More McHenry County Blog

Father's Day is tomorrow and it seems appropriate to jot down some thoughts about my Dad.

The story got out of hand, so I'll cut it up and run some each day until I reach the end.

Calvin LeRoy Skinner was born in Wilmington, Delaware June 8, 1916, the second son of Addie Watling and Roy Skinner.

His mother was running a corner store. She already had son George when she became pregnant with Dad.

I was interviewing her in her 95th year and she suddenly asked,

"Are you in favor of abortion?"

"I don't know, Grandmom," I replied, not knowing where she was going.

"Well, you better not, because you wouldn't be here if I had followed my girlfriends' advice."

Her girl friends suggested if she had a second child she would have to close the store.

The family also lived in Chester, Pennsylvania, and on various rental farms in Maryland, two I know of were in Queen Anne's County.

Dad's father was a handyman-builder and farmer. He built their home in Chester. At one point his mother worked in a fireworks factory in Chestertown, Maryland, that blew up. She led survivors to safety, crawling under a wire fence.

The family lived on rental farms, one of which was next to his future wife Eleanor Stevens near Barclay, Maryland.

Another was on a road where he and his father saw a black man lynched. They were walking home as the mob was stringing the poor man up. (I wrote Maryland officials interested in lynching, but none are listed in Queen Anne's County after 1891. I figure this probably occurred in the 1920's, but Maryland statistics show no lynchings in that decade.)

The last farm was near Route 50 east of Crumpton and Dad farmed it during World War II when his father became unable to do so.

As a high schooler, Dad excelled in agriculture, becoming President of the Maryland 4-H All-Stars. (He must have had a politically astute Ag teacher to win the convention held in Fredericksburg, Maryland.)

As a kid he broke his arm falling out of a tree. His father set it. The result was a slightly bent arm the rest of his life, left, I think.

After graduating from Sudlersville High School, the same year as his future wife Eleanor, in the summer before attending the University of Maryland, he may have received the first student loan.

The local banker asked him,

"Calvin, how are you going to pay for college?"

Dad told him he was going to work his way through.

"Here's a check book. If you ever need money, write a check."

Dad got his first car, a Model T with a rumble seat, I believe, when he walked by a man on a road who couldn't get his vehicle restarted.

"You want it?" he asked.

My father answered in the affirmative.

"It's yours," the owner said and walked away.

The first part of my father's multi-part biography ran yesterday. Today, Father's Day, we'll

Dad graduated debt free from college in three and a half years.

Somehow I have gotten the impression that he was something of a lady's man. I don't know how he had time. But he did have the rumble seat.

He had to take off one semester to work the farm while he father was sick, which I didn't know until I read my sister Jan Patel's memories.

Dad's goal in life was to become a county ag agent.

One of his part-time jobs was candling eggs at a market in Washington, D.C. The Southwest District of Columbia market still exists and I believe it is now an upscale shopping area.

(Later, during the Richard Ogilvie administration, the McHenry County Republican Party sent out a list of jobs that were open. Dad had been elected Algonquin Township Precinct Committeeman in 1966, when I ran for McHenry County Treasurer, and served until 1988. He had been head of the local Nixon citizens committee in 1960. He lost a GOP primary race for County Auditor in 1964 to Harley Mackeben, McHenry County Board Chairman and Grafton Township Supervisor.

(In any event, "egg candler" was one of the jobs and Dad guessed rightly that no one else would have relevant experience. Don't know where the job was located, but he didn't get it. Of course, he didn't really want it.)

My mother and father were married on July 31, 1938, in Wilmington, Delaware. The fancy marriage certificate says it was by a Methodist Episcopal minister named Wingate Daniel Short.

Mother lived in Barclay at the time; Dad in Sudlersville, both in Maryland. Helen Roe Stevens and Addie Louise Skinner were the witnesses.

After college, my father taught agriculture in Cordova, Talbot County, Maryland, but discovered it didn't pay well enough to support a wife.

