McHenry County Blog

In 1963, my mother and I attended the Illinois Crime Commission’s summer hearings held in the old county board room at what is now Woodstock City Hall. It was twice the size of the current Woodstock City Council Chambers.

Crime Commission Executive Director Charles Siragusa had investigated a bookmaking operation in Crystal Lake and presented diagrams of Crystal Lake businesses (like the magazine shop on Williams Street) from which bets were phoned to a room on the second floor the Pinemoor Hotel southwest of the First Congregational Church. At the time, we knew the Pinemoor as a great place for pizza. (It still it near the “V” in the Crystal Lake Plaza.)

The owner of the Pinemoor was Harry Snell, our Republican precinct committeeman. He told the commissioners he didn’t know what was going on upstairs.

Algonquin Township Precinct 7 was huge. It went from Route 14 to the the McHenry-Kane County line east of McHenry Avenue. Most of the homes were in Crystal Lake and Lakewood. The current Lake in the Hills and Algonquin subdivisions west of Randall Road did not exist then. They were farms.

In 1964, my father ran for the office of McHenry County Auditor. It was the first year that the county had enough population to have one–over 80,000 people.

He ran against McHenry County Board Chairman Harley Mackeben, who was on the board by virtue of his position as Grafton Township Supervisor.

My father and mother ran a leisurely campaign in the then-90,000 person county, telling people who asked whether he would quit his Barley and Malt Institute job that he wouldn’t, that the job only require part-time work, which was subsequently proven correct.

Mother and Dad campaigned in the little northern and western towns on weekends, going into the small bars and stores and introducing themselves.

Dad lost the two-way race by about 300 votes, preparing the way for me to become McHenry County Treasurer in 1966 in a 3-way race (33%+, 33%, 33%-) by 72 votes with about 13,000 cast.

Lots of people obviously thought they were voting for my father.

I heard again and again when they met me, the 20-something, in the Treasurer’s Office.

The same year, Dad decided that he would make a more appropriate precinct committeeman than Harry, ran against him and won.

In 1967, Dad, who had opposed the formation of a junior college district in 1963, called a meeting in the cafeteria of Crystal Lake Community High School that led to the formation of a committee that successfully created McHenry County College with a ten-cent tax rate. The committee promoted a college that would be one-third funded by student tuition, one-third by local property taxpayers and one-third by the state. (Needless to say, state government did not come through with the promises made by state officials who spoke to McHenry County college proponents.)

The referendum passed on April 1, 1967, and Dad was elected to serve on its first board.

More tomorrow.

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Links to all the articles are below:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

The pre-Crystal Lake posts of my father’s biography can be found by looking down on McHenry County Blog.

Dad rented a home at 100 W. Crystal Lake Avenue. We started school there (the junior class built its Homecoming float there) as Mother and Dad looked for something that would allow more access to the lake for the 50-horsepower Wolverine outboard boat we bought that summer. The boys of the previous tenants had used the attic as a BB gallery. The BB’s were everywhere.

Soon my parents found a home to rent at 800 West Broadway in Lakewood, but, more importantly in the Country Club Addition Property Owners Association. That gave us the right to keep our boat in the lake.

Dad became the association’s secretary, maintaining up-to-date Address-O-Graph plates for what was probably decades.

Since there was no Rotary Club in town, Dad joined the Crystal Lake Kiwanis, where he became the long-time secretary, doing the tedious record-keeping job of the first service club in Crystal Lake.

After the November election, Dad received a “thank you” letter from the ward committeeman in Chicago where he lived.

My father, a ghost voter in 1958. Who would have believed it?

Having been active in politics in Easton, Maryland, Dad was determined not to become so in Crystal Lake.

It took two years for him to break his pledge.

The Crystal Lake High School District was holding a bond referendum during the spring of my senior year. He started writing letters to the weekly Crystal Lake Herald. The next week the school board’s president would reply. My father would offer a rebuttal the next week. (None of the current Northwest Herald nonsense of only allowing one letter a month.) This went on until I knew the teachers were looking at me and pointing out I was the son of the guy trying to defeat the bond issue.

The bond referendum lost. Since it was my last semester and Oberlin College had already accepted me, my grades didn’t matter as much, but I don’t think any of the teachers retaliated. I still remember standing in the study hall while a couple of teachers looked my way from the westerly hall near Ken Tarpley’s speech class room. I wondered if they were saying, “There’s his son.”

Later Dad ended up on some committee to solve whatever space problem was perceived and, when he discovered that the football field had to be moved, he asked if a sidewalk could be built. I suspect that was his major victory on the committee.

Now, too often, I tell my son as we drive on Wallace, “That’s my Dad’s sidewalk.”

”I know, Dad. You’ve already told me,”

my son replies, sometimes in an irritated tone of voice.

When Richard Nixon ran for office in 1960, Dad became head of his local citizens committee. That put him in touch with the Republican precinct committeemen.

