Before reading this, cut yourself a wedge of apple pie. Be sure it's homemade. While you're at it, add a scoop of ice cream, pour a glass of cold milk and snap a disk of the Star Spangled Banner into your CD player.

We're talking Ron Stephens here, the Metro East lawmaker who gushes Fourth of July patriotism 366 days a leap year. He's apt to greet you with the enthusiastic assessment: "It's a great day to be an American!" It's a pretty darned good day to be a Republican in the legislature, too. That's especially true for Stephens, who is the Metro East area's only one. There is state Sen. Frank Watson, who lives in Greenville out in Bond County and whose 55th District spills into the fringes of Madison and St. Clair counties. But Stephens is the lone Republican from these two metropolitan counties of a quarter million people each.

He's the one Democrats believe they must visit for a blessing on their projects in the state's second most populous region. "You have to go to him," explains Rep. Tom Holbrook, a Belleville Democrat recently interested in a referendum for a drainage district in the flood-prone American Bottoms.

Stephens is the personification of the House's 1994 majority flip-flop. Overnight, he went from being the only weed in a bed of flowers to the only flower in a bed of weeds. "I labored in the fields of the minority for a long time. I'd never been exposed to anything else, so it didn't matter to me," Stephens recalls.

The difference now? "I could have a great idea in 1993 that would have a tough time just getting considered," he explains. "I could have an average idea in 1995 that saw headlines." That amounts to a pretty good definition of raw power. Stephens admits it may be just as well that so much power did not come to him a few years sooner, when he was a little fuller of himself.

Stephens, a pharmacist then living in Caseyville, was first elected to the House in 1984 and built a reputation as self-righteous and intractable — a conservative with a chip on his right shoulder. He also was, and remains, one of the corniest people you will encounter, bubbling with the greatness of America and its government. The sentiment is genuine, by the way, and was fully earned one day in 1970 when Sgt. Stephens suffered machine-gunning by an enemy solider in Vietnam. He recovered from his wounds a long time ago. Some say he more recently recovered from his rigid attitude, too.

There has been talk of a "kinder, gentler" Ron Stephens. Told this, the 48-year-old lawmaker springs to the defense of his record: "I don't know that anybody would call me kinder and gentler," he bristles, chuckling. But Stephens really does see himself as a changed man, humbled by a loss at the polls in 1990 that he regards as "the best thing that ever happened to me."

"I deserved that defeat, I really mean it," he says, suggesting it was karma for his only "negative campaign." One ad indirectly blamed opponent Jay Hoffman, then a probation official, for a fatal crash caused by a driver on probation. After a stint as director of Gov. Jim Edgar's Emergency Management Agency, Stephens won election in 1992 in a 110 th House District redrawn by his party.

Stephens says he listens more to other viewpoints now, something he regards as critical when you bear the responsibilities of the majority party. "We've got to be careful what we think; tomorrow it might be law," he explains. Still, Stephens is a little frustrated to see so many of his region's Democrats bring their ideas to his door. He's pleased at the deference but disappointed they aren't seeking other ways to assert themselves, as he says he did in his minority days.

Rep. Holbrook says Stephens is receptive to hearing out the Democrats. "But make no mistake," Holbrook says, "the Republicans play with a fervor I've never seen in my political life." He adds, "Anytime you're in a Democratic region of the state like ours, and the Republicans are in control, your area suffers in getting a return on its tax dollars." Stephens says Metro East is his home, and he would not punish it despite its political disposition. If you're looking through Boy Scout Ron Stephens' red-white-and-blue colored glasses, it isn't a great day to punish the Democrats. It's a great day to try to convert them. *

Patrick E. Gauen covers Illinois politics for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Illinois Issues March 1996 * 41