Interview with Mark Boozell # ISG-A-L-2009-028.1 Interview # 1: August 18, 2009 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 Tuesday, August 18, 2009. My name is Mark DePue; I’m the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today it’s my privilege to have an opportunity to talk to Mark Boozell. Am I pronouncing that right? Boozell: Boozell [Bo-zell]. DePue: Boozell. Mark was a long-time associate with Governor Edgar through most of the time that Edgar was Secretary of State and through all of his tenure as governor, so there’s a lot for us to talk about. I’ve been looking forward to this one because everybody says it’s going to be a fun one to do. Boozell: (laughs) Good. DePue: We are sitting in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, as far as the location. Mark, why don’t you start out with telling us when and where you were born. Boozell: I was born March 4, 1955, back in the good old days. DePue: You were one of the young people associated with Edgar, by the way. Mark Boozell Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-028.1 Boozell: You know, I was looking at a picture when I went through this Meeting the Challenge book; there’s a picture in the back, and I’ll share it with you. 1 It’s the final senior staff, I think, with the governor, sitting in his office. I was wondering who the really good-looking young guy sitting on the governor’s right was. Well, it was me . (laughter) It’s been a while. Was born in 1955 in Mason City, Iowa. I lived in Iowa probably until about the end of grade school, sometime in there, and then moved to Loves Park, Illinois. We lived in Loves Park for a while. I went to college in Rock Island, Illinois, at Augustana College, and from there moved out to Washington, DC, after I graduated… Oh, we’re going to stop. DePue: I’m going to slow you down a little bit and back up some. Boozell: Okay. DePue: What did your parents do for a living? Boozell: My grandparents really raised me. My father was divorced when I was very young, I think probably around two or three years old. He lived with his parents, my grandparents, in Mason City, and my grandparents pretty much raised me through grade school years, I think. My father was a milkman, my grandfather was a mechanic for Ford Motor Company his entire life, and my grandma was a homemaker. She stayed at home. And that’s where we lived. DePue: Loves Park is where? Boozell: That was in Mason City, Iowa. Then my father remarried and got a job in the Belvidere Assembly plant near Rockford. Loves Park is a little town right north of the Rockford city limits. I think it’s on Route 51—that road goes up into Beloit, actually. So I went to Harlem High School there in Loves Park, and graduated from there in 1973. DePue: Growing up at that time, especially when you got into your high school years, what did you think you were interested in doing after you graduated? Boozell: I don’t know if I remember. I know I was always interested in politics, and I was always interested in broadcasting. In high school, I was on the student council. I was president of the student council, I was president of the National Honor Society, so I liked being in charge of organizations. 2 I ran track, so that was kind of the sidelight to everything. But I was really into the broadcasting- type stuff. I liked that, and I really enjoyed the government things in high 1 Tom Schafer, Meeting the Challenge: the Edgar Administration, 1991-1999 (Springfield, IL: State of Illinois, Office of the Governor), 1998. 2 A trait Boozell shared with Governor Edgar. Jim Edgar, interview by Mark DePue, May 21, 2009, 47-71; Fred Edgar, interview by Mark DePue, April 22, 2009, 23-24; and Tony Sunderman, interview by Mark DePue, May 21, 2009, 8-16. Unless otherwise indicated, all interviews cited in the notes were conducted as part of the Jim Edgar Oral History Project, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL. 2 Mark Boozell Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-028.1 school. So the criteria for looking for a college was, where could I afford to go and what was kind of pretty. Back then, I wasn’t so focused on what I was going to do for the rest of my life; I was focused on going to college. I’m pretty sure I’m the first kid in the family ever to go to college. My great-grandmother and great- grandfather on my grandma’s side came over from Norway and settled in the Freeport area, then somehow got over into Iowa. They were farmers. I mean, these people are farmers and factory workers, and like I said, my dad was a milkman and my grandfather was a mechanic. It was a great achievement to get through high school, in this family. I think my grandma told me one time that I was the first kid ever to go to college, so that was a pretty big deal. We were Lutheran—rich Lutheran heritage up through the family. Never missed a Sunday of Sunday school and church. So we looked at a lot of different Lutheran schools. For a while, I thought I wanted to be a pastor. Late in my high school years, I thought, Maybe being a pastor would be kind of cool, because we spent so much time at church. Looked at Wartburg College in Iowa, some of the other Lutheran-type… DePue: Wartburg, in Waverly; that’s where I grew up. Boozell: I remember that. That’s right. So I looked at maybe doing that. But then when I got to college, I really decided that broadcasting was the way I wanted to go, that was what I wanted to get into, so I did the speech-broadcasting major. After about two years of that and working at the local radio station—Country Sunshine radio, WHBF AM, in Rock Island—I decided that was kind of boring. 3 You didn’t even get to pick the music you wanted to play; they told you what to do, and it was very structured. I thought, Maybe I’ll get a political science degree, too, so I got a double major with political science. I added that on, and that’s what started me in that direction. DePue: I’m going to back up again a little bit. While you’re in high school and you’re in your college years, these were interesting years politically in the United States—a lot of turmoil going on. Boozell: Yes. DePue: You were in high school at the tail end of the Vietnam War; the racial tension was pretty high then. Then you graduated the same year that Watergate really started to percolate. Did that capture your attention? Were you interested in all of those things? Boozell: Really interested in those types of things. I missed the draft by one year. I had to register for the draft, of course, but my year was the year that they stopped 3 Coincidentally, another member of Governor Edgar’s cabinet, Kirk Brown, had seriously considered a career in radio during his college years. Kirk Brown, interview by Mike Czaplicki, December 22, 2009, 13-23. 3 Mark Boozell Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-028.1 picking the numbers, as I recall. That was a great relief, because of course Vietnam was on everybody’s mind. I was probably as big a hippie as anybody. I had hair down past my shoulders in college, and looked the part with the little granny glasses and all that kind of stuff. So, it was a big deal, and it was on everybody’s mind all the time. Augustana, when you talk about racial tensions, really was a lily-white Lutheran college until about ’73, ’74, when I went there. They started programs to bring in African-American students with scholarships, so there was a lot of tension on campus as well. We had several issues on campus where it was just an issue of not understanding what they wanted to be called and what they had gone through and how they expected to be treated. It was interesting. They started a house for African Americans that no whites could go into. I remember vividly in a religion class, probably my sophomore year, I referred to—now, I might get this wrong—but I referred to them as African American or black, one or the other.