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‘Flamboyant,’ controversial former Macon mayor ‘Machine Gun’ Ronnie Thompson dead at 85
Ronnie Thompson, the charismatic and controversial former mayor of Macon, who led the city during the racially-turbulent late 1960s on into the middle 1970s, died Sunday. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Ronita Thompson Caldwell, who said her father had Alzheimer’s disease.
Thompson spent the second half of his life out of the limelight and, largely, away from the public eye. He worked for years as a mental-health and special-needs caseworker, moonlighting as an after-hours overseer at a southside funeral home.
John Ronald Thompson Sr., born in poverty in Augusta in 1934 in a cotton-mill community, traveled the region selling jewelry before opening up shop and settling in Macon.
He rose to political prominence in Macon in the 1960s, first serving on City Council.
In 1967, at age 33, he was elected as the city’s first Republican mayor. He would later mount unsuccessful bids for Congress and for governor.
As a younger man, Thompson seemed destined for a career in show business.
For much of the 1960s he led gospel-music programs on local television stations in Georgia and North Carolina.
In his spare time, he earned his pilot’s license, wrote poetry and music and learned to play piano from a mail-order course.
Musically his tastes ran the gamut from Homer and Jethro to Rachmaninoff. He recorded Christian albums and country-and-western singles, one of the latter titled “City Slicks and Politics.”
In 1960, Georgia Gov. Ernest Vandiver lauded Thompson — who became a household name across the region thanks to his broadcast shows — for live gospel performances Thompson put on at the state mental hospital in Milledgeville.
“He was friends with James Brown, Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers,” Caldwell, his daughter, said Thursday.
Her father led the Ronnie Thompson Quartet. When she was a child, they lived on Brownell Avenue off Pio Nono Avenue. The group sometimes worked on its act there well into the night.
“We lived in a little bitty house,” Caldwell recalled, “hardwood floors, and the quartet would come over. ... Of course, Johnny (her brother) and I were already put to bed, and the bedroom is right next to the living room and they would be in there practicing. You could hear their feet padding the hardwood floor and the piano as loud as ever.”
In his years before running for mayor, Thompson met Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, who once told Thompson the key to success in politics was to “sing softly and carry a big guitar.”
Thompson, however, would become far more notorious for packing a big gun.
After an episode in July 1971, a few years into his time as mayor, he would forever become known as “Machine Gun Ronnie.”
Around the Fourth of July holiday that year, amid racial tensions, he declared a state of emergency in the city. He imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew and went on patrol with the chief of police. Late one night, a city cop reported being shot at near the intersection of Broadway and Greter Street, a mile or south of downtown.
Thompson and the chief rushed to the scene, a move the mayor was criticized for, in part, for injecting himself into the fray.
“I could hear bullets whizzing by me,” Thompson would later tell a reporter in what the mayor would later admit was a somewhat embellished account.
News accounts of the incident noted that Thompson grabbed a submachine gun and fired a shot or two toward a house where a sniper was. The sniper was never caught. The weapon the mayor fired was instead a carbine long gun, not a machine gun. Thompson later said a Telegraph reporter told him that “machine gun” sounded “more colorful.”
A year earlier, in another controversial move, Thompson issued a “shoot to kill” order to city police aimed at and in advance of a Black Liberation Front picket seeking to boycott downtown stores. The order, as The Telegraph reported at the time, sought to halt “lawlessness and anarchy.”
Thompson at the time also wanted to swear in and arm 1,000 volunteer lawmen in the event “violence erupted.” But none ever did. Some in the city’s government deemed the mayor’s measures as affronts that aggravated an already-tense racial climate.
In May 1973, Thompson made headlines again when he had the city buy an Army-surplus armored personnel carrier for $200.
It became known as a folly, “Thompson’s Tank.” He later dubbed the vehicle “Winky Tink,” and though he never did, he spoke of arming it with a .50-caliber machine gun and a cannon to protect the public in the event of race riots.
“I didn’t know Ronnie when he was mayor. ... He was known to be incredibly flamboyant and decisive, sometimes not in good ways,” recalled former Macon mayor and congressman Jim Marshall, who took office two decades after Thompson left office. “But in his later life, I did meet him and he seemed like an awfully decent person. And I really enjoyed his company.”
Marshall said that during his own time as mayor he served on the executive committee for the United States Conference of Mayors, where he met mayors from across the country.
“And one mayor of Macon was well known: Ronnie Thompson. ... Not necessarily for good reasons,” Marshall said, “but some mayors actually had stories about him, what, almost 25 years later?”
Thompson’s daughter, Caldwell, said her father “left quite the legacy, that’s for sure.”
She said growing up as the mayor’s daughter it was at times “very difficult to live in that shadow.”
“But I will tell you ... he taught me, to be proud to be an American and ... the importance and the privilege of voting,” Caldwell said.
Thompson, who met Dwight D. Eisenhower at the famed golf course in Augusta, was instrumental in naming Eisenhower Parkway — the main drag across the city’s south side, which links Interstate 75 and I-475 — after the then-former president.
In his later years, Thompson often watched repeats of “NYPD Blue” on a television at Crest Lawn Funeral Home where he worked nights. He also enjoyed reading and movies and he traveled extensively.
“Some of my best memories are the trips that we took to New York City,” Caldwell said. “He knew New York City like the back of his hand.”
Had Thompson been born closer to Hollywood, he might well have spun his charm into a motion-picture career. Even in his older age, his panache never waned.
“He was famous for that Thompson smile that he always flashed,” said his daughter, whose first name is a blend of her father’s and her mother Nita’s.
“And I have (that smile),” she said. “Those were some of the last words I said to him.”
Thompson’s funeral is private.
Telegraph archives contributed to this report.
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