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vii • Foreword Taylor Pensoneau Alan Dixon had a remarkable political career. During a more than four-decade span in elective office that saw him rise from local police magistrate to inclusion in his Democratic Party’s leadership in the U.S. Senate, Dixon exemplified the best in American public life. His fellow Illinoisans and eventually people across the country were better for it. If some didn’t know this, it was because Dixon eschewed the role of a show horse, sticking instead to the pursuit of excellence in government without the fanfare showered on some of his political contemporaries. I did not meet Alan Dixon until 1965, but it seemed like I knew him long before then. His name was a household word in Belleville, the quintessential city in southwestern Illinois where, as did Dixon, I grew up. I still recall as a kid hearing people routinely predicting that attorney Alan John Dixon, only thirteen years older than I, was going places. He was going to be somebody. My grandmother Olga Pensoneau, who knew about such things, said anybody who could get elected police magistrate at the age of twenty-one was destined for political stardom. And my uncle Horace “Bud” Pensoneau, another Democratic loyalist, boasted to me that his role as a doorkeeper for the Illinois General Assembly gave him an enviable opportunity to talk to Dixon anytime he so desired. I was impressed. Years later, Dixon’s law office in Belleville was located in a building that previously housed the Toggery, a men’s clothing store that Les Pensoneau, my father, operated. While a cub reporter at the Belleville News-Democrat when still a student at Belleville Township High School, also Dixon’s high school, I heard old hands in the newsroom mention something about him virtually every day. viii | Foreword Not many years later, then state senator Dixon was one of the very few public figures on the East Side—the less-than-flattering name Missourians gave Saint Clair and Madison Counties—that my fellow reporters and editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch held in high esteem. Finally, after learning the Post-Dispatch was moving me to Springfield late in 1965 to man a bureau in the statehouse pressroom as the Illinois political correspondent, I was advised in a fatherly manner by Benjamin O. Cooper, a onetime Illinois state auditor of public accounts from East Saint Louis, that real insight into the Prairie State’s political realities would be gained by especially getting to know two leading downstaters in the capitol. He had in mind Paul Powell and Dixon. An interesting suggestion, although the two hardly were peas in the same pod. Powell, the legendary political fox from Vienna, Illinois, at the time was entering the waning years of his long career as an Illinois house leader and then secretary of state. His tolerance for reporters by then was stretched thin amid persistent inquiries into the unethical transgressions accompanying some aspects of his fabled talent for deal-making, past and present. But Dixon never had any part of that kind of stuff. Alan became the youngest member of the General Assembly when at the age of twenty-three, he first was elected to the house in 1950. During the next two decades, he achieved prominence as an astute member of the lower chamber and then as part of the Democratic leadership in the Illinois senate. Besides climbing the legislative ladder in an aboveboard manner, he was not hesitant to combat the finagling of those corrupting the public arena for personal gain. In his early years in the house, he was part of a small band of legislative Young Turks who earned the ire of some older colleagues using their positions to profit through the underbelly of Illinois politics. There also were times when the Turks acted counter to policies of their own Democratic establishment. What I discovered in finally meeting Dixon was a keen source of factual information on legislative issues big and small, a person always intent on setting the record straight on governance matters affecting the lives of every Illinoisan. By the time I got to know him, he’d been on the state governmental scene for fifteen years. He knew the ins and outs, the nuances coloring developments. He may not have been among those covertly tipping reporters to certain stories, but he endeavored unhesitatingly to clarify the big-picture topics in an effort to ensure accurate legislative coverage. [18.216.94.152...

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