The first question for Dan Walker was, Why did he move to San Diego?
“This is psychological, and I’m not a psychologist,” he said in an interview, “but it’s hard to walk around in Illinois. I do have a huge family here, but after I got out of prison, I would look in people’s eyes and wonder, `What does that person think of me?’ And I didn’t want that.”
His face is strange, like that of a chipmunk attached to a long pole. People notice him in a crowd. That’s one reason the former Illinois governor, now 71, decided to move back to his hometown of San Diego after serving 18 months in prison for financial crimes committed after he left office.
“Or maybe it’s just shame,” he said, “and the urge to say: `Come on. Go someplace else. Start anew.’ “
Walker was back in Chicago, in a plush conference room lent by a friend, helping to promote a new biography, written by two reporters he’d known in his Springfield days. He looked frail and worn, but he locked eyes with his interviewer and said, sure, he was willing to talk.
That led to the second question: How did he get into such a mess?
“Things got out of hand, no doubt about it,” Walker said. “I’d never really had a lot of fun in my life. I’d worked hard. I was ambitious. I had a big family, seven kids. My wife did a wonderful job raising them, but she wasn’t social. We never went out much.”
While he was governor, he had several affairs. Then, after he was defeated for re-election in 1976 after one term, came the deluge.
In quick order, Walker divorced his wife, Roberta, and married Oak Brook businesswoman Roberta Nelson. They plunged into a roller-coaster whirl in the social circles of Oak Brook and beyond. “Roberta liked to party,” Walker said. “She taught me to party. I liked it, and got caught up in it.”
She helped him overcome his shyness, his awkwardness.
“I’ve never been gregarious. Never good at cocktail parties. Never good at small talk,” Walker said. “Oh, in politics, I can work a room, keep an eye out for important people, say hello to everybody, push a message. I’m not as good as Hubert Humphrey was, but I can do it. But social gatherings were another matter. Put me in a party, and I’m no good at it.”
Nor was he much of a hand at business. He started a statewide law firm, with seven offices, which failed to attract many clients. He opened a hunting and fishing club that later folded. He did better venturing into the quick-oil-change business. But not well enough.
What sank him, he said, were the yachts.
In 1983, Walker was stricken with severe chest pains. The alarm turned out to be severe heartburn, not a heart attack, but Walker, made aware of his mortality, decided to fulfill a dream. While he was in the intensive-care ward of Highland Park Hospital, he persuaded a nurse to break the rules and bring him a telephone. He called a yacht broker.
“I want to buy a boat,” he said. He wound up paying $350,000 for a 48-foot craft with a glass-mirrored bedroom.
A year later he traded up for the Governor’s Lady, priced at $850,000, a 78-foot cruiser with three staterooms, a 1,500-mile range and a monthly budget of $30,000 for operations, a crew of three and debt service. Much of that, Walker hoped, could come from charter groups, which did provide $125,000 a year, but never enough to cover the gigantic expenses, plus repair bills of more than $150,000 a year.
Living the good life
There were social trips to Florida and overseas. For Walker, there were linen suits, Gucci jackets, polo matches, parties and balls. “I grew up poor, learned the social graces at the Naval Academy, but I never felt accepted by the glamorous side of society,” Walker said. “I enjoyed seeing my picture, with my beautiful wife, being published on the society pages.”
Once, they flew to England for a party at the country manor of Princess Diana’s parents and a reception at Buckingham Palace. That trip, and much else about the Walkers, didn’t please their business partner, Frank Butler. An heir to the Butler paper, aviation and real-estate fortune, he had, in a sense, inherited the Walkers as business partners when his father, Paul, 89, was struck and killed by a car in June 1981.
“They gave $10,000 of my money to an event in England so they could be presented to Queen Elizabeth II,” Frank Butler complained last week in a phone interview. Walker, in turn, asked that an interviewer’s tape recorder be turned off so he could describe, in some detail, the personal and social style of Frank Butler, which, he claims, didn’t help business any.
When Frank’s brother, Michael, and sister, Jorie Butler Kent, declined to participate, claiming other involvements, Frank, following his father’s will, took over the Butler share of the enterprise-Butler-Walker Inc., a chain of fast-oil-change centers in Illinois and Indiana-undertaking personal guarantees of about $6.5 million.
“Then,” he said, speaking of the Walkers, “I started seeing some things that seemed very strange. They’d arrive in Palm Beach, then call a board meeting to write off expenses. They’d call me about buying that, charging that, getting into a savings and loan.”
Drinking days
For Walker, it was a time for champagne-lots of it-and, as he admitted, “it went to my head.” Friends became concerned about his drinking when, several times, he was spotted sleeping in his car. In 1983, he and his wife bought the First American Savings and Loan Association, and Walker became chairman of the Oak Brook thrift. Later, scrambling for money to keep his personal and business ventures afloat, he borrowed above the legal limits, using other people to sign for loans totaling $1.4 million.
A subsidiary of the thrift was established to finance franchising of the oil-change venture, which Frank Butler dropped out of in 1984. Two years later, federal authorities, claiming that the thrift’s assets were overvalued, declared First American insolvent. An audit, routine in such takeovers, turned up troubling loans, traced back to Walker. The matter was referred to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Walker was eventually convicted on federal charges, and on Nov. 19, 1987, U.S. District Judge Ann Williams, accusing him of using First American as “a personal piggy bank,” sentenced him to 7 years in prison and ordered him to pay $231,609 in restitution to the thrift and to perform 500 hours of community service work.
