A VIEW FROM METRO EAST
Almost eight years later, I still have no idea whether the often-outrageous mayor of East St. Louis was serious or just being, well, outrageous. But I am sure of one thing: I miss the most audacious newsmaker I've ever known. Carl personified the term "good copy."
This would be only history except that Officer, now 46 and possibly reconstructed, announced he's running for mayor again this spring despite an earlier vow to the contrary. Reporters rejoiced.
He was a freshman mayor when I met him in 1979, an extraordinarily handsome, intelligent, suave and glib character who enforced a commanding presence with five police bodyguards playing Secret Service to his President.
I rode with him to a speech one of those early days, making up time down a busy street with siren screaming and red light flashing. Despite such silliness, some observers honestly thought we might be witnessing the emergence of Illinois' first black governor — or more.
The son of a prosperous mortician, Carl was a top aide to Secretary of State Alan J. Dixon when townspeople tried to draft the father to run for mayor. Dad deferred to Carl, who surprised some by agreeing. Dixon's
| Carl Officer apparently wants to prove that the politically dead don't have to stay buried. Reporters are rejoicing. |
star was rising — he would go to the U.S. Senate the next year — and poor East St. Louis was a violent, squalid mess propped up largely by federal dollars.
Carl, nicknamed "Smooth," glided into office but found his administration crippled by the election of President Ronald Reagan, who tightened the valve on Washington's spigot.
Thus began an era of treading water for a city whose services and public works would languish at dangerous levels until the legislature authorized riverboat gambling.
Carl turned strange. He was criticized for conspicuously wearing a pistol — he said his role as police commissioner gave him the right, and his obligation to lay off hundreds of surplus city employees gave him the need. One night in Peoria, police were called to a bar to investigate a guy toting an Uzi submachine gun. It turned out to be one of Carl's bodyguards.
Stopped once for doing 105 miles an hour down an interstate highway in a Jaguar owned by a convicted drug dealer, Carl complained that the cop got it wrong. The mayor said he was really going 140. He defended slow police response to a fatal attack by saying the thugs responsible "should have beat his ass a couple more hours." He later apologized, explaining he mistakenly assumed the victim was a gang member.
Carl was jailed once for an hour by a judge who ruled him in contempt for missing a hearing in a lawsuit. He soon came up with "a letter from jail" in the mold of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and compared their plights. Trouble is, I learned, he had neither pen nor paper in the cell.
I remember when he got uninvited to a government conference in Africa after publicly wisecracking about taking a supply of his own blood in case of emergency, so he wouldn't be transfused with any "monkey blood."
My personal favorite was the time he called a press conference to announce that the National Guard was planning to take over East St. Louis by force on orders of Gov. James R. Thompson. Exasperated newspeople never got any fuller explanation of that.
Even without trying, Carl was sometimes at the center of bizarre news. In 1987, Township Supervisor Clyde Jordan challenged the mayor in the Democratic primary, lost, then got a judge to nullify the election. Jordan died, leaving the judge to insist on a runoff between a dead man and an undertaker. (Appellate judges eventually ruled the original results valid after all.)
Partly to blunt Carl's mayoral powers, East St. Louis residents finally approved a city manager form of government, effective in 1991. The same year, Carl lost to Gordon Bush, a retired soldier and civic leader.
In encounters since, Carl always told me he was spending his private life "loving the living and burying the dead."
Now he apparently wants to prove that a politically dead mayor doesn't have to stay buried. ž
Patrick. E. Gauen covers Illinois politics for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Illinois Issues January 1999 / 37