian Trasher suspects, “Jimmy would’ve been the first member censured forever calling his colleagues ‘asshats’.”

I was texting with Jimmy on his 72nd birthday, two weeks before his death. We had not seen one other since the pandemic.

Jimmy told me to call him, so we could plan out the details. But life got in the way, and after all, you always have time…

If you have a chance today to tell a dear friend how much he or she impacted your life, do it. Even people who are in perfect health leave us unexpectedly.

This article was originally published in the August 30, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.