Time for prison
On Jan. 5, 1988, Walker, driven north by his three sons, became inmate No. 96928-024 in a federal prison in Duluth, Minn., on the edge of Lake Superior. Fifteen years before, The Chicagoan magazine had proclaimed, “The Dan Walker Story: Today, Springfield! Tomorrow, The White House!” In prison, he started out as chapel clerk. When a new warden arrived several weeks later, he was switched to scrubbing toilets.
Walker was released in June 1989, partly because of health problems, notably bronchial asthma. He spent six months with his older brother in Virginia Beach, Va., starting up a community program for the homeless. Then his brother remarried.
“I didn’t want to be a third wheel,” Walker said. “So I moved to San Diego. Once I decided not to stay in Chicago, it was the logical choice.”
It isn’t easy for Walker to talk about himself. “Some of these questions are very, very hard to answer,” he said. But he was doing it, he said, to help out the authors of “Dan Walker: The Glory and the Tragedy” (Smith Collins), a biography by Bob Ellis, managing editor of the West Frankfort Daily American in southern Illinois, and Taylor Pensoneau, former political writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now public-relations director of the Illinois Coal Association.
In a round of newspaper, radio and TV interviews, he took credit for fighting the old Daley machine in Chicago, “opening up the Democratic Party in Illinois” and “bringing young people into government.” He was proud, he said, of establishing the Illinois Lottery and introducing the traffic rule known as right turn on red.
“But I also really felt I let a lot of people down,” he told WGN Radio’s Milt Rosenberg. “I did wrong. I wanted to admit that-and go forward.”
In Chicago, Walker caught up with old friends. He joined 150 people at a pig roast at the Long Grove home of Victor de Grazia, his onetime political adviser who now offers psychological advice to law firms and corporations involved in lawsuits on how to handle jurors.
Walker also got to see family. Six of his seven children live in an archipelago stretching from Deerfield to Naperville. “I don’t do well with reunions,” he said. “There’s no time to talk to everyone. So I stayed a night here, a night there.” There are 19 grandchildren, 16 in the Chicago area. The others are in Tokyo, where daughter Roberta Sue is married to an advertising executive.
Surrounded by family
“They’re all doing well,” Walker said, running through a family who’s who that includes three lawyers, a teacher, an ad-account executive and an executive with Jiffy Lube International Inc., the oil-change company that picked up the remains of Butler-Walker Inc.
As Walker admits, his problems often have spilled over onto his family.
“Yes, I confronted alcohol. It did get the best of me,” he said. Although authors Pensoneau and Ellis report that in the governor’s mansion Walker had a butler stash drinks behind plants at parties so he could work in sips without going to a bar, Walker said his drinking escalated with his indictment.
“My children got together, drove out to my house in Oak Brook and told me, in no uncertain terms, to see an expert. I went once, said it wasn’t for me and kept on drinking. In prison, of course, I didn’t drink, but after I got out, I told myself, `That’s enough.’ I’d seen my father, who had that problem. I knew, if I was going to get a job, I had to quit. So I stopped, two years ago. I drink wine with dinner. Maybe a beer or two at a picnic. That’s all.”
His treatment program, he said, does not include therapy (“too expensive”) or such support groups as Alcoholics Anonymous (“just not for me; I couldn’t do that”).
“My father stopped drinking and was sober the last 15 years of his life. At night, after his eyes failed, I used to read to him from what A.A. calls `the Big Book.’ So I know all that stuff.”
Walker now is living alone in a $700-a-month apartment in Clairemont, a suburb just north of San Diego. He and his second wife were divorced in 1988, while he was in prison. With her help, many of their debts have been paid off.
Does he ever get lonely?
“Sure,” he said, “not a lot, but some. Evenings are the hardest, but the answer is self-control. I work late (as a legal assistant), so usually I don’t get home until 7. I play tennis three times a week. I walk a lot, on the beach, read a lot and write.”
One book, due out this fall from Smith Collins, is titled “Why Do the Preachers Close the Door?” Walker said it deals with the spread of Christianity in the century after Jesus’ death. He has started a political novel, tentatively titled “Veto,” which he said will revolve around a governor’s use of an amendatory veto on a riverboat-gambling bill.
Walker said he had a hard time finding a job when he got to San Diego. “When I first got out there, I pulled out all the stops,” he said. “I called all my contacts. I found nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
A contact in Du Page County, where Walker once had been chairman of a Boy Scouts council, put him in touch with a Boy Scout source in San Diego who led him to Rev. Joe Carroll, who runs St. Vincent de Paul Village, a program for the homeless funded largely by fast-food heiress Joan Kroc.
“I said, `Father Joe, I’d like to work in your planned-giving program, for $250 a week,’ ” Walker said. “You’re on,” Carroll said. Walker’s retirement savings were lost in his financial collapse, but, he said, “I found that with $250, plus my Social Security of $1,000 a month, I could do OK.”
Now, with a somewhat better salary as a legal assistant at the San Diego law firm of Kolodny & Pressman, “I’m getting by,” Walker said. “When you clean toilets for a year, the humility thing doesn’t bother you anymore.”
Walker said he hasn’t made many new friends in San Diego, but in recent months he has spent some time with his second ex-wife.
“She still looks beautiful,” he said, wistfully. “Never met a woman like her, before or since.”
