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Pistol Whipping. Carl completed high school, enrolled under the G.I. bill as a psychology major at West Virginia State, but after a year went back home to Western Reserve University. He was still undecided as to a career—psychology and the ministry were possibilities—when in 1948 he became chauffeur to a political organizer in Frank Lausche's gubernatorial campaign. After Lausche won, Stokes was offered a state job and chose to be a liquor inspector. He was a tough one. In his first case, a lone foray against an unlicensed saloon, the tough barkeep and customers laughed in his scrawny face (he then weighed only 150 Ibs.). Stokes pistol-whipped the bartender into submission. Later, in a shoot-out with some bootleggers, one of Stokes's colleagues was wounded while Stokes gunned down two men. Before long he had the second highest record of arrests among 85 inspectors.
By this time he had decided on law as a career. He went first to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.S. in law and the university's billiards championship, while working as a dining-car waiter; then to the Cleveland-Marshall Law School at night, where he obtained an L.L.B. while serving as a court probation officer during the day. He had married while he was a liquor inspector, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1956. In 1958 he married Shirley Edwards, an attractive Fisk University graduate in library science. They have a boy and a girl: Carl Jr., 9, and Cordi, 6.
On the day he passed the Ohio bar examination in 1957, Stokes resigned his court job and went into law practice with his brother. A year later Mayor Anthony Celebrezze appointed him an assistant prosecutor under City Law Director Ralph Locher. The next step, in 1962, was election to the state legislature, where he quickly established himself as a prolific, catholic lawmaker. He helped draft legislation establishing a state department of urban affairs, wrote a new mental-health services act, helped enact stiffer traffic regulations, promoted a gun-control bill, worked for tougher air-pollution controls, and was the only Democrat to sponsor a bill giving the Governor power to send the National Guard into a city before a riot situation gets out of hand.
Mistake-on-the-Lake. His record suggests a bizarre combination of New Dealish liberalism and honest-cop abrasiveness. While Richard Hatcher says his personal hero is John Kennedy, Carl Stokes mentions crusty old Harold Ickes, Interior Secretary under F.D.R. One of Stokes's favorite books is Who Governs? by Robert Dahl, which describes the political assimilation of European immigrants in New Haven. Although Dahl was not primarily concerned with Negroes, Stokes associates the Negroes' evolution with that of other minority groups. "If the ethnic pulled himself up a bit with the help of the rope," wrote Dahl, "he could often gain a toehold in the system; the higher he climbed, the higher he could reach for another pull upward. He was not greatly interested in leveling the mountain itself."