Why Phillip Morris would bring Carl Stokes’s name into a discussion of a dull mayoral race is beyond me. Stokes wasn’t in any dull mayoral elections. Not in 1969. Not ever.

I guess Morris needed a column again but couldn’t stir himself enough to go get one.

Morris tries to equate the coming mayoral election of Mayor Frank Jackson and Bill Patmon to the Stokes-Ralph Perk race in 1969.

“Cleveland was locked in the middle of another fairly noncompetitive mayoral election 40 years ago,” wrote Morris today.

Wrong.

The 1969 election was nothing like this year’s election. Nothing at all.

It was a hard fought election. There were 316,000 eligible voters in 1969. Stokes won 120,464 votes. Perk received 117,013. Stokes won by 3,451 votes. That’s not a runaway by any means.

In this year’s primary the reported vote was some 11 percent. Real exciting stuff. One hopes that a few more will get out in November to vote. The turnout in 1969 was 75 percent. That's an election.

In 1967, Stokes won by a smaller margin 129,396 to Seth Taft’s 127,717 with 325,000 eligible to vote. Less than a 2,000 vote margin. A difference of 1,679.

In 1965, when Stokes lost to Ralph Locher, Locher got 87,967, Stokes got 85,675, losing by another close margin, 2,292, or less than 1 percent. There were two other candidates, Perk and Ralph McAllister, in the race.

Do you think the Jackson-Patmon race this year would be anything like those? I guess Patmon would like to think so.

Yes, Stokes had a large ego. He would have to have to do what he did.

Stokes also ran in a much different city, maybe twice the population of today’s Cleveland. There is no comparison with the Jackson-Patmon race other than there are two candidates again.