Former Senate candidate Woods dies at age 83

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 | 11:13 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

DOTHAN, Ala. -- Charles Woods, who overcame the scars of a fiery World War II plane crash to become a wealthy media and real estate owner and perennial political candidate, has died at age 83.

Woods, who ran for the Senate against Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., died Sunday at Extendicare, a health and rehabilitation center in Dothan, according to WTVY, the television station he owned for 40 years. Funeral services were scheduled for Friday in Dothan.

Woods' face and hands were disfigured by burns in the crash of the B-17 he was piloting in 1944. After the war he started a house-building business and in 1955 launched Dothan's first TV station, the beginning of a media chain and other business ventures that made him wealthy.

"I consider myself an ordinary man who has been extraordinarily blessed by God," he told the Associated Press in a 2000 interview.

His holdings were reduced to a radio station and an office building when he ran into financial problems in the early 1990s. But he continued his unsuccessful quest for political office -- including runs for president, the U.S. Senate and House as well as statehouse posts -- with a final losing bid for a congressional seat in Alabama's 2nd District in 2002.

Woods ran both as a Democrat and a Republican, in both Alabama and Nevada.

As a Democrat in Nevada, Woods lost to Reid in the 1992 primary. Two years later, as a Republican, Woods vied for the other Senate seat, losing in the GOP primary to Hal Furman, who in turn lost to Democrat incumbent Richard Bryan in the general election.

Although Woods maintained residences in Las Vegas in the early 1990s, he was viewed by some political observers of the time as a carpetbagger -- a man who failed to get elected to federal office in Alabama and tried to use his wealth and war hero status to win similar seats in less-populated Nevada.

In the 1994 Furman race, then-Clark County GOP Chief George Harris questioned Woods' residency, noting that a $750,000 Del Mar, Calif., home was listed in the name of Woods' wife. And when he was running for office in Nevada, Woods listed as his residence, a Las Vegas home that was owned by another couple.

According to Woods, he was born in a shack in a coal mining community called Toadvine near Birmingham in 1921 and was given to an orphanage by his mother after his father ran off. Raised by a farm family in Headland, he became a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force and then U.S. forces.