Serving Time, Serving a Town

The last time Howard Mechanic sought public office, he tried to cloak his past and even his real name.

In 2000, Mechanic was a wanted man living as Gary Tredway, small businessman, community activist and City Council candidate in an upscale Phoenix suburb.

The campaign wound up revealing a three-decades-old secret: He wasn’t Gary Tredway. He was Howard Mechanic, a man who had skipped town to avoid a five-year prison sentence for his role in a 1970 Vietnam War protest.

The risky decision to raise his profile with a political campaign landed Mechanic in prison, but the former fugitive has never been able to outrun his idealist streak.

Now free for 4 1/2 years because of a presidential pardon, he is seeking public office again -- this time using his real name and his real past.

“Why Prescott Needs This Felon!” read the headline on a newspaper advertisement run by Mechanic’s campaign.

He figured the ad, which included details about his conviction and more recent community activism, would help quell the rumors around town.

“I understand people are going to consider my past when they are voting,” said Mechanic, sitting in the living room of the home he shares with girlfriend Janet Grossman. “My life hasn’t been perfect. I don’t know anyone whose has been. Mine’s just a little stranger.”

Mechanic’s life took its strange turn in the early 1970s.

The Washington University senior, studying political science on scholarship at the St. Louis school, was at a demonstration like many others nationwide on May 4, 1970, protesting the war and the shooting of four Kent State University students. During the Washington University protest, someone set fire to the ROTC building.

Someone threw a firecracker at firefighters; no one was injured. Mechanic was arrested after a witness said Mechanic launched the cherry bomb -- something Mechanic denies. He was convicted under a tough federal anti-rioting law and sentenced to five years in prison.

Out on bond, Mechanic vanished in 1972. It was a decision that surprised even those close to him at the time.

“I know it was difficult,” said Phillip Koch, a friend and college roommate who helped fight for Mechanic’s release from prison. “Those were very different times. It’s hard to describe how it was.”

Mechanic wasn’t the only 1970s activist to go underground to avoid prison. Others, including Kathleen Ann Power, who helped rob a bank to fund anti-Vietnam War activities, and Sara Jane Olson, a former Symbionese Liberation Army member who attempted to bomb police cruisers, have resurfaced in recent years after decades of exile.

Mechanic was sent to prison shortly after being unmasked by Phoenix-area reporters in 2000. “I was a little naive about the risks,” he says now of the decision to run for office while on the lam.

He had been in the public eye for his involvement in social causes dealing with growth and campaign finance. He had gotten comfortable there, he said.

After admitting his identity, Mechanic served nearly a year in prisons in Florence, Ariz., and Lompoc, Calif., while Koch, Grossman and others worked to get his sentence commuted.

Always reserved, he said he started to relax in prison, shedding nightmares of being chased, which nagged him over his 28 years as Gary Tredway.

Grossman, who met Mechanic in 1994 after answering a personal ad in an alternative newspaper, remembers seeing him sitting behind the glass in his brown jumpsuit for the first time and thinking how relaxed he looked in prison. He had never seemed particularly uptight before, but she recalls telling him, “Your face looks freer than I’ve ever seen it.”

Mechanic also got used to being called “Howard” again. (He had forgotten how to spell his real middle name, Lawrence, during his fugitive years.) He wrote an autobiography and thought about the future.

“I decided when I was in prison ... I was going to be working on community projects as much as I could,” he said.

President Clinton pardoned him on Jan. 20, 2001. Mechanic walked away from prison that night. It didn’t take long for his penchant for community involvement to kick in.

He sold the apartment hotel he owned in Scottsdale, and he and Grossman settled in pine-studded Prescott, a smaller town with milder weather.

Within months of arriving, he got involved in open space and water issues, some of the most contentious questions in this rapidly growing town.

He started attending all the City Council meetings, and Mayor Rowle Simmons appointed Mechanic to a water conservation advisory commission.

Mechanic, now 57 with short, graying hair, decided to run for City Council earlier this year. He’s one of eight candidates fighting for three at-large seats; voting in the mail-in primary, during which six candidates will advance, ends Sept. 13.

He bought the newspaper ad discussing his “felon” past after the nominating petition deadline in June. “That was really, really slick on his part because he knew it would come out,” said Simmons. “That was the first shot across the bow.”

His past is no secret here because of news stories and reruns of television specials, but in this conservative community, his hippie and fugitive past still rankles some folks, Simmons said. That has opened him to rumors and criticism on talk radio.

Mechanic, who supports himself financially by selling capsule-filling kits to vitamin and supplement producers, said he was willing to take the criticism.

He concedes he’s a bit of an idealist. He knows that many people figure there’s not much point in being involved, but “I’m sort of more altruistic,” Mechanic said.