Message of the Day – A Sign

Since I have an article about the McHenry County Treasurer’s office below, today is as good a one as any to post this sign.

It’s a political sign that helped me (barely) win the 1966 Republican June primary election for county treasurer two days after my 24th birthday.

It’s 8½ inches wide and 7 inches high.

It says,

VOTE FOR

CAL

SKINNER JR.
FOR
TREASURER

There were made out of 8½ by 14 inch goldenrod card stock.

They were printed on a mimeograph machine. This one didn’t get inked as well as it should have.

Then, they were cut in half.

You will not the hard charging elephant, which the national Republican Party has replaced with a stylized one with rounded edges.

I like the older, more energetic elephant.

The campaign had about a third of the precinct committeemen supporting me. I remember Nunda Township Supervisor Ted Sterns, after whom Sterns Woods is named, telling me that I should wait my turn, that I was young, that I had time.

(A neighbor across the way from his basket show on Woodstock Street said he ran a bookie joint. He said there was an incredible amount of traffic in and out of the little building that was torn down to be part of the Crystal Lake City Hall parking lot.)

Another precinct committeeman from McHenry Township told me I would be eaten alive by the tigers in the courthouse.

When I campaigned at the small grocery store in Fox River Grove, the Republican precinct committeeman called to complain that I had not asked his permission. Ted Mandale was a Goldwater Republican who later moved to Lake Forest where I reconnected with him and his wife Ruth after I became more conservative.

Because the election was held the second Tuesday of June, I had plenty of time to knock on doors—some 4,000, I think. The county’s population was about 90,000 at the time.

With nightfall being pretty late, I found that I could knock on doors until 8:45 without scaring people. Of course, it helped that I was young. I sensed many of the older women gave me the same benefit of the doubt they would have given their grandsons.

In any event, I put these little posters up all over McHenry County. Supporters of the other two candidates, Harvard Police Chief Gene Brewer and Hartland Township Supervisor and county board member Ray Murphy thought there must be at least six people putting them up.

But it was just me.

I even put one on a telephone pole outside the police department door. It stayed up for years, but was probably a bad idea, because Brewer probably just got more energized every time he saw it.

After Earth Day in 1969, Jack Schaffer and I pretty much agreed that signs on poles and in rights-of-ways were something that no longer seems appropriate.

The right-of-way avoidance continued until Don Manzullo ran for congress in 1992. Apparently he had more signs than he could find supporters to give permission to place on their properties. Maybe it was because he was running against Schaffer and McHenry County was his “home town.”

Signs have been illegally put in road rights-of-way ever since.

My father designed the sign, by the way.


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