At some point in the 1960′s, Dad took over the publication of the Government Improvement League Newsletter, GIL Newsletter, for short. He wrote about assessments and taxes.

Dad’s office at the Barley and Malt Institute was in the Builder’s Building on Wacker Drive when he started work.

After the lease ran out, he convinced his board to move the office to Des Plaines. (“If we ever meet in Chicago, it will be near O’Hare, not Downtown Chicago.” They agreed. It was on the corner of Route 14 near the train station across from the movie theater in an old Masonic Hall.)

When that lease came up, he asked if he could move the office to Crystal Lake, arguing that if the board ever met in Chicago, it would be at a hotel near the airport, not in the Des Plaines office.

He ended up on Brink Street, later on the second floor on the west side of Williams Street, then the tip of “V” in the Crystal Lake Plaza and, finally, at Mike Janek’s old auto dealership on the corner of Woodstock and Brink.

More tomorrow.

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Links to all of the articles can be found below:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

Earlier segments of this biography of my father can be found below on McHenry County Blog.

In 1952, my youngest sister Ellen was born.

That was also the year Dad switched his registration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in order to be able to vote for Dwight Eisenhower for president. (Maryland has a closed primary, unlike Illinois’.)

And the state was as Democratic then as it is now.

To understand how Democratic the area was and how significant it was for the President of the Easton Town Council to switch parties, let me tell you about the 1952 Halloween paintings I helped put on the barber shop’s front window.

It was a parade to a haunted house. On a wagon was a sign that said,

A day or so after we painted it, my 5rh grade teacher, Miss Ornett, suggested that I should change the sign to

Compliant child that I was, I did.

The Eastern Shore had always been conservative. Today my birth place is firmly in Republican Party control.

But I remember in 1948 when I was six asking my mother why she and Dad weren’t in favor of President Truman. I am not sure of the answer, but that’s the first political thought I remember…unless watching my mother cry when she heard the news that President Roosevelt had died in 1945 when I was two years and ten months counts.

Just as Dad may have been the first to get a student loan, he certainly was one of the first Democratic Party office holders to switch to the Republican Party—all the rage while Ronald Reagan was in office.

My mother, who was the daughter of a Queen Anne County, Maryland, Democratic Party county board member James Clayland Stevens didn’t follow suit until 1954.

Her father was the swing vote who tried to keep the county’s two Democratic Party factions honest after he was recruited by one to run on its slate.

In 1953, the family moved to Salt Lake City.
Dad found that he could not get a job at the National Canners Association because the national association did not want to offend its regional affiliate.

So, he looked outside of the food industry.

He found the National Chinchilla Breeders and Marketing Associations in Salt Lake City. It had lots of employees, but was looking to modernize and downsize. Dad did both. The association keep voluminous records of the genealogy of the little animals with the softest fur on earth. He implemented a pre-computer filing and sorting system using cards about the size of 4 by 6 inches with places to punch out indicators around all four edges.

That must have meant there needed to be many, many fewer employees, because by the time he moved the office to Middletown, New York, in 1956, the association did not need very many people.

The office was moved because Dad convinced his board that if the industry was going to survive they needed to sell some pelts for coats and stoles. Since the fur market was in New York City, being fifty miles up the Hudson was close enough to make sales pitches in the city and far enough to avoid the high cost of labor there. The pelt is pretty poor, but the black and gray fur you see above is the natural color. The marketers experimented with dying the pelts blue, among other colors.

After about a year, my father was let go. The board figured his two top assistants earning $5,000 each could do the job he was doing earning $10,000. (My sister Jan covers this much better than I.)

So, Dad was looking for a job while I was a sophomore at Middletown High School. What he found paid less than the NCBA, but it was a job. He was the natural resources man for the National Association of Manufacturers dealing with the big lumber companies, among others.

I suspect he immediately starting looking for a job that paid more and would allow him to see his family more than Wednesday night and weekend. (While Middletown was fifty miles from New York, the same distance as Crystal Lake is from Chicago, the train trip was at least an hour and a half. The track was so bad, the commuters called it the Eire and Lackadaisical.)

He stayed in a single room occupancy hotel in NYC, meeting all sorts of interesting people, as he did in Chicago when he preceded us to take his new job as Manager of the Barley and Malt Institute.

“Tell Grandmom—his mother—it’s about malt, like malted milk,” he told me by phone. (You see Addie Watlin-Skinner in her mid-nineties here.)

Addie Skinner was not one who favored alcohol or cards. She and her husband left the Methodist Church about 1944 because it was getting too liberal. My grandfather Skinner built a Holiness Church near Crumpton, Maryland, where they retired.

Dad came to Chicago while us kids finished the school year. He lived in a single room occupancy hotel.

Dad and Mom decided on Crystal Lake as the place they wanted to live. It had a lake that seemed safer than Lake Michigan.

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Here are the links to the other stories in this series:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death