Interview with William E. Feurer Jr. # IS-A-L-2011-065.01 Interview # 1: December 16, 2011 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Friday, December 16, 2011. My name is Mark DePue, the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. We are in the library this afternoon and I’m going to be talking to Bill Feurer. Good afternoon, Bill. Feurer: Good afternoon. DePue: And we’re talking to Bill because of your long experience in Illinois politics, but especially the timeframe fairly early in your career, where you were dealing with the Otto Kerner Administration, part of the Otto Kerner Administration. I’m excited to have the opportunity to do that, because that predates a lot of the interviews that we do, and this will be the second one that I get to talk about the Kerner folks. I wanted to start though with a little bit of your background. What is your birthday? Feurer: August 5, 1934. DePue: And where were you born? Feurer: I was born in Englewood, in Chicago, Illinois. DePue: Did you grow up there? Bill Feurer Interview # IS-A-L-2011-065.03 Feurer: Well, I spent much of my early life in Chicago, in the suburbs. Lived in Englewood, then Blue Island, a suburb, and then New Lenox, another suburb that at that time was a fairly small, sleepy, country town. From the fourth grade through my freshman year in high school, my father took a job in Mexico, Missouri, and then from my sophomore year on, they moved back to a town called Park Forest, Illinois, which was a southeast suburb of Chicago, and that’s where I spent my last three years of high school and where my parents lived until their deaths. DePue: Park Forest you said? Feurer: Yes. DePue: Are most of those on the South Side of Chicago? Feurer: They were all in the South Side of Chicago. DePue: What was your father’s profession? Feurer: Well, my father spent most of his life as a sales manager for a refractories company, which is firebrick. He sold firebrick to the steel mills, primarily in the Chicago area. DePue: And what was his name? Feurer: He was a senior. He had the same name as mine. I was William Eugene Feurer, Jr.; he was William Eugene Feurer, Sr. DePue: How about your mother’s maiden name? Feurer: My mother’s maiden name was Murphy. DePue: And her first name? Feurer: Dorothy. DePue: Dorothy. Feurer: Actually Dortha, her actual name was Dortha. D-o-r-t-h-a. DePue: Which is a little bit unusual. Feurer: Yes. DePue: Dortha Murphy. Well, it sounds like the Germans and the Irish getting together. Feurer: Well they did in this case. 2 Bill Feurer Interview # IS-A-L-2011-065.03 DePue: Okay. How long had they been in the country? Feurer: Well, they were both born in this country. My father was born in Marion, Illinois. His parents had come over as children, from Germany, married in Marion, Illinois. My mother lived in Northwest Missouri, in a town called Winston, Missouri, about sixty miles north of Kansas City, on the hard road 1 to Des Moines. Her father was a rural mail carrier in Winston. DePue: Did they have any brothers and sisters? Feurer: My father had two sisters and four brothers. My mother had one brother and one sister. DePue: How about you? Feurer: I have one sister, six years younger than I am. She still lives very close to Park Forest, lives in Olympia Fields, Illinois. DePue: You grew up, it sounds like, during World War II. This might be a little early for you to remember much about World Word II. Do you? Feurer: Well, I remember, one of the first memories I had was when I was six years old, my parents explaining to me about how the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor and how that was going to affect us perhaps. DePue: Did your father keep his job or did he get into the military at the time? Feurer: No, he didn’t serve in the military. He had two children and at that time, you were exempted if you had two children, and so he did not go in the military. DePue: Was the family religious? Feurer: Yes. DePue: What denomination? Feurer: Well, most of my life they were Methodists, but when we moved to Park Forest they became Presbyterians, and my parents stayed in the Presbyterian church the rest of their lives. DePue: Was the family involved in politics at all? Feurer: Not at all. DePue: Was that even much of a discussion at home when you were growing up? 1 For people born a couple of decades later: H ard road referred to any road paved with asphalt or concrete, while many roads were still gravel or gravel covered with road oil. (Editor) 3 Bill Feurer Interview # IS-A-L-2011-065.03 Feurer: Well, my mother was a Republican and my father was a Democrat, so it was a discussion at times. My grandfather on my father’s side had been like a township road commissioner in Williamson County, so he was involved to some extent in politics. My father had a couple brothers who were involved in politics to some extent. DePue: Tell us a little bit about your high school years. Where did you go to high school? Feurer: Well, I went my freshman year to Mexico Missouri High School. Then I went to Bloom Township High School in Chicago Heights, Illinois. Park Forest at that time was a very small community. It was a pre-built community, you know by one builder, and they didn’t have a high school, so we went to the neighboring high school in the next town. DePue: Was that one of those post World War II boomtowns? Feurer: It was. It was often sometimes called GI town. There was a sociologist named William Whyte, who had a book called The Organization Man , and it was about Levittown, [Long Island, NY] Park Forest and I believe a community in California, and they were the three models for his book, The Organization Man . DePue: Well that’s interesting. What kind of childhood did that lead to then? Was this all the houses looked the same or did they evolve quite a bit over time? Feurer: Well, they all looked a lot the same at the beginning, but they evolved over time, so of course, it doesn’t look so much like that now. It led to a very interesting childhood for me, because in Mexico, Missouri, everybody was fairly much the same, except for the African American community, they had their own high school. I don’t recall even thinking about it at the time, but when I moved to Park Forest and went to school in Chicago Heights, if you took a picture of that student body it looked like a Norman Rockwell cover. I mean it was about 15 percent African American, and it was probably 30 percent second generation Italian. Park Forest had a lot of Army-Navy brats who had lived in Japan and Germany before they came to Park Forest. There was a lot of truck farmer kids from Crete and Steger and towns like that. There was an area called Homewood Flossmoor that was fairly wealthy, that had a lot of people there. There was a military school called Glenwood Military School that sent its kids to Bloom Township. So it was a very cosmopolitan type of school and a lot of fun to go to because there were so many types of people. DePue: A good education as well? Feurer: I had a very good education. I found when I got to college I was probably a year ahead of most of the people in my college. Not because I was any smarter. I just had been taught more in high school. 4 Bill Feurer Interview # IS-A-L-2011-065.03 DePue: What were your academic interests in high school? Feurer: Well, I was probably most interested in the things I was best at. I was best at things like English, history, literature, subjects like that. I had been a reader all my life and that was a substantial advantage in all the courses I took. DePue: Did you have any extracurricular activities in high school? Feurer: Well, my high school was a large high school; it had a couple thousand students, and I wasn’t a good enough athlete to make anything except the track team. I ran on the track team for a couple years, but I was way down the list on the track team also, so I was not an athlete.