Brian Calley and the Reinvention of the Role of Lieutenant Governor

Dome Magazine, 5/16/11

Lt. Gov. Brian Calley didn’t have to cast the deciding vote last week on the biggest tax overhaul in Michigan in a generation.

Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville had the 20th vote in his back pocket if he needed it, although several freshmen had told the Monroe Republican they weren’t wild about backing the pension tax and freezing the income tax at 4.35 percent for another year.

But the newly minted LG wanted to be on record for the centerpiece of Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan — and he got his wish, which earned him the lead of most news stories. But before voting in his capacity as Senate president, Calley took the highly unusual step of “asking for the chamber’s indulgence” to make a statement.

Now, the second-youngest lieutenant governor in Michigan history is not an imposing figure — no taller than five-six with a banker’s haircut, and porcelain skin and slightly rosy cheeks somewhat reminiscent of a marionette. But standing on the Senate dais that afternoon, Calley displayed a powerful and almost serene confidence.

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Double Down: Andy Dillon gambles on big government reforms –– is he willing to bet the house and run for governor?

They had to be the oddest of couples — Andy Dillon, the contemplative, straight-as-an-arrow scion of a Wayne County judge, and Jerry Rubin, the shaggy, larger-than-life member of the Chicago Seven.

But there they were, “running tables” together in New York City nightclubs in 1985. The 23-year-old Notre Dame grad was working as a financial analyst for W.R. Grace when he happened to be invited to Rubin’s house for a party. He hit it off with the founder of the Yippie movement, almost a quarter-century his senior, and the two began a “brief business venture,” as Dillon now describes it. After a few months, he quit, since he had already committed to work as an aide in Washington for then-U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, the Ivy League Democrat from New Jersey.

“But I made more money than I did at W.R. Grace,” the now-Democratic speaker of the Michigan House reveals with a chuckle. “I didn’t know the whole story until it had taken off.”

The whole story, of course, is how Rubin, along with other ’60s radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Michigan’s Tom Hayden, were arrested after the bloody Democratic National Convention riots in 1968. After a theatrical trial (during which Rubin gave the judge a Nazi salute and shouted, “Heil, Hitler!”) he was acquitted of all charges. Rubin had since become a successful entrepreneur, but he maintained that outlaw persona.

“That’s not on my résumé,” Dillon adds, shooting a grin at Dan Farough, his media coordinator, during an interview this month. “There. That’s something no one knows about me.”

Farough’s face blanched slightly. “And now everyone will know in the pages of [Dome],” he murmurs with halting joviality, while moving to quickly wrap things up.

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Mike Bishop Was Born to Run

Dome Magazine, 3/16/09

In 2004, a letter from a precocious child put Mike Bishop’s life into focus.

The son of former state Senator Donald Bishop was a busy senator himself, the self-described “techie of the caucus,” serving on the Judiciary and Banking and Financial Institutions committees in his first term. Before that, the Rochester Republican had spent two terms in the House and had been an assistant majority floor leader. Life with his young family was a balancing act, and yet Bishop still managed to squeeze in time as a senior attorney with Simon, Galasso & Franz and as president of Freedom Realty.

But the workaholic — who’s been known to sneak in workouts at 3 a.m. — somehow found time to slit open an envelope from Roy Kaiser, his former principal at St. John Lutheran School in Rochester.

Bishop suddenly remembered an old eighth grade assignment — writing a letter to himself as an adult, which the principal promised to mail back in 10 years. It ended up taking more than 20, but Dr. Kaiser was a man of his word.

The first lines were a doozy: “Dear Senator: How’s the wife and kids? I know you live nearby.”
Staring yourself in the face can be an odd thing.

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Joe Schwarz’s Year of Living Dangerously

Dome Magazine, 3/16/10

The year was 1965 and all hell was breaking loose in Jakarta. On September 30, six senior Army generals were rounded up and executed in an attempted communist coup in the poverty-ravaged nation. The ensuing battle for Indonesia’s heart and soul over the next few years would eventually claim a half-million lives and give rise to a new president.

This was the new normal for a 28-year-old doctor-turned-assistant naval attaché from Battle Creek, Michigan. Nearly 45 years later, Joe Schwarz still can’t talk about what he did to help stop the country from collapsing, although he is a fan of the Mel Gibson film about that era, The Year of Living Dangerously (When watching it with his daughter, Brennan, years ago, he told her, “That was your mother and me.”)

“A lot of other people — Americans, the British, Australians — wanted to help the good guy,” he simply says, “and in this case, it was [General] Suharto and the loyal Indonesian military.”

Schwarz would soon come face-to-face with the man who was preparing to take over as Indonesia’s new leader. As the violence was winding down in 1966, he was summoned for a new mission: teaching English to Suharto. Schwarz remembers following him around a big white table in the entranceway of his house, drilling him on basic phrases like “good morning” (“Just the simplest ways to ingratiate yourself in English, because he didn’t speak a word,” he says).

“I was chosen, not because I was the world’s greatest English teacher, but because I was the most inoffensive American — very junior person who couldn’t offend anybody,” Schwarz adds.

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