Before the era of Bobette Keasler, Kane County’s 41 elected board members didn’t have an office and often found themselves discussing business in the courthouse hallways.
Nonetheless, the 1967 decision to actually set aside two small offices for the board, buy some office furniture and hire a secretary was much criticized.
Keasler was that secretary. Since then, however, no one has found much reason to criticize her for anything. Indeed, she’s been the glue that has tended to hold everything together.
A Chicago native who moved to Aurora at age 5, Keasler has served as executive secretary to County Board chairmen for 26 years.
Keasler never intended a career in government. “I got a call from an Aurora insurance executive,” she recalled the other day. “He had me come down for an interview. Then I found out he was the Kane County Board chairman at the time, and he was setting up the office of executive secretary.”.
Keasler, 56, retired on March 12 from her government post, although not from the working world, which comes as no surprise to the people who know her.
She has accepted a new position at Riverwoods Christian Center in unincorporated St. Charles Township, where she will work as executive secretary to the executive director.
“I told her I would be mad as heck if she’d gone anywhere else, but you couldn’t fault that move,” said Warren Kammerer, the current Kane County Board chairman.
One of the things he will miss is Keasler’s vast storehouse of knowledge. She was a self-contained information warehouse, and during her long tenure in the job, she basically created the board chairman’s archives.
In 26 years, she served six chairmen, including Kammerer, and worked with more than 124 board members, three coroners and four county clerks, among others.
“She was a great benefit because of the knowledge of past operations and the history that she brought to the office,” Kammerer said.
“I don’t know of a public employee who was more sincere, devoted and pleasant in their duties as she was,” said attorney Richard Cooper, one of the few Democrats on the board while it was chaired by Robert Stumm, the county chairman who hired Keasler. “Sometimes I had pretty dim views of the leadership of the board.”
But not in Keasler’s case.
When the Caterpillar Tractor Co. opened an office in Aurora, Keasler was the first person hired, she said. She was secretary of the personnel office and worked above the Fox Valley Snack Shop on the river.
The county job came next. And together, Keasler and the county grew, or shrank in the board’s case, which went from 41 members in 1967 to 26 in 1971.
“We had 41 people on the board, and they were from rural Kane County, and many were farmers,” Stumm, now retired in Florida, recalled. “I told Bobette that I wasn’t going to stay too long because I thought politicians should stay only as long as they could do something.”
Keasler recalls those early days as being the challenge she had hoped for, and some of the tests were entirely unexpected.
“One day, Justice John Chivari came rushing into our office with his black robe on, asking for a large book, any book,” she recalled. “We finally grabbed a dictionary, as I recall, and he went flying out into the board room. As we watched, he approached a table with a young couple on the other side and proceeded to officiate at a marriage ceremony.”
Her biggest accomplishment? “I guess it would be winning the confidence of the 41 board members that I had been a stranger to when I got hired. They weren’t 100 percent in favor of a full-time employee. Most of them were very wary of what exactly I was supposed to do besides take minutes of meetings. They would gather around the railing outside the office, and I’d have to go out and encourage them to come in and get their mail, use their phone and make use of their new office.”Tribune photo by James Mayo
