Tom Wakely for Congress / P.O. Box 1501, Columbus, NM 88029
Paid For By The Tom Wakely for Congress Campaign
I was still in seminary when I moved from Chicago to Walworth County, Wisconsin. After that, I just commuted back to school, sometimes driving, sometimes taking the train. Anyway, Walworth County, like many rural counties in Wisconsin, was dotted with small public schools serving students from 1st through 8th grade. Each had its own small school board. However, there was only one high school, Badger High, in Lake Geneva, and it had its own school board. Now, if you don’t know anything about Lake Geneva, let me give you a little background about the town, as it’s an integral part of this story.
Lake Geneva lies about an hour and a half from downtown Chicago. During prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, a period of time during which alcohol was banned throughout the country, the city became a bootlegging hub for the Chicago mob. Seaplanes would fly in booze from Canada, land on one of the many small lakes in the area, unload their cargo, and small trucks would then haul the cases of whisky to one of several warehouses in Lake Geneva. When the coast was clear, larger trucks would then transport the cases to Chicago. Soon, major mob bosses, like Al Capone, started renting houses on the lake to keep track of their supply lines. Subsequently, as the decades passed, more and more ‘goodfellas’ started buying up land and building houses in the area. The 1st Playboy Club in the country opened up in Lake Geneva in 1968.
My daughter’s 8th-grade graduating class had just 12 students, classmates she had known since 1st grade. And like so many parents, I was concerned about how she would adapt to a high school with over 2,00 students. As such, I felt I needed to ensure she would be okay, so I ran for the school board that served Bager High. The fellow I was running against was a 20-year incumbent, born and raised in Wisconsin. I was called a carpetbagger among other things. But I didn’t mind, I’d been called worse.
On one of my trips back to Chicago to attend a seminary class, I told a few fellow seminarians that I had decided to run for the Badger High School board. One of them was a fishing buddy of mine, Jesse Jackson, Jr., who later became a U.S. Congressman. Unfortunately, he screwed up, was impeached, and served some time in prison. But when I knew him, he was just a nice guy I met in seminary. Anyway, he gave me some money for my campaign, and I used it to buy some local radio time on the Rush Limbaugh Hour, a three-hour conservative talk show. Those 15-second spots ran something like ‘Tom supports education, and he needs your support.’ I went on to win that election. I was happy because I could now keep a better eye on my daughter. But she was not happy at all. She thought she could hide in the back of the classroom, but no way. All the teachers sat her in the front row after introducing her to everyone as the daughter of the school’s newest board member. Anyway…
My first and second board meetings went well. I got to know everyone and got familiar with how things work. At the third board meeting, we were all handed a copy of the proposed vendor contracts for the high school: food service, health-insurance plans for employees, that sort of thing. Well, one of the vendors we were set to approve at the next board meeting was a contract for trash collection. When it was my turn to speak about those contracts, I told my fellow board members that I had just received a rather thick booklet from Greenpeace detailing all the pertinent information about trash-collection companies across the country, including which companies were alleged to have ties to organized crime. Among the trash-collection companies listed as having mob ties was the current Badger High School vendor, whose contract we were scheduled to approve at the next board meeting.
Now, these board meetings were generally attended only by a reporter from the local weekly newspaper. The paper’s headline the following week was “WAKELY TIES SCHOOL BOARD VENDOR TO ORGANIZED CRIME.” Opps, me and my big mouth. At the next board meeting, the room was packed with big, scary-looking guys, about fifty of them, arms crossed, scowls on their faces, all wearing white T-shirts, effectively showing off their muscles. When I couldn’t get a second to discuss the contract, I abandoned my attempt to enlighten my fellow board member, and those 50 guys, probably from Chicago, all left. After the meeting, I went out to the parking lot only to find all four of my truck’s tires had been slashed. I called the police, the officer who took my statement was a friend, and he gave me a ride home, to be on the safe side, he said. When I got home, we found the front door kicked in and my home trashed. For the next few weeks, I was constantly followed around by a black limousine with dark-tinted windows. Message received, and as the fates would have it, I had just received an offer to return to Texas, to Austin, to serve as the Executive Director of the Economic Justice Foundation. A short time later, the U-Haul was packed, and we were on our way.
The moral to this story is just like Kenny Rogers said: Sometimes you need to hold them, other times you need to fold them. And this was one of those times I folded.