House reading clerk Bubba Cromer is given a standing ovation after receiving a resolution Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in House chambers of the Statehouse in Columbia, S.C., in honor of his retirement from the job this year. (Photo courtesy of state House photographer Sam Holland)
COLUMBIA — The notes popped up on House members’ desks on April Fool’s Day. A constituent, Myra Mains, needed help.
Unsuspecting representatives, trying to do their due diligence, might put in a call to the phone number included, which led to Dunbar Funeral Home.
“Most of you are smart enough to hang up,” former House Speaker Jay Lucas told a crowd of current and former representatives earlier this year.
“We have had several people who aren’t smart enough to hang up, who ask Dunbar Funeral Home if they can speak to ‘my remains,’” he said.
The prank was a classic for James “Bubba” Cromer, the House reading clerk, who retired at the end of this legislative session. Since 1998, Cromer has read bills and amendments with a voice made for radio and a sense of humor.
The job often involved more than reading words on a page. Along with staying on top of a quick-moving pile of bills and amendments, or spending hours reading entire bills during lengthy debates, Cromer acted as a source of entertainment and levity amid the tension of politics, legislators said.
The 63-year-old’s career expanded far beyond the House desk. He was first legislator elected through South Carolina’s tedious petition process, an advocate for the homeless, and director of two movies, including one that led to a lawsuit that made national headlines.
As Lucas began to sing Cromer’s praises during his May speech, Cromer wandered off.
“Bubba!” Lucas shouted, causing Cromer to scurry back as the chamber laughed.
“Now you see what I have to deal with every day,” House Speaker Murrell Smith quipped.
For all his intelligence and dedication, “he’s got the attention span of a gnat,” along with a remarkably messy desk, Lucas said.
“I don’t have a better friend than Bubba Cromer,” Lucas added. “Any of you don’t have a better friend than Bubba Cromer.”
Cromer’s pranks weren’t limited to April Fool’s Day, Smith said.
He once called the speaker’s office during his annual vacation to Newfoundland and told the secretary his name was Col. Ben Dover, making her shout, “Murrell, ‘bend over’ is on the phone for you,” said Smith, speaker since Lucas stepped down in 2022.
“You have irritated the hell out of me for four years up here,” Smith told Cromer. “Anyone who has been in this position will know that.
“But you can’t find a funner, more loving, kind person than Bubba Cromer. Bubba, we’re going to miss you.”
Lucas described Cromer as “strange.”
“I don’t think anyone can argue with that, and I admit it freely,” Cromer said.
He also ended up at the Statehouse through “a strange set of circumstances,” he said.
Born and raised in Columbia, Cromer left after getting his law degree for a job as an entertainment defense attorney in Los Angeles. After two years there, he got homesick and returned to his hometown “with my tail between my legs,” he said.
Two weeks after Cromer moved home, Hurricane Hugo struck. Cromer found a job as a disaster relief coordinator in Charleston, where he helped direct 18-wheeler trucks carrying supplies from southeastern states to the hardest hit areas, he said.
There, he met state Supreme Court Justice George Gregory, who encouraged him to apply to work as an attorney for the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee — Cromer’s first foray into the Statehouse.
“I jumped on it like a duck on a junebug,” Cromer said.
About a year later, in 1990, Rep. Mickey Burriss, Cromer’s representative, unexpectedly announced — on the last day candidates could file — that he would not seek a fourth term. Just one Republican submitted paperwork by day’s end to replace Burriss in the seat representing Eastover and Lower Richland communities, seemingly making him the automatic winner.
“I thought, ‘That’s not right. Voters can choose. Why don’t we let those voters choose?’” Cromer said.
Cromer attempted to run as a Democrat, but the nomination window had already closed.
So, he tried to file as an independent through a process that requires collecting signatures from at least 5% of the district’s registered voters. He collected 20% only to have his statement rejected due to a 2-year-old law requiring even petition candidates to announce their candidacy by the March 30 filing deadline.
“I was darn glad I had a law degree, because I crawled myself back into that law library, and I researched, and I researched,” Cromer said.
He filed a lawsuit claiming the filing requirement was unconstitutional and won. He won again in November, becoming the state’s first legislator elected through the petition process.
He remained an independent during the eight years he spent in the House, despite members of both major parties asking him to join them.
Seeing politics from outside the two major parties, Cromer learned to treat everyone equally, which was a skill he carried on into his time as reading clerk, he said.
