In the world of politics, Jerry Payne didn’t particularly care to advertise his own role; he just wanted to get results and usually did.

Anybody involved in electioneering in northwest Louisiana over the past few decades knew of Jerry. He first entered politics through his lifelong and perhaps best friend, Republican former Gov. Buddy Roemer, when Roemer started his political career through election as a delegate to the 1973 Constitutional Convention. Jerry would continue to work with Roemer as the latter ascended the ladder up to the governorship.

Actually, their initial collaboration came in the field of data management. For the first quarter-century or so of his work life, Jerry served as an administrator mainly dealing with systems for tracking and processing financial transactions that would send him out of state for years at a time. For that reason, he never took a role in the Roemer Administration even though he was asked as a significant figure in Roemer’s defeat of Democrat former Gov. Edwin Edwards.

Election consulting remained a sideline of his until the latter part of Roemer’s term, when he finally committed full time. Once he did, he became phenomenally successful, enabling a couple of hundred ideologically-eclectic collection of candidates mainly from Caddo and Bossier Parishes to win elective office nine out of ten times over the next two decades.

That remained largely unknown to any but area political activists, because Jerry wasn’t the kind of guy who did things to publicize his role. Some area consultants would be fixtures in the media, but not him. Nor did he really attempt to branch out beyond area contests, despite his rate of success (although when younger and working in Birmingham, he did get involved in a historic mayor’s race there, which his candidate narrowly lost).

He began to taper his activities after he became a widower, and in fact would survive a cancer scare himself. He hung on as a Democrat while the national party, followed by its state version, began its sprint to the far left that increasingly disdained his strong Christian beliefs. Helping him transition more towards the partisan center (a journey more than one area figure involved in politics would experience) was the presence in his life of his second wife Madonna, who before her return to Bossier City had become involved in GOP politics.

In actuality, I got to know Jerry not really in the realm of politics, as we rarely had rubbed elbows since my arrival in the area which was about when he went full time into consulting, but more because he and Madonna were friends of my wife’s family from their church. They joined others (including his brother and sister-in-law) in their Sunday school class that committed to helping out my wife, and me by extension.

Unfortunately, his greatest test came in his last years when he suffered a particularly debilitating stroke (as cruelly, Roemer had the same happen to him) seven years ago that left him having to live in a nursing home. Things got rougher still when the pandemic hit to close off his world even more and family members faced their own health challenges, but he hung in there.

Jerry this week assuredly gained a richly-deserved reward, leaving a lasting legacy in area and state politics and as a person.