Governor Sam

For 7 1/2 years as Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, Samuel Harvey Shapiro was the man who came in the back door to see Governor Otto Kerner. So self-effacing was Shapiro that most voters knew him merely as a loyal Democratic minion from Kankakee--if they knew him at all. Last week the stocky, homely "Mr. Sam," 61, was sworn in as Governor of Illinois.

He automatically succeeded Kerner, who took a federal judgeship. In February, Chicago's Mayor Dick Daley, the state's chief Democratic potentate, picked Shapiro to run this fall in Kerner's place, and it seemed to many that the party was abandoning any real hope of keeping the governorship. But Shapiro seems determined to try. Although his inaugural was as modest as the man, Shapiro's first week in office reflected a quiet but forceful style developed during a 35-year political career. He drew up an emergency program for tornado relief, stopped all construction of state buildings to fight an estimated $170,500,000 revenue shortage, helped launch a campaign to fight crime, poverty and urban blight, and fashioned such cordial ties with the state senate that its Republican majority leader praised Shapiro's "practical, realistic way of handling things."

Practicality comes easily to the son of an immigrant Estonian cobbler. As a child, Shapiro handled so many shoes for the Catholic fathers of St. Viator College that when the Jewish lad went there himself, he knew the faculty members not only by name but by feet. After getting a law degree from the University of Illinois in 1929, he set up practice in Kankakee, joined the Young Democrats, met Kerner, and won election in 1936 as Kankakee state's attorney despite the area's Republican preponderance. He convicted the state public-welfare director for neglect of duty after a typhoid epidemic killed more than 50 inmates at a state mental hos pital. Shapiro has been an impassioned crusader for mental health ever since. After antisubmarine duty as a naval officer in World War II, he served seven terms in the legislature before being picked to run with Kerner in 1960.

Shapiro's probable foe this fall is Cook County Board President, Richard Ogilvie, a Republican who outpolls Daley in his own domain. But Shapiro ran the state at least 50 days a year during Kerner's term, handling mine cave-ins and prison riots; when Kerner was off heading the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Shapiro was acting Governor for 101 days. He got Chicago through the trauma following Dr. Martin Luther King's death, and has already traveled up and down the state. "I'm gonna campaign," Shapiro said, "because I'm gonna win." And nowadays he uses the front door.

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