had many diversified investments including Whale Inc. and a chain of fried chicken restaurants with country comedian Minnie Pearl and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. His rationale for the chicken restaurants was just as Pepsi had long made a large amount of money as the primary competitor to Coca-Cola, someone else stood to make a comparable fortune as the primary competitor to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hooker was also closely involved around the same time with the Frist family and others in the formation of what became the first major for-profit healthcare chain, the Hospital Corporation of America. Hooker won the 1970 Democratic nomination for governor of Tennessee over a host of competitors, most notably the candidate of the "Old Guard", Nashville attorney Stan Snodgrass, who had the endorsement of the Nashville Banner. In the past, the Democratic nomination would have assured him victory in November. But many things had changed in Tennessee in the four years since his loss to Ellington. For one, the Republican Party was benefitting greatly from the Southern strategy of then-President Richard Nixon to reach out to rural and working-class urban Southern whites who were disturbed by desegregation and other rapid social changes. Tennessee Republicans, only just over two years from failing to field a gubernatorial candidate, had even managed to organize the Tennessee House of Representatives for the first (and only) time in the 20th century in 1969, and they were not about to allow what appeared to them to be a golden opportunity to pass them by. In 1966, Howard Baker had beaten Governor Frank Clement for the United States Senate because the Democratic party was divided between the Clement/Ellington forces and the anti-Clement/Ellington forces, as best exemplified in the heated primary battle that year between Ellington and Hooker, and the absence of a gubernatorial nominee had in fact allowed Republicans to focus almost all of their energies on electing Baker to the Senate seat. Events, as well as people, seemed to conspire against Hooker in the fall of 1970. The Republicans had staged a very hard-fought primary race of their own but had come out of it largely united behind the candidacy of Memphis dentist Dr. Winfield Dunn, former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party. Many of Snodgrass' erstwhile supporters, including the Nashville Banner, endorsed Dunn. At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission had in 1969 announced an investigation into Minnie