Gyrene Joe blows through the legislature.

• Author: Donsky, Martin
• Position: Politician Joe Mavretic, North Carolina

Joe Mavretic's resume lists his profession as "retired military officer." He joined the Marines right out of college and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

That's a dignified way to describe a 21-year career that included 300 combat missions in Vietnam. He was an F-4 Phantom fighter jock and won the Bronze Star.

These days, Mavretic, 55, doesn't need strafing runs to launch his attacks - word processors do just fine. He is, friends say, as intense as ever about his mission. Only the enemy has changed.

Pick a topic - or target - and the man who leads the North Carolina House of Representatives has some explosive thoughts.

It's time, he says, for the state to overhaul its voter-registration system. Something is wrong when an estimated 35 percent of those who are eligible don't even register.

How about the state's schools?

"The educational system is in disarray," he says. "It's not a school system but a system of schools or, rather, school buildings. The General Assembly had to pass a law to get the three school systems - the board of governors, the community colleges and the public schools - to meet annually. I had to hold a bill hostage to get it done."

The massive $9 billion road-building program endorsed by the General Assembly last year is great, but he worries that without water, sewer and utility connections to attract industry, these roads "will become highways to nowhere."

A few years back, he began calling for an end to the property tax. He even suggested that a hazardous-waste site be located in his home county - he saw it as an economic-development boon - and came close to working a deal before outcry from the home folks scotched it.

His description of North Carolina is not quite what you'd expect from a politician worried about the state's image. "We are the 10th-largest state, but we are 34th or 37th in per capita income, depending upon whose statistics you use. We re a big, poor state."

Josephus Lyman Mavretic, now running for his sixth term in the state House, challenged majority-party rule to become speaker.

Just 16 months ago, he and 19 other Democrats banded together with 46 Republicans to pull off the coup of the decade. They ousted long-term Speaker Liston Ramsey and his tight band of supporters who had run the House for most of the 1980s ["The Canning of Liston Ramsey," March 1989].

He was a rebel with a cause.

Not much has changed since then. The coalition of dissident Democrats and Republicans still holds sway...