Then, he took a job with the Federal Land Bank in Baltimore. The two lived in an upstairs apartment in a row house.

As an appraiser, he worked with farmers who held loans with the Land Bank when the Pennsylvania Tollway right-of-way was being purchased, among others.

In 1941,he took a job as assistant to the Tri-State (Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey) Packers Association in Easton, Maryland, with the prospect of becoming its Executive Secretary when the man who hired him retired. I think his name was Frank Shook. They lived in half a house until I was born in 1942.

My September, 1941, conception occurred before Pearl Harbor and for some reason that kept Dad from being drafted. Dad also worked for what the government considered an essential industry--food production. That may have contributed to his deferment later in World War II.

I found a Red Cross Volunteer arm patch, which I assume was Dad's.

I know he told me that he did serve as a lookout along the shore to see if German submarines were within site.

I'm not sure where, but the coastal areas were worried that a submarine would land spies or saboteurs, I guess.

Our home county of Talbot has more miles of waterfront than any other in the country. (And, the British did bombard St. Michaels during the War of 1812. And, the Nazis patrolled the Eastern Seaboard looking for Allied ships.)


The night I was born, June 11, 1942, my father and his Methodist minister friend Charles (Charlie) Jarvis, who baptized all three kids and, having moved to Illinois to the first pastor the Oak Park Methodist Church, officiated at Dad's funeral, sat on the porch of the Easton Memorial Hospital drinking beer.

It was the night of the first blackout. (During World War II communities prepared for air attacks by using shades to block light coming from their homes.)

Since I was conceived before Pearl Harbor, my father was not drafted. He also was working in what was considered an essential industry. Those two factors, rather than his mis-set broken arm probably keep him out of way.

A local owner of property, Mrs. Hubbard died and her homes went up for auction to settle her estate. Dad was bidding on her home, which was at 212 S. Aurora Street. As I remember the story, he had $2,000.

The bid went higher.

Mr. Shook offered to loan him $500 and, with that money, he bid $2,500 and bought his first house. (It had weathered wooden shingles then. I remember tossing what Mrs. Hubbard had stored in the attic out the window, which seemed very high up to someone in grade school. I got a lot of great old stamps, because she saved every letter.)

Shortly thereafter Mr. Shook retired and Dad became the Tri-State Packers' Executive Secretary.

That must have been about the time Dad was spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. As one of the closer trade associations.

The National Canners Association often called on him to appear before congressional committees during World War II. Dad always got cannery operators to testify, knowing that congressmen would rather hear from someone in the trenches than a hired gun.

The high-powered attorney the national association retained gave him some advice I have repeated many times:

“Cal, there are two kinds of lawyers. Those who tell you why you can't do what you want to do and those who tell you how to do what you want to do.”

Dad and I preferred the latter.

Besides working at the trade association, Dad managed a cannery at least one summer.

He also worked his father's farm when his father became incapacitated. You see him behind the mule.

As an up-and-comer in Easton, Dad was elected president of the Easton Rotary Club, which met in the Tidewater Inn. From the award for club excellence I found, it appears that must have been in 1944-45. (Plaques just don't take the place of those hand-lettered awards, do they? Click to enlarge.)

His friend Walter Barnes, who ran a men's store across from the courthouse, was Mayor of Easton. When a vacancy occurred as head of the legislative branch, the town council, Dad ran unopposed and won. (I remember walking with my mother when she voted at the fire house on the side street near the Avalon Theatre.)

One of his inspirations for running involved an unresponsive city government.


I can hear the sounds of gravel to this day hitting the water below my feet as my Dad held my hands after I managed to slip into the open storm sewer.

Dad went to city hall and asked for a grate on the sewer. (You might say my and my father's political careers started that day...in the gutter. That what I said when I announce for the U.S. Senate in 1981 at my then-in-laws' at 955 Lake Avenue David Adler mansion in Lake Forest.)

Dad didn't get what he requested.

