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Ninety-three year-old Willis Reed has few funds and even fewer high-powered friends. When I ask him what he’s doing to win Cleo Fields’ state Senate seat, he shuffles slowly across his office and tells me not to print what he’s about to show me.

“I don’t want anybody else takin’ my ideas,” he clarifies. I stay seated, more than a little nervous about what he might be retrieving from behind me. Turns out there is nothing to worry about. He hands me a bumper sticker and a thin photocopied pamphlet that looks more like a church bulletin than campaign material. Both are inscribed with “Willis Reed Senate District 14.” He looks at me wide-eyed as if they are the first of their kind.

Willis Reed's bid for state Senate is a one-man operation, a mission, just like his other baby, The Baton Rouge Post.

“Did you see that outside?” Reed asks, referring to the campaign signage on the windowsill of his small office off of Florida Boulevard. “And the van?”

The van is Reed’s early ’90s white Ford Astro, the last and most vital piece to his campaign arsenal. It carries two more signs, and it carries Reed to his “campaign stops,” daily, informal visits to local businesses and homes in Mid-City and downtown just to see what’s going on.

It’s the quietest campaign office I’ve ever been in. Phones aren’t ringing, volunteers aren’t scurrying from fax machines to laptops and back, juicy gossip about the incumbent isn’t burning Reed’s ears. There’s only the hum of the air conditioner. Wearing a blanched white campaign T-shirt with brown lettering, Reed sits alone in a painted cinderblock room behind a desk with a computer he doesn’t know how to use, surrounded by scraps of notes and newspapers, many of them yellowed by the passage of time.

Reed’s bid for state Senate is a one-man operation, a mission, a charge in every sense of the term, just like his other baby, The Baton Rouge Post.

Beginning in 1983 Reed served as publisher, editor, reporter, photographer, designer, sales rep and deliveryman for the Post, a weekly paper with a circulation of 5,000 that printed editorials on local politics, reported church news and dug up untold stories from the African-American community.

“I want people to know what’s going on in the community,” he says. “Because people don’t know right now.”

But Reed hasn’t published the community paper for a few years, since an auto accident slowed him down. He’s not supposed to lift anything heavier than 10 pounds after a recent hernia operation. (While researching his medical history, doctors informed Reed that he is, in fact, one year older than he had thought.)

He hopes to relaunch the Post soon, but first he has to hire a deliveryman and a new assistant to type the stories he’s written out longhand, which is how he’s been doing it for decades.

“I think he feels he never got his just due for the work he did in the ’60s,” says Southern University public relations officer Ed Pratt. Reed was instrumental in Baton Rouge’s bus boycott, which civil-rights leaders later used as a model.

Pratt first met Reed in the 1960s while handing out fliers for Joe Delpit’s campaign to be the parish’s first African-American councilman. “He likes to tell stories of how things were, the roots of black politics. But what really drives him is a burning desire to do what’s right. He doesn’t quit.”

Trying to do the right thing has earned Reed the nickname “troublemaker” in some circles. He’s never afraid to speak his mind. When a local church asked him to address the congregation, he took the opportunity to sound off on falling Sunday school attendance and the rising take-home pay of area pastors.

But as free as he is with his opinions, he is even more cautious with his income. One acquaintance’s kids wanted to help this summer with the Senate campaign, but Reed said no because the mother kept asking how much her children would be paid. He has turned down large donations in the past for his unsuccessful runs for state representative and councilman, saying he doesn’t want to be under the thumb of anyone, not even a friend.

That doesn’t surprise freelance photojournalist Jason Terry, who sold photos to the Post in the 1980s. Terry thinks Reed is probably running now more so to call attention to certain issues, rather than to actually take office. “It’s one thing to run, it’s another thing to serve,” Terry says. “But he doesn’t want to be bought or controlled by anyone.”

Willis Reed just can't shake the political bug.

So Reed is the oldest candidate in this year’s state elections and also the only one without a volunteer staff or financial supporters of any kind. Before I leave he shows me what he’s up against, handing over a clipping that says attorney Jason DeCuir began his campaign for Fields’ seat with $130,000 banked.

“That’s how much he startin’ with,” Reed says shaking his head. The issues Reed talks about are real: crime, education, unity within the black community. But not enough people know the 93-year-old is even running, and he is not likely to make much of an impact in the race. If he does, he’ll have the inside scoop on one fantastic cover story for the return of The Baton Rouge Post.