Love 22 – Former Lompico Resident’s Presidential Write-In Campaign

By Chris Vaughan

Among the notable distinctions attending this month’s presidential election, former Santa Cruz mountains resident Love 22’s record-setting eleventh consecutive write-in candidacy likely falls low on the recognition meter, but is perhaps the least likely to be duplicated any time soon.

“Pat Paulsen and Harold Stassen gave it a good run but they can’t run any more because they’re dead. I’m still doin’ it!” says the 83-year-old contender, cackling out one of his favorite phrases.

Now living in a retirement home in his native Rhode Island, Love 22 (his legal name, ever since changing it from Lawrence Edmund Wagner in 1976) has once again thrown his Uncle Sam top hat in the ring as a way of reminding us that he is not only “still doin’ it” but extending a record that will be tough to break. A minimum presidential aged 35-year-old starting this year would have to run as a write-in every cycle until age 83 to surpass the crusty busker, who has spent most of his adult life distributing $22 bills and alternately delighting and irritating passersby with his ever-evolving 22-oriented rap on streets and plazas from Key West to Alaska and Europe.

Some mountain residents might remember him as a frequent backroads hitchhiker or septuagenarian sinker of three-pointers at Lompico Park, while others may have been treated to his trademark patter and origami tricks (people are routinely dazzled to this day by his “Twin Towers” maneuver). But when he moved here in 2004 from his longtime base of Key West, Florida, where he was known far and wide as Ambassador of the Conch Republic, it was to retire from a life spent in public, winning Frisbee championships, frequently serving as MC of the naked comedy show at the Rainbow Gathering, appearing at festivals and major sporting events, and of course, running for president.

“I came for the warm weather and the medical marijuana,” he says. He lived in a van with a view on a Lompico parcel owned by the son of a childhood friend, later moving to the Summit area, where he was renowned for his ping pong prowess, defeating skilled decades-younger foes while cursing a blue streak with every lost point. Some might remember him for handing out walnuts everywhere he went. More recall the $22 bills he designs and updates regularly.

The bills got him in hot water in New Orleans once when people started cashing them. Charged with counterfeiting, he was freed by a judge who proclaimed anyone who would cash a $22 bill too much of a “nitwit” to stay in business. Passing out the bills for free, while not-super-subtly noting that he accepts donations, Love 22 also sells self-published books (available at love22.com) detailing among many other things his Da Vinci code-like system for converting letters to numbers, a system that he then employs to isolate word strings that add up to or otherwise relate to, yes, 22.

Topical example from his website: “(UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT) HOW MANY LETTERS?..”22”

He still tirelessly marks up several newspapers daily to capture samples but even without a pandemic, there is no longer the traditional 22-city campaign tour (one year it was to “22 hot springs going out and 22 hot springs coming back”). He moves more slowly now, but notes that among the residents of the Golden Years retirement home, he remains the most athletic specimen: “In ten-pin bowling with plastic pins, I have six games over 200, with a high game of 235!”

Ever the competitor, he gleefully relates “dominating” rival write-in candidate Vermin Love Supreme in a Rhode Island radio debate, and is disappointed that this year he has had no opportunity to mix it up on the public stage. He came out of re-retirement last year for another street stint in Key West, where is widely loved, and now plans to move back there at the end of the year. He also has plans for a 2024 campaign but says that for now Love 22 in 2020 “might be enough” to seal his electoral legacy:

“Someone is gonna have to live a looong time to beat my record, and I will always be the original!”

In many more ways than one.

Photos by Huckleberry Vaughan