So, when the post of president of the town council came up, he had a real reason for running.

Needless to say, storm sewers soon had grates.

First daughter Janet was born in 1944.

I remember the family joined the Miles River Yacht Club. We had a small outboard in what seemed to be a very big berth to someone about six. I remember the day we came to the yacht club and it had sunk.

More scary were the fireworks that blew onto our blanket when the wind blew in from the east during the 4th of July celebration.

Dad then bought a leaky, old fishing boat. We had seen the “African Queen.” The boat ran aground in Kent Narrows and the men got off to push it off the sandbar. I was put in charge of the pump at age ten, while my eight-year old sister Janet sat with me inside the small cabin.

The yacht club is where I got introduced to slot machines. They were nickel slots and I have to admit I did not understand the sign above them:


I knew there were no mines nearby.

My father and his assistant Jack Rue, who became a congressional assistant to either Rogers C.B. Morton or his successor, took off the boat's copper sheathing and spend hours putting wooden match sticks into the holes where the nails had been.

One day a snow goose showed up in the back room where the washing machine was kept. Dad had shot it. I remember Mother's pouring boiling water over to loosen the feathers, which she plucked. I don't think she was too happy about having that task.

Sometime in the late 1940's Dad bought a used offset press and started a printing business in the side room where we played. I guess he thought the family needed more money than Tri-State Packers paid him.

Dad was in the caravan of Eastern Shore public officials who were the first to drive across the new Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952.

That was the same year that second daughter Ellen entered the world. Jan and I were asked if we wanted a little brother or sister. My guess is that Mom asked the question after she was pregnant.

So much for the ferry rides across the Bay. They were a real treat to us kids.

That same year he 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'.)

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, county board member didn't follow suit until 1954.

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.)

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.

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.

(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.

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.

Soon he 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.

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

Dad was its 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.

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 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.

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 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 above 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.)

Owner Harry Snell, still a congenial fellow, was arrested for being a keeper of a gaming house. He said he didn't know what was going on upstairs.

Harry Snell was our Republican precinct committeeman.

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.

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 ran a leisurely campaign telling people who asked whether he would quit his job that he wouldn't, that the job only require part-time work, which was subsequently proven correct.

Mother and Dad campaign in the little towns on weekends, going into the little bars and introducing themselves.

He lost by about 300 vote, 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. I can't tell you how many people told me,

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

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

“I thought you were older,”

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

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.

Before we moved to Crystal Lake in 1958, the Government Improvement League of McHenry County had a newsletter. Dad belonged to the group and became responsible for publishing the newsletter. From 1963 to 1968 the publication became the Public Affairs Newsletter.

In 1969, Dad renamed the publication "The Star Reporter." It was a weekly newspaper.

Among other issues, he spoke out about the building of the new courthouse without a referendum. It was built with illegally accumulated surpluses.

That and other “rock turning over” stories must have irritated the Establishment as much and, perhaps more, than McHenry County Blog.

I remember McHenry County State's Attorney Bill Cowlin, who was first elected in 1968, interrupting a Fiance Committee meeting held in the county board room. He started berating me for an article my father had published saying it was inaccurate. I knew the article was accurate because I had written it. It was about a legal opinion that county treasurers could put up to the insured amount ($15,000 at the time) in savings and loans associations. Dad's headline was a bit off.

I told Cowlin that it wasn't the time or the place for such a discussion. He walked out in a huff.

In 1969, my father again took on District 155. My sister Ellen was bored in high school, so Dad asked fellow church member and Superintendent John Buckner if she could attend some classes at McHenry County College instead.

Buckner replied that would result in the school district losing State Aid to Education.

"John," my father replied. "It's $154 a year. I'll write you a check."

Buckner didn't accept the trade, but starting the year after my sister graduated from CLCHS, students were allowed to take MCC classes.

Ellen and Dad found a way around her boredom. She entered the Diversified Occupations program and spent every afternoon working on the Star Reporter. Typing, mainly. And, she got paid for it.

