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114 12. Speaker Madigan It is fair to say that Mike and I had differences in style and different views of government. We started 1983 by making history. Democrats regained control of the Illinois House because of the remap, and they installed Michael Madigan of Chicago as Speaker of the House for the first time. He would be the Speaker for most of the next three decades. Meanwhile, Democrats kept control of the Senate, and this year there were no shenanigans as I easily won my third term as Senate president. I became the first Democrat ever elected Senate president for three consecutive terms.1 Amazingly enough, with Madigan and me, it was also the first time that the presiding officers of the Illinois House and the Illinois Senate were both from Cook County.2 People probably remember Madigan as following George Ryan as Speaker. Ryan served only one term while the Republicans controlled the House, starting in January 1981, but he had to resign from the House after winning election as lieutenant governor in November 1982 and getting sworn in on January 10, 1983. George would spend the next twenty years in statewide office: eight as lieutenant governor, eight as secretary of state, and four as governor. But for two days at the end of the Eighty-Second General Assembly before the new representatives and senators were sworn in, the House needed a different Speaker, and the House Republicans chose Representative Art Telcser, a Chicago Republican and close pal of Ryan’s. When the new Democratic majority was sworn in on January 12, 1983, they chose Madigan as Speaker for the first time. House Democrats had not been in strong hands under Bill Redmond’s leadership, and they knew it. So the switch was a good move for them. Madigan and I had entered the legislature the same year, 1971, when he was twenty-nine years old and I was thirty-four. He was from the Thirteenth Ward on the South Side, and I was from the Thirty-Seventh speaker madigan 115 Ward on Chicago’s West Side. We had been in the legislature together for twelve years when he became the Speaker. I have heard some people suggest that Madigan and I didn’t get along or that we didn’t like each other. Those people don’t know what they are talking about. No question about it, Mike and I were, and are, friends. We didn’t socialize together much, because Mike was pretty well convinced that it was in his best interest to have dinner virtually every night with his leadership team and maybe one or two others. But I didn’t think that was necessary anyway. You could always find him in one of the better restaurants in Springfield with six or eight people—the same people from the House and once in a while with a visiting firefighter from Chicago or a visiting constituent. We had a lot of access to each other. Over the years, I could pick up the phone and talk to his secretary and say, “I have to see him; I have to talk to him,” and virtually always there was an immediate favorable response. I’m happy to say that the same was true on the other end. He would call my secretary, Betty Shipley, or one of the other close members of my staff, and say he wanted to talk to me. It was part of a good working relationship. If something got away from us—if there was a mini-revolt among our members, or if some piece of legislation happened to slip out of the Senate or out of the House and it was later thought not to be in the best interests of Chicago or of the Democratic Party—I could count on him to slow it down or kill it in the House. He could count on my same effort in my chamber. I would stop or postpone or shelve whatever the issue was whenever Mike and I reached an agreement. We probably agreed on most of the substantive issues, as well as on some that were special to both of us. For instance, he and I put in the requirement that private schools be included in the state’s capital program for schools. When Governor Thompson promoted a big capital program for higher education, Mike and I both insisted that private colleges and universities be included. Also, Mike and I did our best...

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