Looking back at Donald Stephens' Rosemont legacy
Sixty years after he founded Rosemont and nearly a decade after his death, people are still talking about Don Stephens.
His legacy permeates the 2.5-square-mile Northwest suburban village, from the office buildings, hotels and businesses he helped lure to town to the 890,000-square-foot convention center that bears his name.
On Sunday, a lasting impression of the late mayor - in the form of an 8-foot, 1,500-pound bronze-cast statue - will be unveiled outside village hall, 9501 W. Devon Ave.
It's an event that's sure to draw family, friends, residents, politicians, lawyers and real estate developers the mayor came to know during his 51 years at the helm of Rosemont.
It's no coincidence that the dedication is on Father's Day, as Stephens was a fatherly figure to many.
“Constantly for us as a family, he just set an example,” said Christopher Stephens, executive director of the convention center, and one of Stephens' grandsons. “A big city couldn't do some of these things. For our community, it worked, and it worked very well.”
In 1956, Don Stephens, then a 27-year-old fire insurance underwriter, was elected village president of the newly incorporated municipality of 84 acres and 84 residents. Drawing names from a hat, Stephensville was among their choices, but Rosemont stuck.
Two years later, Stephens struck a deal with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley to get Lake Michigan water in exchange for a 162-foot-wide strip of Foster Avenue the city needed to connect to O'Hare Airport.
It helped establish the red-haired suburban mayor as a political power broker, one who used old-school deal-making tactics with politicians and developers to help convert Rosemont from swamps and garbage dumps to a major economic engine of the suburbs.
With Stephens at the helm, Rosemont built its own exposition center to host trade shows, a stadium for athletic events and concerts, and a theater for stage performances.
Though a Republican by name, he had respect from both sides of the political aisle. His April 2007 funeral was attended by prominent Democrats, including then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan.
“He had an ability to play both sides of the street. He was allegedly a Republican, but he never let labels interfere with his dealings,” said Paul Green, a longtime local political analyst and director of the Institute for Politics at Roosevelt University. “In Springfield, there was the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and then there was the Stephens Party.”
The family business
Rosemont has famously had a number of Stephens family members on the village payroll, along with members of other families that have lived in town for years. The village, with only 4,200 residents, has a residency requirement for its employees, many of whom live in a gated community off Higgins Road.
One of Stephens' sons, Brad, has been the town's mayor since his dad died of stomach cancer at age 79.
Another of Don Stephens' grandsons, Donald III, is chief of the public safety department. His dad, Donald II, retired as the department's superintendent in 2014.
In many ways, Brad Stephens has carried on the elder Stephens' legacy of big building projects, with an eye toward attracting businesspeople, tourists and the dollars they bring.
He says his dad taught him how to be fair in negotiations with developers so both sides can benefit - lessons that have led to the development of a number of projects since the elder Stephens' death. That list includes an entertainment complex, softball stadium, indoor sports dome and outlet mall.
But the current mayor admits there are stylistic differences between him and his father.
“He'd probably vomit if he saw this laptop sitting on his desk,” the younger Stephens said during an interview from his second-floor village hall office, kept virtually unchanged since his father's death.
Rumors of mob ties
One thing Don Stephens never got was a casino, a deal that fell apart amid accusations that investors in the project had mob ties. For most of his public life, Stephens was subject to rumors of being linked to organized crime - charges he constantly denied.
In fact, he maintained he drove the mob out of Rosemont during the village's early days.
“When I was elected in 1956, this was a garbage area,” Stephens said in a 2001 interview. “I'll be the first to tell you that. There were houses of prostitution. There were pinball machines that they gambled on. I eliminated all that.”
What started the rumors was Stephens' purchase of the Thunderbolt hotel, on the site of what is now the Rosemont Theatre, from Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in 1962. Giancana's daughter, Antoinette, maintained in interviews before Stephens' death that he was a towel boy and errand-runner around Giancana's crew in the early 1960s.
“I bought a piece of dirt from Giancana,” Stephens said in one of his last interviews, given to ABC 7 Chicago's Chuck Goudie. “I didn't know Giancana. I had no interest in Giancana. I had seen him twice in my life before I bought the property, one time in a restaurant. I wouldn't have known who he was.”
