There is no Carl Sandburg to make poetry of its progress, no Richard J. Daley to harness its political clout, no Al Capone to make even its crime mythical. And for better or worse, their likes never may be known in northwest Cook County.
The northwest suburbs are not a place where diverse neighborhoods bind together into a single identity–Big Apple, Windy City, Big Easy–which, in turn, spawns outsize, galvanizing personalities.
It is a place where private property and individual families are paramount, a place diffuse by design where one person can exert only so much influence. So its movers and shakers are numerous and vary widely in the power they exert in their communities, the region and the state.
They keep businesses strong, help the arts thrive and carve political fiefdoms from the prairie just as their urban counterparts once carved wards from the city. But don’t call any of them Boss.
Except maybe Don Stephens.
Donald E. Stephens is not just the mayor of Rosemont, he is Rosemont’s creator.
From the truck farms, brothels and swamps that once marked this crossroads abutting O’Hare International Airport, Stephens created a business and entertainment mecca, simultaneously transforming himself into a financial and political powerhouse.
Stephens built the Rosemont Convention Center, the Horizon, the Rosemont Theatre and hotels in a style not unknown in Chicago. Mob boss Sam Giancana was among his business partners.
Federal prosecutors, the FBI, the Cook County state’s attorney, the state Liquor Control Commission and the Internal Revenue Service all have probed Stephens’ deals. He was twice indicted on federal tax and fraud charges but acquitted both times. One of his trial judges remarked, “I have admiration for people like (Stephens). They are the people who make this country go.”
His influence extends to the state Capitol, from which he got tens of millions of tax dollars for his convention center when other towns got none. And his sway has been sufficient to keep Schaumburg from getting a convention center out of fear that it would hurt Rosemont’s.
Chicago’s suburbs collectively enjoy newfound clout in Illinois politics, thanks to population shifts away from the city. The new leaders, however, are not from Cook County but rather from neighboring DuPage County.
So northwest suburban politicians have more of a say in state policy but remain in the shadows of the likes of Senate President James “Pate” Philip and House Republican Leader Lee Daniels, both from DuPage.
Still, there are Statehouse standouts such as Sen. Steven J. Rauschenberger (R-Elgin), a former furniture-store owner who helps carve up a $37 billion state budget as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Rauschenberger, whose family settled in the Elgin area in 1886, came to Springfield as part of the reform-minded class of 1992. With 53 lawmakers, it was the largest class of freshmen ever to arrive at the Capitol.
His classmates included Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Inverness), who today enjoys notoriety not as a political boss but as a thorn in the side of Republican Party leaders.
The politically impatient Fitzgerald will try to unseat U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, a vulnerable Democrat, next year. But his conservative profile so worries the GOP’s candidate for governor, George Ryan, and other bosses that they recruited state Comptroller Loleta Didrickson, a moderate, to oppose Fitzgerald in a GOP primary next spring.
Also among the region’s political who’s who is Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson.
Larson arrived in Schaumburg in 1969, as the boom was beginning, and quickly met Bob “Top Hand of the Cowhands” Atcher, former host of the Chicago-based radio variety show “Barn Dance.”
Atcher helped incorporate Schaumburg in 1956 and was mayor from 1959 to 1975. He hired Larson as the village’s public relations man, which led to a Village Board seat and, in 1987, the mayor’s office.
Larson, whose license plate reads “SCHMBRG 1,” has heard the jokes about the village’s strip-mall motif and is not amused. In a missive to an out-of-town critic, he summed up the feelings of many suburban leaders:
“Please be advised that we just want you to work in Schaumburg, shop in Schaumburg, eat in Schaumburg, and then Just Go Back Home! It’s tough enough dealing with legitimate complaints from local residents without an influx of out-of-town mopes who are more concerned about `lifestyle’ than living.”
Next door in Hoffman Estates, a town spawned from a single subdivision, Mayor Mike O’Malley has overseen the creation of a corporate oasis.
Since he took office in 1989, Siemens Gammasonics moved its huge medical equipment division to town, followed by Ameritech Inc. and, in a major nose-thumbing to Chicago, Sears, Roebuck and Co.
O’Malley reaches out to his town in small ways too. He found free union labor to fix a children’s shelter, created a fund to aid the needy and uses his home computer and home page, ilikemike.com, to dole out advice to residents. His Halloween advisory: “Tempt cavities, but not your children’s safety.”
Even his waistline serves the community. After losing 110 pounds in 15 weeks, O’Malley turned his loss into a high school health-class lesson.
Like other northwest mayors, Arlington Heights Mayor Arlene Mulder has no trouble spinning the part-time job into a full-time burden.
