By KATHLEEN BEST

Mr. Nice Guy goes to Washington

Gene Callahan, former aide to Paul Simon and Alan Dixon, now makes pitches for Major League Baseball. And with his off-the-rack wardrobe and homespun values, he is one of a kind in Gucci Gulch

It's 8 a.m. and Gene Callahan has already finished a radio interview and sits working the phone at his office desk. Four Rolodexes filled with thumb-stained cards compete for space with a ball bucket, a stack of newspapers and a legal pad filled with notes.

Scouting reports come in from Capitol Hill, where members of Congress angry over the canceled season are pushing legislation to strip Major League Baseball of its anti-trust exemption. Callahan fields the calls, then makes new ones of his own.

This is the biggest test yet for the lobbyist for the big leagues. And while he won't win outright, his work will force Congress, like the Cubs, to wait until next year.

"I think frankly when you look at Major League Baseball

'When you look at Major League Baseball today. Gene Callahan is worth more to the owners than any single player,' Alan Dixon says

today, Gene Callahan is worth more to the owners than any single player," says his one-time boss, former U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon of Illinois. "Everything to do with anything that is baseball in our nation's capital, he does. And he's priceless."

But what Callahan does, he does his way.

In a city where lobbyists' row is called Gucci Gulch, where diners sup on someone else's tab, where spin is more important than truth and where family values are just another campaign slogan, this son of a hog farmer from Milford, 111., still shows up for work by 6 a.m., wears clothes you could find at Kmart, answers every call the day it comes in and thinks anyone who would lie to him would also cheat and steal.

He is, in short, part of a dying breed. "He's totally unique, one of a kind. They broke the mold after Callahan came along," says U.S. Rep. Richard Durbin, a Democrat of Springield. "He has no pretense, is not caught up with titles or the power of office. He comes from a simple background, a farm family that had tremendous influence on his life and his values."

Those values, say friends, are anchored by four fundamentals: He believes in family, personal loyalty, the Democratic Party and baseball.

Baseball came first.

"My mother was a very religious person and she asked me when I was in grade school if I prayed, and prayed every night," says Callahan. "I said yes.

"Then she said, 'What do you pray for?'

"That the Cards win the pennant,' I told her.

'"Is that all?' she asked.

"I said, 'Yeah.'

"She said, 'Well, that's OK. But do you think you could pray for your family, too?'

"I said, 'Yeah.'"

Sports of every sort were Callahan's passion growing up on the family farm 96 miles south of Chicago and five miles from the Indiana line.

He started out playing alone. The family's nearest neighbor was 2.5 miles away and there were only two kids in his entire grade school for all of second grade. When his father bought a new farm, young Gene moved to Milford to attend high school, where 28 students made up his graduating class.

"All I cared about was sports — girls were a distant second," Callahan recalls.

Girls eventually caught up — he married Antoinette L. Hammond 37 years ago and they have two daughters and a son of their own. But he never lost his love of the games.

"He would stand and watch two kids shoot marbles," says Dixon, who hired Callahan to work for him when Dixon was state treasurer and later made Callahan his top aide when Dixon moved on to become Illinois secretary of state and then a U.S. senator. "When we were in Washington, he would always drag me off to watch some Class D ball game. He'd go see high school basketball, even grade school basketball."

But Callahan was learning more than just box scores down on the farm. His father, Joe Callahan, was a voracious newspaper reader, a Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat and a rising star in hog and agriculture associations. He believed in hard work and opportunity for all, Gene says. It almost cost Joe his political career.

November 1994 / Illinois Issues / 17

Gene Callahan, a former political aide, is now the lobbyist for Major League Baseball in Washington, D.C.

After the family moved to Milford in the 1940s, Joe Callahan opened his farm for hunting to anyone who would ask. Among those who did was a black family from the Chicago area. A local resident took offense and mounted a campaign to oust Joe as the local Democratic precinct committeeman. His slogan, Gene recalls, was "Joe Callahan is a nigger lover."

Joe Callahan was away on hog business as the election approached. "My brother called dad and told him to get home or he'd get beat," Gene says. "Dad said he couldn't leave, so my brother put on a herculean effort for him and he won — by three votes.

"My dad would not tolerate discrimination of any kind — color or creed," Callahan says.

In 1948, Joe Callahan was the only committeeman in Iroquois County to support a young Jewish politician named Samuel Shapiro in Shapiro's first bid for the state legislature. Shapiro won that race by 900 votes and went on to become governor, where he hired Gene Callahan to be his assistant press secretary.

"I always thought that was partly a thank you to dad," Gene says.

Joe Callahan's high standards — and Gene's hay fever — conspired to move him off the farm and into college, where he says he was a reluctant student. He attended class at Illinois College in Jacksonville through the week and worked on a nearby hog farm to make money on weekends. He also threw himself into sports reporting, following a career path he had decided on as an eighth grader in Milford. By his junior year, he was the sports editor for the college paper, was stringing for the Jacksonville city paper and putting on a 15-minute radio program every Sunday.

After a two-year stint in Germany for the Army, Callahan returned to central Illinois and asked the Illinois State Register to make him a sports reporter. They had no openings, but offered him a slot on the cop beat. "It was the only job I ever had that I didn't like," Callahan says. But it allowed him to quickly separate the good guys from the bad guys in Springfield and gave him a close-up view of the use of political influence — lessons he hasn't forgotten.

