Across nearly three decades of public service, Gayle Franzen led the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority before he served one term as the DuPage County Board chairman.
While at the toll authority, Franzen worked with legislators to create a deal that paved the way for the funding and construction of Interstate Highway 355, the Veterans Memorial Tollway. As DuPage County Board chairman, Franzen worked to end long-standing rancor on the board while also reducing county residents’ property taxes.
“He enjoyed and understood the importance of public service, and really had the right perspective on things,” said former DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin. “He always said how fortunate we were to be in a position to solve problems and help people and make the world a better place. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said. You could count on his word.”
Franzen, 81, died Tuesday at Lake Forest Hospital in Lake Forest after suffering a fall at his home and a resulting brain bleed, said his son Tim.
A Lake Forest resident since 2021, Franzen previously had lived in Chicago, Wheaton and Springfield.
Gayle Menke Franzen was born in Rantoul, Illinois, where he grew up on his parents’ farm and graduated from Rantoul High School. He spent two years at a junior college in Florida, where he played baseball, before transferring to Michigan State University.
At MSU, he got a degree in criminal justice and was the starting shortstop alongside a third baseman named Steve Garvey, who would go on to star as a first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers before going into politics himself.
After college, Franzen was hired as an investigator by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, where he got to know then-U.S. attorney and future Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson. Franzen then took a job overseeing the correctional system in Pierce County, Washington.
In 1977, Thompson, by then elected governor, lured Franzen back to Illinois as a special adviser. Late in 1978, Thompson named Franzen the head of the beleaguered Illinois Department of Corrections. That agency had been under fire after a riot at Pontiac Correctional Center and because of inmate misconduct, inefficiencies and suspected collusion between inmates and guards at Stateville Correctional Center.
As state corrections director, Franzen ordered a shakedown at Stateville and fired two wardens at the facility in an effort to root out corruption. He also oversaw the construction of new prison facilities.
In early 1981, after a little more than two years into the job — a tenure that was generally well regarded, the Tribune wrote in 1986 — Franzen left the state Department of Corrections to become the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority’s executive director.
In that role, he championed legislation to authorize construction of I-355, the first new toll road built in more than a decade. In fact, within weeks of taking the job, Franzen informally proposed building a tollway instead of a freeway that had been on the drawing board for 20 years.
From there, Franzen worked to win the support of then-state Sen. James “Pate” Philip, the Republican chairman of DuPage County, and then-DuPage County Board Chairman Jack Knuepfer on the idea of the project as a tollway. Another powerful DuPage Republican, House Minority Leader Lee A. Daniels, also eventually agreed.
Even so, Franzen told the Tribune, there still were “a lot of naysayers, including in the governor’s office.”
“I got laughed at,” he recalled in 1986.
Ultimately, the project won approval amid a complicated compromise in which DuPage legislators offered help to the Chicago bloc in passing World’s Fair and McCormick Place bills in exchange for approval of the tollway, which opened in 1989.
Franzen resigned from the toll authority in late 1984 to take a job in the private sector. He went into municipal bond finance as senior vice president of the firm L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin, where he negotiated various municipal bond issues. He left Rothschild in 1987 and immediately joined the firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in the same capacity.
Franzen’s private-sector work also included being one of seven investors in the first casino in Illinois, the Empress Riverboat Casino in Joliet.
While in the private sector, Franzen was named to the board of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority — the public agency created to fund a new ballpark for the Chicago White Sox after the team’s threats to relocate to Florida. Ultimately, the agency funded a new Comiskey Park — now Rate Field — and Franzen left that board in 1990.
In 1989, Thompson named Franzen the part-time chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority. While with the RTA, Franzen lobbied for legislative approval in 1989 for a $1 billion capital investment program aimed at improving bridges, stations and rails.