Prior to the 1972 elections, the United States Supreme Court ruled that legislative bodies like the McHenry County Board and city councils had to be apportioned on a one-man, one-vote basis.

The county board divided the county into three districts, Dad's consisting of Algonquin and Grafton Townships.

Dad didn't like the way the districts had been apportioned and challenged it acting as his owner lawyer in Federal Court.

Because the district lines Dad came up resulted in more closely matched populations and were at least as compact as the county's the judge told McHenry County State's Attorney to discuss a settlement with Dad.

State's Attorney Bill Cowlin did not do so before the next scheduled court date.

When both showed up before the judge, Dad told the judge that Cowlin hadn't gotten in touch with him.

The Federal judge then ordered him to do so before returning for the next hearing.

Dad didn't get exactly what he asked for, but the county board members came up with a much more acceptable map. Algonquin and Grafton Townships were put in District 1, one-third of the county's population.

Dad and his allies put together a slate, which they called “Responsible Republicans.” They made the ballot order so they could tell people to vote from “Bick to Burns.” (John Bick, an older conservative and 10-acre tree farmer from Barrington Hills; Brad Burns, my to-be brother-in-law, from Crystal Lake's Coventry.)

The regular Republicans won all eight seats up in 1972, but my father got more votes than any other county board member running in Districts Two and Three.

The next time Dad ran, he and his ally Lou Anne Majewski won. Lou Anne got more votes, helping validate my theory that women have an automatic advantage when they run for office.

I remember on serious disagreement we had. When an addition was being built on the new courthouse, he voted to let the Public Building Commission issue bonds without a referendum. I reminded him that he had campaigned against similar action when the new courthouse had been constructed.

When Vernon Kays retired from being County Clerk, Dad ran for the office against Vernon's Chief Deputy Rosemary Azzaro. Rosemary won, even winning at least one Crystal Lake Coventry precinct in which she knocked on doors. Dad didn't do any door-to-door campaigning.

Two years later he was back on the county board.

In the 1980's, the county board was bold enough to announce potential sites for ten or so county airports. What a way to engender opposition.

Tom Smrt, the owner of Fox Valley Systems in Cary took offense. He raised English Shires sought of Marengo on Route 20 next to the Tollway. He created the McHenry County Chronicle, which was mailed to at least all who voted Republican regularly. Every month. Smrt's attacks on the county board led to Dad's allies winning all four seats that were up that year.

In the fall of 1987, his wife Eleanor was killed in a truck-car accident at Route 14 and Dean Street Road. It took over ten years after that for a traffic signal to be installed.

Dad and Mom had been scheduled to go up to Mayo the next April. Dad didn't go.

The night the summer drought was broken by a severe thunderstorm Dad had a county board meeting. On Country Club Road almost to Crystal Springs Road, he ran into a tree branch. He hit his chest on the steering wheel. That might not have been so bad, but when he plowed into the big tree branch there was a young man trying to move it from the highway. Dad's bumper crushed the Good Samaritan's leg between his bumper and that of the young man.

About a year later he developed cancer where his chest was bruised.

It would have been caught early had Dad kept the appointment at Mayo, but, after Mother's death he skipped it.

He ended up being treated at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He and I lived with my sister Jan in a zip code in search of a town between Annapolis and Washington.

In December, Dr. Stevens would not release him when he had to leave in order to get back to McHenry County to vote for Ann Hughes for county board chairman.

He signed himself out.

You see the photo of my wheeling him in for the crucial vote. Somehow he managed to retain his position as vice chairman, even though a deal had been cut to elect another man.

After Dad died in the summer of 1989, I executed his estate.

To do that I had to get his birth certificate.

To my surprise, I found that his middle name of “LeRoy” read “Leroy” on the birth certificate. Apparently he decided to capitalize the “R” at some point in his life. So, I'm not really a “junior” because my birth certificate reads “LeRoy.” I guess being a regular “Leroy” wasn't fancy enough for him.