She was already leading a community that, as the home of Arlington International Racecourse, was at the epicenter of vitriolic debates over the future of horse racing and casino gambling in Illinois. Now, Mulder has pulled up a hot seat on the front line of the decades-old war between Chicago and the suburbs over noise and runway expansion at O’Hare.
Mulder chairs the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission, a panel created and financed by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Fellow suburban mayors, battling the city for nearly 20 years over O’Hare, are shouting down Mulder’s pleas for cooperation with cries of foul.
Over in Palatine, Mayor Rita Mullins is for a third time reaching for a higher office: the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District board. She will be trying to add the job to her duties as mayor, a part-time manager in the private sector and board member for nearly two dozen volunteer groups.
The suburbs of “The City that Works” work too.
The northwest gave the world the first McDonald’s restaurant, in Des Plaines, and the country its first enclosed shopping mall–Mt. Prospect’s Randhurst Shopping Center, which opened in 1961. Palatine-based Weber-Stephen Products Co. developed in its current form the most ubiquitous of suburban status symbols, the covered barbecue grill.
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This also is the domain of Richard Duchossois, whose fortune was built on the grittiest of industries but whose reputation grew in the flashiest fashion: as owner of Arlington International Racecourse.
Duchossois started repairing railroad cars at Thrall Car Manufacturing Co. in Chicago and now runs Duchossois Enterprises, a $500 million conglomerate of which Thrall is a part.
But his passion was his track, a palatial spread, built from the ashes of the fire-ravaged original, that attracted the sport’s grandest names until riverboat casinos did him in. His track closed in October, perhaps for good.
At Motorola, Chris Galvin this year took over the firm founded by his grandfather Paul, a saloonkeeper’s son who left his hometown of Harvard to invent the car radio.
Chris Galvin started at the firm during school breaks in 1967. By 1988, he was an executive vice president.
Now he is shedding unprofitable businesses, building on promising technologies and quashing a corporate culture so internally competitive that it’s been called a “warring of tribes.”
Beyond the realms of clout and capital are the movers and shakers of suburban spiritual life.
William Hybels believed 22 years ago that traditional churches offered young adults little. So he started in Palatine’s Willow Creek Theater what would become one of the world’s most successful churches: the Willow Creek Community Church.
Located now in a South Barrington, the church boasts a pond, food court, cappuccino counter and 20,000 members. It spawned 1,000 imitators around the globe, and Hybels now consults regularly with President Clinton.
There also is Rev. John Smythe, a 1957 All-American basketball star at Notre Dame and first-round draft choice of the St. Louis Hawks. Smythe left basketball for the priesthood, ending up at Maryville Academy, a Des Plaines-based group helping abused, neglected and abandoned kids.
Executive director since 1970, Smythe now taps his sports connections to help keep the orphanage afloat financially.
Phyllis Mueller, while a theological student in Chicago, spent three days on the street with just $3 and a driver’s license. The lesson was quick and profound: “No one wants to be homeless. It is dirty, it is lonely, it has no future.”
It also is not confined to the city. It extends to the prosperous suburbs where Mueller lived. So Mueller founded the Home of the Sparrow shelters in McHenry and Palatine, helping hundreds of women and children each year.
On religious matters, Rob Sherman is often right. But that usually just irks people. Sherman, of Buffalo Grove, is Chicagoland’s most vocal and litigious atheist.
Suing often to maintain a strict separation of church and state, Sherman forced several suburbs to erase religious images and phrases from city seals, water towers and government centers.
He blocked a secular college from holding classes in a Jewish community center and a Baptist college from buying an Elgin hotel with taxpayer help.
He hosted “The Rob Sherman Show” on local cable TV and most recently forced Buffalo Grove police to cut ties between one of their youth programs and the Boy Scouts because the Scouts’ pledge mentions God.
Art in the suburbs? Sound like the start of a joke?
Even in the shadow of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Elgin Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Robert Hanson, has become, as one critic put it, “one of the finest professional ensembles outside the city.”
From the heart of a hardscrabble river town, Hanson has tried to broaden the classical audience with pop concerts.
“A well written and performed pop song,” Hanson once said, “is every bit as satisfying as a Schubert art song.”
In Palatine, Martin Ryan has built a museum of sorts at Harper College.
The president of the Northwest Cultural Council and a former dean of liberal arts at the college brought 18 major sculptures to Harper’s 210-acre campus. Among them is Picasso’s “The Bather,” a lounging nude that once scandalized the northwest suburbs when a larger version was placed along Golf Road.
“The northwest has come of age in a very serious way, and this area deserves some significant sculptural presence,” Ryan once said.
“We don’t have the status of the north suburbs,” said Betty Southard, a retired high school teacher who leads tours of the northwest for classes at Roosevelt University’s Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg.
But, she adds, “We’re no longer the boonies.”
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