Disappointed with the DuPage County Board’s direction, Franzen resigned as RTA chairman in 1993 to run for County Board chairman as a Republican in his first bid for elected office. He tapped lawyer and then-Wheaton City Councilwoman Linda Davenport, now a justice on Illinois’ 3rd District Appellate Court, to be his campaign’s treasurer, even though Davenport was and remains a Democrat.
“What you saw was absolute him — there was no pretense,” Davenport said. “He taught me so much about grace and not being afraid and to learn that in every situation, someone, somewhere, is going to teach you something. He also taught me to be fearless and to go for it. For someone like Gayle Franzen to be proud of you, that lifted me up and gave me courage.”
Franzen was elected County Board chairman in 1994, comfortably defeating then-County Board member Gwen Henry, former County Board member Judith Crane Ross and board member Robert Schroeder in the GOP primary. Then, with about 74% of the vote, he trounced Naperville Democrat Richard Owens in November.
As chairman, he drew praise for reducing friction among board members, promoting a longtime employee to be a county administrator who handled most of the day-to-day business, and cutting taxes four times in three years.
Franzen also lobbied for legislation in Springfield that separated DuPage’s forest preserve district from the County Board, starting in 2002. Before then, County Board members also had sat as forest preserve commissioners.
“Gayle was one of those people when you talked to him and he had an opinion, you could take it to the bank, because he knew what he was talking about,” said former DuPage County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom, whom Franzen appointed to the DuPage Water Commission’s board and who succeeded Franzen. “He had substantial experience on the state level and also the local level, and he also was a very skilled guy. He was like a walking resume.”
In October 1997, Franzen announced that he would not run for reelection as County Board chairman.
“I knew what I promised to do four years ago when I started running, and I had accomplished just about everything I had promised to do,” Franzen told reporters. “I guess in some respects, that’s been my history: to go into an agency — go into a unit of government — and turn it around and then look for something new to do.”
Two weeks after his announcement to not seek reelection as board chairman, Franzen announced a bid for the GOP nod for Illinois secretary of state in 1998. He changed his mind just one week later, telling reporters that he lacked the passion to run for higher office.
“I’ve had the power. I’ve done that. I don’t need the secretary of state to satisfy some ego,” Franzen told reporters at a news conference at a Lisle hotel. “I have always relished a fight. I like the competition. I like the battle. I knew when I got into the race that I would get a lot of heat. It wasn’t about that. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I didn’t have the passion.”
Later, the public learned the reason why: Franzen revealed in 1999 to then-WBBM-Ch. 2 reporter Carol Marin that he had been battling clinical depression for the past five years. By that point under a doctor’s care, Franzen said that there were days where all he had wanted to do was to lie on a couch. The purpose of his on-camera interview with Marin was to get the word out.
“I stayed private (about depression) and I shouldn’t have, because the right time to have done it was when I was in office,” he told her. “Then, it would have had a much greater impact, and would have been a much more honest approach than (not saying anything).”
With about eight months to go in his term, Franzen resigned as County Board chairman in April 1998 to become CEO of the West Chicago-based Harry W. Kuhn road-building firm.
He left that firm a year later and began focusing on commercial real estate development with his two sons. The trio worked together on a variety of projects in the western suburbs, including successfully building the Front Street Center project in downtown Wheaton.
Franzen retired from development work in 1994. He and his wife moved from Wheaton to Chicago around 2011.
Former Gov. George Ryan appointed Franzen to head the now-defunct Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation, a six-member political panel created to oversee the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in utility-supplied environmental funds. Franzen left that panel in 2000.
Outside of work, Franzen enjoyed golfing, and was a member of the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton from 1985 until 2010.
In addition to his son, Franzen is survived by his wife of 56 years, Peggy; another son, Craig; two grandchildren; two brothers, Gary and Todd; and a sister, Kathleen Swanson.
A visitation will take place from noon to 3 p.m. Thursday at Wenban Funeral Home, 320 Vine Ave., Lake Forest. A funeral mass will be held at 10:30 a.m. Friday at St. Patrick Catholic Church, 991 S. Waukegan Road, Lake Forest.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
