You've heard of road rage.

Several employees of The Citizen were confronted Wednesday with political

rage. And the cause of the rage was the candidate's own mistake.

Thomas Stephens, a strapping

six-footer, stormed through the front door at the newspaper just after

3 p.m. Wednesday. He is running for Post 4, Fayette County Commission.

In my column Wednesday I called him a nice guy. Several stunned employees

of The Citizen got to see another, darker side of Mr. Stephens. It wasn't

pretty.

Our receptionist is a little

white-haired grandmother named Virginia. She never has a harsh word for

anybody. She has never been heard around here to utter anything close

to a cuss word. She is a real Southern lady. And she looks up to see this

red-faced guy breathing fire.

Stephens demanded to see me.

I had just closed the door to my office for an interview with a job applicant.

I'm sorry to say I knew nothing of the ugliness just beyond my office

until it was over.

Stephens demanded to see me,

his voice rising. About the third time Virginia explained that I already

had a visitor in my office, Stephens exploded, "Yes, he WILL see

me NOW!"

"No, sir, he's in with

a visitor."

"He WILL see me TODAY!"

Stephens said, beginning to yell. By this time Stephens was leaning through

the glass partition above Virginia's desk, gripping the ledge so hard

she "thought he was going to break it."

"His face got red, and

he got louder," she said.

In an adjoining office, Maureen

was trying to take a classified ad from a customer seated next to her

desk. She heard Stephens "yelling" and got up to close her office

door. Virginia also closed her exit to the hallway, trying to keep the

noise from the office area.

Reporter John Munford was in

the adjoining office and heard the yelling: "I had heard someone

speaking in a ridiculously loud tone of voice to Virginia, saying something

to the tune of, 'I turned it in on time, you signed for it and y'all chose

not to run it!' I chose to intervene on Virginia's behalf because the

disturbing loudness of the customer's voice showed he was a LOT more than

miffed," Munford said.

"As I entered Virginia's

area, the gentleman later identified as Mr. Stephens proceeded to yell

directly at me, saying things like 'If YOU want to run the county, then

you get elected and go do it!' He used several different expletives during

his tirade, but the only one I can specifically recall is 'crap.' There

may have been a damn or two in there as well," Munford said.

Meanwhile, Virginia had to

leave her office in order to continue answering the phone calls she handles.

Two ladies from offices down the hallway heard the yelling and came to

see what the commotion was about.

Angela went into the vestibule

and got yelled at in her turn. Munford kept trying to find out what Stephens

was angry about: "But he kept yelling at me (not screaming) for a

short while until I was able to interject, 'First of all, you need to

calm down, sir.'

"'I will not calm down!'

he shouted in reply, and I believe after this he yelled that he was upset

because he could not speak to [the editor] about the situation. That appeared

to be a sore spot with Mr. Stephens, and I tried to explain that [the

editor was] busy. 'Oh, like I'm not busy too!' he hollered in reply,"

Munford said.

"It was at this point

that I considered dialing 911 to get police involved," Munford said,

a sentiment shared by reporter John Thompson, also a witness to the tirade,

and two other ladies.

"He was leaning in the

window, yelling at Virginia," Ellie said. "We should have called

the police."

"At one point he said

to Virginia that he was not mad at her, but she was the one he was yelling

at," Ellie said.

"I see him coming through

the window shaking this paper [at Virginia]," Thompson said. "He

was saying, 'This is just crap and bulls**t, and he's still in Virginia's

face,'" Thompson said.

Munford continues: "Also

during his tirade, he claimed we were trying to affect the election. He

also at one point referred to having his children able to read the negative

campaign information printed about him (he specifically referred to the

letters).

"I was eventually able

to ask him what the problem was, and he belligerently continued further,

pointing to page 6 and the reference to no letters being received about

his campaign for the post," Munford said. "As he did so, his

upper body had reached through the window to Virginia's office as he aggressively

spread out his copy of the paper ... He then said the magic words that

helped me resolve the incident: 'I kept it under 250 words.'

Munford explains: "Then,

I was able to flip the page and show him how we had indeed run his candidate

essay in totality along with his mug [facial photo] and the mugs of the

other county commission candidates. After that, he apologized profusely

to Virginia and somewhat to me. He blamed his tirade on the stress of

the campaign ... When he left, I truly believe Mr. Stephens comprehended

that the newspaper made no mistake and that he was responsible for the

misunderstanding."

At least two of the female

employees said they feared that Stephens was close to getting physically

violent. Everybody who witnessed the remarkable display of misplaced anger

was shaken by it.

"I was stunned,"

Thompson said. "I've never seen anything like it in 12 years of covering

political races. We were both ready to call the police because [Stephens]

was out of control. He just lost it."

Munford said he never had seen

a comparable display by a candidate during the years he covered political

races in rural southeast Georgia.

So Stephens read to Page 6A

and thought we had deliberately left out his campaign statement. Without

turning one page farther, and after missing the reference to the candidates'

statement at the top of the front page, he stormed into the newspaper

offices and subjected women and other innocent employees to a profane,

abusive verbal assault. Some thought the verbal assault was close to going

into violence.

At one point, Stephens yelled

at our receptionist, "My 9-year-old and 5-year-old kids can read

this paper and they can tell [when something is] a lie!"

One wishes that his small children

had counseled their strapping big daddy to turn the next page to discover

his terrible mistake. That would have prevented the ugly scene Stephens

fomented with a little, sweet lady who would never yell at anyone and

who, in any case, is not in the least responsible for what does or does

not go into the paper.

Stephens advertises himself

as a sixth-generation Fayette Countian. One wonders how such a supposedly

hometown boy could have missed the lessons taught to generations of Southern

men: You treat people with respect, especially little white-haired grandmothers

many years your senior who have done nothing to warrant your obscene assault.

Stephens blamed his outburst

on the stress of campaigning. What would the continual, four-year-long

stress of actually governing the county bring out in him? How would he

handle a hot rezoning meeting? One can only shudder.

On the front page of that same

paper he was waving in Virginia's face, I called Stephens a nice guy.

I hereby retract that statement.