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Richard Thern didn’t come from Alabama.

And he most likely carried it in his hands rather than on his knee.

But with a banjo he did come, delivering it as a gift to the attorney for the Collier County School Board.

Thern, a candidate for the School Board, has made a practice of giving gifts to the school system staff. Attorney Richard Withers received a Richelieu banjo. District communications officer Joe Landon got a watch. Chief Operational Officer Michele LaBute received ceramics.

Thern, a retired architect, says giving gifts is part of his nature. He feels he’s been blessed in life and likes to pass on his good fortune to others he meets in his travels.

Over the past few years, his travels have taken him to School District offices, where he was part of a volunteer committee looking into the district’s construction practices.

In that capacity he met and worked with Withers, LaBute and Landon, taking a liking to all of them.

The banjo once was owned by Thern’s father, who had 24 of them. At one point, Thern hoped to give it to country music star Roy Clark. That didn’t happen, so when Thern found out Withers plays banjo (“I flatter myself,” Withers says, reluctantly describing himself as a musician) Thern decided to give the instrument to him. “I didn’t need the money and the family had no interest,” Thern said.

Thern says he was in no way trying to influence the staff. “It was kind of spontaneous. I didn’t have anything to gain. I hadn’t even thought of running for School Board,” Thern said of the gift to Withers, which occurred around late 2004.

If he did intend to win favor with the gift, a fat lot of good it did him. Withers later ruled that Thern could not have plans for a school because of a new state law designed to keep blueprints out of the hands of terrorists.

Withers said he checked with the Florida Commission on Ethics before accepting the gift. “It sat in my office a couple of days before I took it home,” he said. LaBute said she checked with Withers before accepting. “He would have been quite hurt if I’d given it back,” she said.

Both Withers and LaBute say they filed a disclosure with the ethics commission after receiving the gifts. Landon is out of the office this week and unavailable for comment.

Thern said the ceramics piece he gave LaBute was worth about $700. He said he’s not sure how much the banjo was worth. The company’s Web site lists banjos for sale from $1,400 to almost $8,000. He guesses the watch, which he received as payment for designing a small jewelry store, would be worth about $1,000.

Thern’s generosity is by no means limited to School District staff. He sponsors a scholarship at the University of Wisconsin and started the Thern Foundation Inc. for at-risk children. He’s currently paying the private school tuition — amounting to $9,000 — for the child of an acquaintance who was struggling in public school. He’s given $500 to the Manatee school’s clothing fund and separate $1,000 donations to Youth Haven and an Immokalee day care center.

If elected, Thern says, he would not accept a salary to serve on the board.

He worries that disclosure of the gifts will sully the spirit in which they were offered and hurt his campaign. In fact, that is exactly what not disclosing them would do.

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E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com.