I've known Scott Griggs and Eric Johnson since 2007 — long before either one sought his first vote for public office.

They were both young lawyers — heck, they're still young — with a passion for Dallas and its future. Yet it never occurred to me that a dozen years later they would be facing off in a runoff election to decide which of them will lead this city.

OK, so I'm not clairvoyant.

My first conversations with Griggs and Johnson were part of the months of research I did before helping launch The Dallas Morning News' "Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap" editorial effort. I came to know both of them well and learned a lot from each — as I did from many others — throughout that decade-long project.

Now with one of these guys about to be our next mayor, I wondered what a day in the life of their runoff campaigns would look like. This is what I found on the trail with Scott Griggs. (You'll find my day with Eric Johnson here.)

Mayoral candidate Scott Griggs wakes up before the chickens in his family’s North Oak Cliff backyard and works like a dog to try to convince Dallas residents that he’s the right guy to lead this city.

More than 60 percent of Dallas residents voted May 4 for someone other than the two candidates who made the runoff. So Griggs is spending every available minute tracking down those could-be supporters and, one by one, trying to win them over.

The first thing I noticed when I accompanied the four-term City Council member on a recent Friday of campaigning is that, for block walking, he exchanges his much-photographed brown boots — used frequently in his campaign ads — for Nike tennis shoes.

Scott Griggs, a four-term Dallas City Council member and mayoral candidate, answers a call while checking a voter database on his other smartphone as he block-walks in a Lake Highlands neighborhood on Friday, May 24. (Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer)

Focused on a database on his smartphone that pinpoints May 4 voters, he walks with a strong sense of urgency. The hotter the day gets, the brisker his pace. A slender guy to begin with, Griggs has lost seven pounds during this campaign.

Lake Highlands resident Vickie McDonald, whose late husband was a Dallas police officer, is just the kind of voter Griggs looks for on these walks. She plans to vote June 8 but said she was undecided about her choice because her candidate, Dallas ISD trustee Miguel Solis, didn’t make the runoff.

"That's why I'm here today — to tell you more about me," Griggs said. They chatted about a range of issues, including animal welfare and public safety, and McDonald said she would carefully read the literature Griggs left behind.

Running on four hours of sleep — even pulling an occasional all-nighter — has been the norm in the Griggs household since the council member began his mayoral run.

"You're exhausted when you go to bed," Griggs' wife, Mariana, had told me early that Friday morning as we drank coffee in the few quiet moments before their three kids began waking. "Your mind has been going a million miles an hour at night about sign deliveries, fundraising, where to get votes. But you get up and you keep going. And somehow it all works out."

Vickie McDonald shares a laugh with mayoral candidate Scott Griggs as he went door to door taking to potential voters in Lake Highlands Friday, May 24. (Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer)

The first family business of the day is feeding the Griggs menagerie — Bruno, a dog rescued from the streets of West Dallas, a revolving door of cats — among them, Cocoa and OBC, short for Other Black Cat, and seven chickens.

“The chickens don’t have names — they are livestock,” Griggs said as he and 5-year-old Catalina, or Cati, pulled on mud boots and headed for the coop.

Unlike her brothers, Francisco, or Cisco, who turns 3 Saturday, and 1-year-old Guillermo, or Memo, Cati understands a little bit about the campaign. Before her dad drove her to preschool, she informed me that the “Scott Griggs for Mayor” signs “forget an important thing” — his middle name. “It should be Scott Taylor Griggs,” she said.

While Cisco and Memo squealed in delight over tug of war with a playpen in the Griggs kid-friendly but grand 1912 home, Mariana began to get organized: “Sometimes the most pressing issue is we need garbage bags and milk.”

“We are regular people,” she said. “Every day we get up, we make coffee, we drive our kids to school, we keep our own home. Even though I’m campaigning right now, you still have to be a mom, you still have to be a dad.”

Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs feeds chicken with his daughter, Catalina Griggs, at their North Oak Cliff home on Friday, May 24, 2019. (Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer)

Mariana and Scott are a team. The self-described “strong, educated Latin woman” tells people at forums that a vote for Griggs means “you are getting a mayor and an extra person: me.”

Mariana, a longtime neighborhood advocate in North Oak Cliff, puts a lot of stock into devising easy-to-pull-off creative solutions to local problems, whether developing community gardens or promoting the reuse of children’s toys and clothing.