As a 1999 resolution celebrating Cromer’s birthday put it, “he never chose a party but never missed one either.”
Standing by his belief in term limits, Cromer decided eight years was long enough in the House and retired. At his retirement party in 1998, a fellow legislator mentioned that the previous reading clerk, Danny Bruce, was moving, and he thought Cromer would be great for the job.
“I’m way too important for that,” Cromer replied, until the legislator added the gig was part-time and came with health insurance. After that, Cromer’s tune changed.
“I said, ‘How can I be reading clerk? Please!’” Cromer recalled.
Altogether, Cromer spent nearly 40 years working at the Statehouse. As the chamber changed with elections every other year, he remained a mainstay at his spot on the right side of the desk.
From there, he watched tragedies and triumphs, he said. He worked with five House speakers and watched debates that captured local and national attention.
“The rich history of this place is everywhere, and I’ve had the privilege to have four decades,” Cromer said.
Through it all, Cromer tried to make the chamber a brighter place, he said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cromer made his own hand sanitizer, masks and microphone covers, which he sanitized between speakers to keep the virus from spreading.
Every year, on the eve of budget weeks notorious for late-night debates, Cromer left gifts of snacks and supportive notes on legislators’ desks for them to find when they came in the next morning.
At the end of this year’s session, Cromer used nicknames he’d assigned to each legislator when calling out their bills, growing increasingly nonsensical. Bill sponsors included the likes of “Extraordinary” Sessions (Rep. Heath Sessions), “Turbo” Todd Rutherford (House Minority Leader Rutherford) and “Gumby” Bannister (House Ways and Means Chairman Bruce Bannister).
“He has been given free reign to call his nicknames as his going away present,” Smith told representatives on the final day of the regular session.
If Cromer needled anyone in the House, it wasn’t because he disliked them, he said. He tried to have a personal relationship with everyone who passed through the House.
He was always the first person to reach out to new legislators, sending them handwritten letters offering help with anything they needed, said Rep. Richie Yow.
“There’s no place like home,” Cromer told legislators, current and former, who gathered to see him off. “You have my heart.”
Former state House members who returned to the chamber in May to honor Cromer included former Gov. David Beasley; former U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett; and former Speaker David Wilkins, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada.
As much as Cromer liked to prank the chamber’s representatives, they could dish it back, too. On the resolution recognizing his retirement, the first signature is an all-too familiar one: Myra Mains.
Cromer spends his days off driving around Columbia in his 1994 Chevy with his dog, Queen Boudicca. The back of the car is packed with drawstring bags full of food, water, toiletries and other essentials.
Cromer goes to the places where he knows homeless people gather and hands out the supplies. He also prays for those who need it, though the point of his nonprofit is not to preach the gospel but to practice it, he said.
“This is one man that I know is the hands and feet of Jesus,” said Rep. Tommy Pope, R-York, the House speaker pro tempore since 2014.
Cromer’s work with the homeless started more than a decade ago, when he volunteered at a shelter in Columbia. The people who passed through called him the candyman because he left candies on the beds’ pillows when he turned down the bedsheets, he said.
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When Cromer left, he adopted the moniker as the name of his nonprofit, Candyman Homeless Outreach, which has a staff of one.
“There’s never been a person I knew who was as selfless as Bubba Cromer,” Lucas said.
Cromer also had a creative streak. He wrote, though never published, a novel titled “Blue,” which told the story of his beloved grandmother. He later directed two movies, “The Long Way Home: A Bigfoot Story” and “The Hills Have Thighs.”
“The Long Way Home,” a fictionalized documentary of people hunting bigfoot, won a handful of awards at regional film festivals after its release in 2006 and ran in small theaters across the country.
Cromer wanted to make a funnier movie, so he wrote, directed and starred in “The Hills Have Thighs,” a comedy following the disappearance of a “local hillbilly icon” from his Appalachian home.
“If THE LONG WAY HOME is a piece of my heart, THE HILLS HAVE THIGHS is a piece of my warped, twisted mind,” Cromer wrote in a description of his movies.
The movie made national news when Cromer sued Showtime and HBO, claiming they replaced an advertised run of his film with a pornographic film of the same name, embarrassing him during a watch party of friends, family and legislators.
The case ended in a settlement, after HBO made the distinction between the two movies.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
