Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2024

Verified Purchase

Having had the author as my college history professor and living in the area a few times courtesy of the Army, I was super excited to read this. The history and storytelling are too good.

Not many books make a reader let out a hyena laugh at 2 a.m. or cry like a baby in full daylight, but “Small-Town Mayor: Political Adventures In The Ozarks” does. Pick an emotion, any emotion, and this memoir resonates.
Luge Hardman, former two-term mayor of Waynesville, Mo., is a brutally honest writer — funny, wise, tough, practical, graceful and, above all, insightful. This memoir about her eight years at the helm of the small town she moved to in 1971 to teach social studies, is a page-turner because she documents her journey vividly. No sugar-coating, no pretense.
“Never touch your hand to your nose in public with cameras around. It’s not a good look.”
Hardman is caught in the act of being herself throughout even when she face-plants on concrete while trailing the governor at a ribbon-cutting during a blinding rainstorm.
Hardman is a storyteller in the vein of Bill Bryson. She sprinkles her pages with you-can’t-make-this-up challenges, serious and otherwise.
Near the end of her tenure she deals with Vulture Culture and how to get rid of endangered black vultures living in an abandoned building on the town square.
She details her criticism of the name of a start-up newspaper, Uranus Examiner.
She fields constituent complaints on everything from economic development to potholes:
“Could we please have an ordinance against sagging pants?”
“My road has ice on it. When are you coming with hot water?”
Hardman remains impossibly and instinctively grounded throughout her tenure with a single purpose of making Waynesville a better place to live. Early in her first term she deals with a deadly flood that changed the town’s landscape and the lives of residents. She became the face and the voice of her community on CNN, the Weather Channel and large and small news media outlets from coast to coast.
In her maiden term she also faces the decline and death of her husband of 42 years, First Gentleman Paul X. Hardman. This chapter becomes a guide to handling grief with grace and courage. “I don’t ever want to hear, ‘he’s in a better place,’ again.” She didn’t quit, and one of her husband’s last acts was to encourage her to seek a second term, which she won without opposition.
All politics is local so if you really want to know what’s going on in America, “Small-Town Mayor” is a tutorial on understanding how divisions form, how to bridge them and how to move on with purpose when minds don’t meet. The book is about one place, but it has a broader everyman, anyplace appeal.
Send this book to the pols in Washington, but read it first.