He moved full-time into political reporting in 1961 with a twice-a-week column on politics and the legislature. Eventually, it grew to five days a week and lasted five years.

Political reporting was different then. Callahan says there was more camaraderie among reporters — and between reporters and the pols they covered. "When I covered politics, I used to drink with legislators a lot," Callahan says. He would rove the city's bars on Monday night, the day the legislators returned to town. "I'd never get quotes in a bar, but I got great tips," he says.

One of those tips nearly cost his wife a job. Callahan was investigating reports that the mental health department had spent thousands of dollars putting up new photographs of Gov. William Stratton in institutions all over the state. When he asked for an interview with the mental health director, Calla-

18 / November 1994 / Illinois Issues

han says, the director had a question of his own. "He said, 'Is your wife unhappy working here?' And then he asked me several questions about Ann," Callahan says.

The tactic flopped. "We roasted him pretty good," Callahan says. But it underscored a lesson he already had learned on the cop beat: be prepared.

"My wife has every check we have ever written," Callahan says. They began preserving checks as proof that Callahan wasn't on the take as a cop reporter chronicling the mob — and kept collecting when he moved from reporting into politics. "If you are a public servant, the public has the right to know every penny you make and where it comes from," Callahan says. "I have always disclosed everything."

Callahan's reputation for honesty drew a job offer from the administration when scandal broke out in the state's meat inspection system and the governor's office needed someone to clean it up. "I wish I could tell you there was some Utopian reason for taking the job, but it was money," Callahan says. He was making $165 a week at the Register and had three children at home. The governor's office offered $15, 000 and Callahan left reporting behind.

But he didn't leave the values he had learned. "I remember everyone who has ever lied to me and never returned my phone calls," Callahan says.

Including Ralph Nader.

Nader's Raiders had blown the whistle on the Illinois meat scandal in 1967. Callahan worked for weeks to clean up the mess and, when he was done, invited Nader back to Illinois to take a look. But his calls were never returned. Years later, when Nader asked for a meeting with Sen. Dixon, he didn't get one. Aides were instructed to remind the activist that the man who controlled the senator's schedule then was the same man Nader had failed to call in 1967.

Steve Rabinowitz, a former Dixon aide who worked with Callahan, says he was unique on Capitol Hill. "The concept of returning everybody's phone calls is on its face totally reasonable," Rabinowitz says. "It's just that nobody does. Except Gene."

Working with Paul Simon, who shared the same reputation for being squeaky clean, was a natural fit for Callahan, and he became Simon's chief of staff in 1969 when he was lieutenant governor. Simon's loss to Dan Walker in the 1972 Democratic gubernatorial primary was one of the darkest days of Callahan's life, in part because he blamed himself for not urging Simon to hit back harder and sooner at Walker's charges. "I'm not proud of my effort in the '72 race," he says. "It made me more outspoken, if anything else."

He vowed to leave politics and took a job with City Water, Light and Power in Springfield. But nine months later, the phone rang. It was Simon, who would remain a lifelong friend, pushing him to get back in the game. "He urged me to talk to Alan Dixon. He said he thought Alan and I would be a good team. We both believed that when you work, you work, and when you play, you play."

Dixon warned Callahan that he wasn't as liberal as Callahan's two Democratic heroes: Simon and Abner Mikva, now the counsel to President Bill Clinton. "But he was right on the three issues most important to me: ethics, the right to know and civil rights," Callahan says. "Dixon never wavered on those."

And Callahan never wavered in his loyalty to his new boss. As assistant secretary of state under Dixon, he played the role of enforcer. "Some secretaries of state may deny this," Dixon says. "But you spend all your time in that job putting out fires.

Working with Paul Simon, who shared a reputation for being squeaky clean, was a natural fit for Callahan, and he became Simon's chief of staff in 1969

You've got thousands of employees, and, even now, the office is sufficiently patronage-oriented that you always have some political types who tend toward mischief. Callahan was great at keeping things straight. He would call in a [Democratic] county chairman who was sleeping on the job and tell him you're out if you don't stop."

Mike Lawrence, press secretary for Republican Jim Edgar as both governor and secretary of state, says Callahan was a natural. "Gene himself is honest," Lawrence says. "And he recognizes that the failure to do something about wrongdoing will hurt the office-holder. He has a commitment to doing everything possible to help his boss."

That included moving to Washington when Dixon was elected to the Senate — a move he hated for the first two years, but one he eventually came to enjoy.

"There are all sorts of different models for administrative assistants," says Bill Mattea, who worked in the Senate offices of Adlai Stevenson, Dixon and now Carol Moseley-Braun. "Gene was very oriented toward the political end of it and toward the state. He was very good at it."

To keep in touch with events back home, Callahan had a friend in Chicago pick up the papers each morning at 5 and call him to read stories that might be of interest. By 7: 30 a.m., Callahan would have read the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Washington Times and — when it arrived — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"Gene also had a habit," says Durbin, "of sleeping at night with WBBM radio on. He and Ann — God bless her — would wake up enough to hear the top of the hour news and if a story hit. Gene was out of bed like a bullet. You always wondered how Alan Dixon was the first to respond when something happened in Illinois? It was because of Callahan.

"I think he was one of the most effective [administrative assistants] on the Hill," Durbin says. "There were people better skilled at dealing with issues. But when it came to assembling an effective team of people who worked hard and were totally dedicated to Dixon, no one could match Callahan. He

November 1994 / Illinois Issues / 19