Fred Thompson comes home to end campaign kickoff

LAWRENCEBURG, Tenn. -- In a town where everyone knows him simply by his first name, Fred Thompson received a hometown hero welcome Saturday night as he capped his first 10 days as an official candidate for president.

"We haven't even had an election yet," Thompson said as the crowd roared when he took a stage set up in the town square. "Just think what it's going to be like after we win the election?"

The former senator recounted the small-town values of honesty and responsibility he learned in this southern Tennessee town.

"I want to thank you for that, Lawrenceburg," he said.

Large video screens flanking the stage showed Thompson's motorcade arrive in the Norman Rockwell-like square with a white gazebo flanked by a bronze statue of the area's other famous son — pioneer and statesman Davy Crockett.

Thompson was preceded on stage by a who's who of Tennessee Republicans, including former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.

People began arriving midday and spent a crisp afternoon listening to country music — including John Rich or Big & Rich — along with bluegrass and gospel and milling around food booths selling everything from burgers to funnel cakes.

Numerous business marquees greeted the GOP candidate with "Welcome Home, Fred" in a town that has seen the high school cutup mature into a lawyer who played a prominent role in Watergate, to a U.S. senator and actor.

Nearly everyone in this town of 11,000 seems to be related or think they are related or simply feel like a relative to Thompson, best known as prosecutor Arthur Branch on the popular television series Law & Order.

"I think it's the biggest thing that's happened in Lawrence County," said Kenneth Johns, 68, who manned a table in the makeshift Fred Thompson memorabilia store that he helped open in recent days on the town square.

With buttons, baseball caps and bumper stickers displayed around him, Johns discussed with several people his kinship with Thompson, thumbing through a genealogical printout that someone had provided to the retired executive of the former Reynolds Metals beverage can plant.