She believes in her husband and his espoused philosophy focusing on “regular people.” And Mariana sees Griggs as “the perfect candidate” in part “because he looks like the establishment but he has this diverse family.” And what do people not know about her husband? “He’s that guy in the group class project in school who gets the work done.”

Although Scott usually takes Cisco to preschool, on this morning he needed to get to Uptown to meet with a group of pastors. So Mariana handled Cisco's drop-off before she and Memo headed to a Go Oak Cliff video shoot. She would spend the rest of the day, with her youngest child alongside, delivering yard signs, T-shirts and bumper stickers requested at the previous night’s mayoral forum.

Because Griggs’ meeting with pastors wasn’t open to reporters — he told me only that the gathering allowed him to dispel misinformation — we reconnected midmorning in Lake Highlands for block-walking.

Before we hit the street, he told me, “You are about to see how abysmal turnout really is because we are only stopping at the houses with voters from the May 4 election. It’s really sad how many didn’t turn out.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. On this Friday, walking through the Highland Meadows neighborhood just south of LBJ Freeway, I lost count of the number of “non-voting” households we skipped over.

When no one answered his knock, Griggs left a hand-written note and highlighted his cell number, which he includes on all his literature. When voters did open the door, they were almost all friendly, relatively informed and interested in what the candidate had to say.

Scott Griggs leaves a note with his phone number on the door of a potential voter Friday, May 24. (Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer)

Griggs can sound like a municipal policy wonk, which is understandable given that with eight years on City Council, he knows seemingly every in and out of how Dallas works. But as he talked with residents one on one, he was relaxed, unrehearsed and downright cheerful.

His simple pitch varied from house to house, but he always emphasized that he’s “running on ‘back to basics’ — police, fire, streets, parks and rec centers.”

A handful of residents told Griggs he would have their vote June 8. One woman who was out front trimming shrubs talked at length about drug deals at nearby apartments. Griggs asked her a number of questions and made several suggestions about what next steps she could take.

That conversation ended with the woman — who asked that her name not be published because she feared for her safety in the neighborhood — saying, “I think you have a lot of integrity and will work for everybody.”

Conversations like these are why Griggs tries to squeeze personal door-to-door campaigning into his schedule every day, even as he juggles the responsibilities of his law practice, the last days of his council work and mayoral debates and neighborhood gatherings.

Scott Griggs shakes hands with worshippers at the Islamic Association of North Texas mosque in Richardson before an afternoon prayer service. Thousands of North Texans, many of them from Dallas, attend the services. (Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer)

We block-walked for more than two hours before returning to Griggs' white Dodge Ram pickup — a mess of campaign signs and paraphernalia mixed with children's toys and cracker crumbs. Already that morning, he had returned 15 calls, many of them from voters, but a dozen more had piled up.

The next stop was the Islamic Association of North Texas mosque for an informal meet-and-greet before and after the 1:45 p.m. prayer service. Just north of LBJ Freeway, the Richardson mosque attracts thousands of worshippers, many of them from Dallas.

Hadi Jawad, co-chair of the Dallas Peace & Justice Center, told me that he offered to host Griggs at the mosque because he likes that the candidate’s platform “is focused on everyday people.” He also said that many local Muslims were impressed that Griggs took time in March to attend a downtown Dallas observance after the deadly massacre at two mosques in New Zealand.

Griggs had warned me when we went over the day’s schedule that he almost never has lunch — unless a campaign volunteer shows up with a snack. He does most of his weekday canvassing alone, and he joked that photographer Shaban Athuman and I were the closest thing he’d had to an entourage.

Skipping lunch was one thing — but I needed coffee. Griggs agreed to a quick Starbucks stop, where he wolfed down a sandwich and chips. But another 13 calls had come in while he was at the mosque, and he wanted to get back to the business of connecting with voters.

When I asked what he planned to do once he got home, he chuckled: “When we put the kids down at 7:30, I’ll fall asleep five minutes later.”

The last I saw of Griggs that day, courtesy of Mariana’s 7 p.m. Facebook post, was the mayoral candidate on the couch, surrounded by his kids but with his phone still in hand. The caption on her photo read, “A special Friday where Dad is home. Dialing for dollars, but also watching some fairy movie on TV.”