Bill Hanna

Template:Infobox officeholder​​ ​ William Thomas Hanna, Jr., known as Bill Hanna, Jr. (September 26, 1930 – December 17, 2016), was a Ford Motor Company] automobile dealer who served a single term from 1978 to 1982 as the Democratic [[mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, the first mayor under the current mayor-council form of government.​ ​ ==Background==​ Born in Kansas City, Missouri, to William Hanna, Sr. (1903-1980), and the former Irma Belle Adams (1907-1980). The couple married in 1925 in an airplane traveling 75 miles per hour some 2,000 feet above the surface of the earth, a unique wedding for that time.Hanna's mother was the aunt of Owen D. Adams, one of the first Republicans elected to the former Caddo Parish Police Jury and later for twelve years as the mayor of Greenwood in southwestern Caddo Parish.

Hanna moved in infancy with his parents from Kansas City to Shreveport. In 1947, he graduated from Clifton Ellis Byrd High School and enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, He played on the LSU Tigers baseball team from 1949 to 1951, and was thereafter a shortstop for several minor league teams but soon returned to Shreveport to join his father in business.

In 1977, Hanna was named "Automobile Dealer of the Year" by the Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association, of which he once was the president. The company was well known for the popular sales slogan, "You Can Afford a Hanna Ford," which was intended to attract moderate-income buyers. Hanna Ford, however, no longer exists.​ ​ ==Public career==​ ​ Hanna won the mayoral election by defeating his fellow Democrat, Donald Edgar Hathaway, the outgoing municipal public works commissioner. Two years after the mayoral race, Hathaway was elected to what became a twenty-year tenure as the sheriff of Caddo Parish. Hanna was the first Shreveport mayor since George Washington Hardy, Jr. (1900-1967), who had not served in a prior public office at the time of his election. Hardy was mayor for a single two-year term from 1932 to 1934. Some questioned Hanna's enthusiasm for "politics." Such an attitude made it appear that he did not like being mayor because he did not seek a second term in 1982.​. ​ Mayor Hanna promoted the decision to construct Interstate 49 through northwestern Louisiana. General Motors located a plant in Shreveport while Hanna was mayor, but the facility since closed. The stadium at the Louisiana State Fair Grounds, became the renovated Independence Stadium, at which numerous football teams occasionally played their games. Some two weeks after becoming mayor, Hanna presented actor John Wayne, then in the last year of his life, the second annual "Spirit of Independence" Award at the annual Independence Bowl. ​

Former Mayor James C. Gardner served as a city council member in the Hanna administration and helped chart the new form of government. Other council members included Charles B. Peatross, a future judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit; Gregory Tarver, a later long-term state senator; John Scotto, a civil engineer from southwest Shreveport; Hilry Huckaby, the first vice-chairman of the council, and the Reverend Herman Farr, a leader of the Shreveport NAACP. Tarver, Huckaby, and Farr were the firstAfrican-Americans to have served in Shreveport municipal government since Reconstruction.

In his memoirs "Jim Gardner and Shreveport, Vol. II," Gardner described Hanna, accordingly:

His self-assurance as a businessman shaped his approach to running city government. He sought proven professionals as department heads, something for which he never received adequate credit. He could never bring himself to 'view with alarm and point with pride' as a political leader must do. And so he never received the credit that he was due. … In four years, he never initiated a political conversation in my presence. It was just not his thing, and it made his position not as pleasant for him as it could have been. But he always desired to do what he felt was best for Shreveport. And no taint of impropriety ever attached itself to him.

​ In 1994, twelve years after his term as mayor, Hanna became the director of buildings and grounds for the Caddo Parish Commission government and was promoted to parish administrator in 1998. He retired in 2006. As the parish administrator, Hanna pushed for the opening of the Northwest Louisiana Veterans Cemetery and devised an emergency cell phone program for the elderly and the handicapped.​ ​ ==Personal life==​ Hanna's only sibling, his brother, Kenneth George "Ken" Hanna (born 1939), also worked in the automobile business.​ ​ Upon his death at the age of eighty-six, Hanna was survived by his second wife, Marvelle Warren Hanna, four daughters from a previous marriage, and two stepsons from the second marriage. He is interred at Forest Park East Cemetery.

References

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