Howard Lydick

    Howard Lydick was an all-lines insurance adjuster living in Richardson, Texas.  Lydick was active in the temperance movement as a Methodist layman. He organized the Independent Committee on Alcohol & Drugs for United Methodists. He organized and currently serves as Chairman of the Independent Committee on Alcohol & Drugs for United Methodists.
     Lydick told The Prohibitionist that he was aware of the Prohibition Party as a college student in the early 1950s but dropped out of politics after graduation in order to marry and to pursue a career. He was invited into our Party by national chairman Earl F. Dodge in 1995 and since then has worked closely with us via the National Temperance and Prohibition Council. Lydick has been President of the NTPC since 1996.
    Then-national Chairman Earl F. Dodge appointed Lydick to be a Prohibition National Committeeman for the state of Texas in 1999. Lydick was recommended to be Vice-Chairman of the PNC by participants in the Lakewood meeting in June, 2003, but he was passed over by the national convention in September and subsequently said he was not interested in continuing as National Committeeman for Texas.

Biography

    Howard Lydick was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1929, the son of Clarence and Rachel Long Lydick. He attended the public schools there and earned an Arts Batchelor degree from The University of Wichita in 1951. A two-year hitch in the Army followed. Lydick entered law school in 1953, graduating from the University of Kansas Law School in 1956.
    Lydick married Eleanor Beling following graduation, and the couple settled in Richardson, Texas. Lydick made a career in Richardson as an all-lines insurance adjuster. They had two children, a son Daniel and a daughter Marian.. Mrs. Lydick died in 1993.
    Howard Lydick died on 5 August 2008.

National Committee

    Mr. Lydick said that his job, if elected to the position of Vice-Chairman of the PNC, would be that of encouraging the other PNC members to become more active in what they are doing.
    The Prohibition Party has the apparatus to be much stronger than it is at this time, Lydick told The Prohibitionist. The problem, as I see it, is that we have been beaten down for so long that most of our active members have failed to recognize the change in public opinion that has occurred in the past ten years.
    There have been three waves of prohibition in The United States, Lydick continued.  
    Were seeing the start of the fourth wave. People need to take advantage of this change in public opinion and go to work. We need to stop crying over the loss of the Eighteenth Amendment and get to work to bring it back.
    Otis Lydick, Howard Lydick's grandfather, voted for adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment as a Kansas state legislator.
    Howard Lydick, the grandson, was an active Republican for over 50 years, before becoming disillusioned with the Republican Party and switching his allegiance to Prohibition. He believes he has acquired much useful experience during those years which he can now use to benefit the Prohibition Party.
    For example, says Lydick, as legal counsel for the Dallas County Young Republicans in 1961, he successfully sued to force rural counties in Texas to provide enclosed voting booths - an old statutory requirement left unenforced for 40 years.
He has been admitted to the practice of law in Kansas, in Texas, and before the United States Supreme Court.
    Lydick was chairman of his United Methodist Church Conference Committee on Temperance and General Welfare from 1960 until 1964. He was a charter member of the Dallas Area Historical Roads Society.

The Coming Campaign

    Lydick began campaigning for the nomination for Vice-President in July, going back to his home-town of Wichita to seek interviews with the news media. One brief mention was published in the ______. He worked closely with National Prohibitionist editor Jim Hedges to prepare this article (published in ______ and revised for the website in January, 2004). He arranged with the sponsors of the September, 2003 convention at Fairfield Glade, Tennessee to take part in a rally after the convention, in preparation for filing ballot petitions in Tennessee; his proposed running-mate, Earl F. Dodge, subsequently order Lydick not to participate, and the rally was cancelled.
    Lydick worked to inform himself about election laws in the ten states with the easiest ballot access laws and to encourage PNC members to do their best to meet ballot access requirements for the Prohibition Ticket in those states.