The People's Choice

"When I first ran for mayor," said Paul Egan of Aurora. Ill. last week, "everybody thought I was a joke. They tried to prove I'm crazy. Once they got working on my wife and they almost had her persuaded to commit me to an institution." Opening the desk drawer in his office in the ramshackle city hall 35 miles west of Chicago, hen-shaped Mayor Egan spat into it, slammed it shut. At 58, blue-eyed, poly-chinned Paul Egan is no joke. The magazine Chicago called him "the worst mayor in the world"--but the electorate of industrial Aurora (pop. 57,000) does not seem to agree.

A onetime newspaper advertising salesman who bills himself as an Independent, Egan began his remarkable career in public service in 1953, when he quit taking unemployment compensation ($27.50 a week) and ran for mayor ($8,000 a year), beat his opponent by 3,000 votes. His big troubles started after he fired his police chief. The chief won reinstatement in court, later resigned. After that, with his four-man city council battling him all the way. Egan fired the new chief six times, was rebuffed by the courts all the way ("I fire him," Egan moaned helplessly, "but he keeps right on working"). The chief put up a notice in headquarters reading: "The police are no longer expected to take abuse and insults from Mayor Egan."

Traits & Ratters. Egan had other troubles. Once he paid a $50 fine and spent a night in jail for speeding, another time was fined $10 for disturbing the peace after he tried to remove a toy car from a repair shop (he said that it belonged to his son). In a fight with an Aurora justice of the peace. Egan got punched in the nose, lost his glasses, took after his opponent with a pair of scissors. He won such a reputation for his colorful use of abusive and obscene language that the city's Ministerial Association declared "a moral emergency."

But the mayor was untouched; there were great evil forces at work in the world, and Paul Egan stood ready to analyze them with frequent, mysterious monologues. Sample: "Lenin was a noble man, like Gandhi. It was that sonofabitch Trotsky that messed things up. And that obscenity Stalin. I wonder where he came from. I'll tell you. I think J. P. Morgan put him in. The two big things that cause world tension are religion and the National Association of Manufacturers. I went down to the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach and I saw gutters made out of marble. I said, we got starving kids in this country and here they got marble gutters. Both the U.S. and Russia are run by a bunch of crooks, traits and ratters--I mean rats and traitors."

Egan also poured out his feelings to world figures, dashed off messages to General Douglas MacArthur ("For many years I have thought you were a phony, but I beg your pardon now"), Russia's First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan ("I believe the bells of the world should be tolled for the death of free speech in the U.S."), proposed to his city council that he and his wife be sent to Russia, where he and Nikita Khrushchev could thresh things out. The council declined.

Sugar & Arrows. By that time, some Aurorans were voicing a lusty opinion of Egan's stewardship. They stuffed sugar into the gas tank of his auto, burned him in effigy, shot flaming arrows into his six-room house. The arrows, some said, came from Indians. "Many people are mad at the mayor," explained one man. "I do not see why the Indians should be excluded."

Despite this show of disapproval, Egan somehow managed to look good to a lot of his constituents. His antics brought Aurora plenty of publicity, and after each squabble, he tried to make it seem that Paul Egan, the man of the people, was defending the city against entrenched interests. When the city council refused to pay for spraying the area against mosquitoes and flies, the Mayor guaranteed the payment out of his own pocket, sprayed the city, later collected $7,000 in contributions from the townspeople.

Last week, after a roaring re-election campaign, Paul Egan clomped to victory with a 4,000-vote margin -- 1,000 votes better than his plurality in 1953. Crowed Egan as he spat triumphantly into his desk: "It all proves one goddamned thing. You can't fool the people. The world is watching a new concept of government, where the people make themselves heard above the horse manure of the vested interests. The world will be hearing from Aurora in the next four years, you can bet your tail on that."

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