Stephens filed a defamation lawsuit against the former head of the Chicago Crime Commission over allegations of being a business associate of the Outfit, though Stephens later dropped the suit.
“You're never going to be able to remove that stigma because he came in here and there were no shootouts at the O.K. Corral with the mob back in the day,” his son Brad said. “So everybody thought there had to be some collusion here, that he had to be involved with them.”
“Sort of by default, you end up knowing people - not so much having relationships, but you know people,” he added.
Acquitted twice
Don Stephens was indicted twice in the 1980s on charges of tax fraud and bribery, but he was found not guilty both times. He was charged in March 1983 with failing to report $82,000 in income taxes. In the other case less than a year later, he was charged with accepting $87,000 in kickbacks.
Stephens held up the acquittals as a point of pride.
His son said the constant surveillance by federal investigators amounted to a “witch hunt.”
“Obviously somebody had a vendetta, whether it was the federal government or whoever,” the current mayor said. “In modern history, there aren't many politicians that turned them back and shut them out.”
Indicted and acquitted with Stephens in the latter case were longtime friends and local developers Isaac Degen and Ray Rosato.
Rosato maintains Stephens was targeted by the federal government out of “pure unadulterated jealously.”
“They couldn't imagine a guy could be a businessman and turn a town into what he did,” Rosato said. “He turned a lemon into more than lemonade.”
The Rosemont way
It may have been Stephens' businesslike approach to government that enabled him to get so much done, but it also led to criticism from government watchdog groups.
He and his village board regularly gave contracts to favored companies in lieu of an open-bidding process. Degen and Rosato's construction firm alone was on the receiving end of millions of dollars in contracts, including work at the convention center and what is now the Allstate Arena.
“Our company has earned every single thing we have been given there,” Rosato said. “We've been good for them and they've been good for us. We're not there because of our good looks. It's because of performance.”
Stephens also inked deals with firms owned by family members, from catering to interior decorating. Bomark Cleaning, owned by his son Mark, also chairman of the Triton College Board since 1992, still has janitorial contracts to clean the Allstate Arena and Rosemont Theatre and run parking operations there.
The current mayor also embraces the practice of no-bid deals, saying it's easier to work with contractors who know what Rosemont wants and are quick to respond to complaints.
He says he doesn't negotiate his brother's contracts, leaving it up to the staff members who manage the arena and theater.
“At times am I hard on him? Absolutely,” Brad Stephens said. “Because the way I was brought up is that because we are Stephenses, that we need to go above and beyond. And sometimes that's almost unfair to my brother, but it's something we've got to do.”
The suburban boss
In more than five decades as mayor, Don Stephens lost control of the village board only once - in the early 1970s, when a three-person opposition slate was elected over Stephens' Rosemont Voters League candidates. The group of three was able to sway a fourth trustee to gain a majority on the village board.
Stephens had been battling health problems and was in the hospital, but he returned with renewed vigor and wrested back control of the board.
“There was one meeting that (a trustee) objected to something and he says, 'Robert's Rules of Order,'” according to Brad Stephens. “And (Don Stephens) said, 'Excuse me, sir, but the way I can count it's 4-3 now, so it's Don's Rules of Order.'”
After that, Stephens never took an election lightly, even when unopposed. Later elected as Leyden Township GOP committeeman, he worked to strengthen the local political organization and exert influence in the region and in Springfield, partnering with current Cook County Commissioner Peter Silvestri, Elmwood Park Village President and former state Rep. Angelo “Skip” Saviano, and lobbyist Jack Dorgan, who became a Rosemont trustee.
Mayors and village presidents in most suburban towns are part-time positions, and village boards hire professional administrators to handle day-to-day municipal operations. But in Rosemont, Don Stephens established a hands-on approach to the mayor's job befitting a big-city boss.
He often started his days early, driving around town in his Mercedes to monitor the progress of construction projects.
Christopher Stephens remembers riding alongside to learn the ropes.
“For my grandfather and Brad, those are not once-a-day trips but sometimes several times a day to make sure everything is the way it's supposed to. It takes finesse and hard work. That's what I learned from him,” he said. “When you're in that position and if you're doing it right and if your heart is in it, it just becomes part of you. Your life becomes Rosemont.”