Illinois Governors IV: Otto Kerner, Sam Shapiro, and Richard Ogilvie

Otto Kerner, Jr.  (1961-1968), Democrat

sentenced to 3 years

Kerner was born in 1908 in Chicago.  His father served as Illinois Attorney General and as judge on the Seventh Circuit of the US Court of Appeals.  He graduated from Brown University in 1930, and attended Trinity College in Cambridge before receiving a law degree from Northwestern University in 1934.  He married the daughter of Anton Cermak, the Chicago Mayor who had been fatally shot in 1933.  In the second world war, he served in the army in Italy where he made the acquaintance of Jacob Arvey, who was the leader of the Cook County Democratic Party.  Later he joined the Illinois Army National Guard, where he retired in 1954 as a major general.  

In 1947 he was appointed the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and became a judge in the Illinois circuit court of Cook County until 1961 when he was elected governor,   denying Stratton a third term and was re-elected in 1964.   Illinois won with his efforts the contract to build the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL.  He worked to expand international trade in Illinois products.  He reformed the mental health system run by the state.  In the wake of the race riots of 1966, he served as chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, having been appointed by President Johnson.  

In the last year of his second term, Kerner resigned his governorship to become a judge for the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.  

In 1973 Kerner was convicted of 17 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, perjury and related charges.  He was sentenced to three years in Federal Prison, but served only 6 months, being released because by that time Kerner was suffering from lung cancer.  He died in 1976.  
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Samuel S. Shapiro (1968), Democrat

Samuel S. Shapiro was born in Estonia in 1907 and emigrated with his family to America as a small child.  He got his law degree from the University of Illinois and practiced law in Kankakee, IL.  He became state's attorney for Kankakee County in 1936, served as a state representative from 1947 to 1961.  In 1961 he was elected Lieutenant governor along with Otto Kerner as governor.  When Kerner left his position as governor in 1968, he succeeded him as governor.  His special interest as legislator and as Lt. Governor was mental health, which he sought to reform.  After being narrowly defeated for governor by successor Richard B. Ogilvy, he returned to his law practice.  He died in 1987.  The day he died he was supposed to be in court in Kankakee, and was only discovered to have died, when police were sent to his home to investigate why he had not been in court.  He was buried in Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, IL.
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Richard Buell Ogilvie (1969-1973), Republican

Ogilvie was born in 1923 in Kansas City, MO.  He attended Yale and then entered the army in 1942, serving as a tank commander in France, and then finished his studies at Yale, graduating in 1947 with a degree in American History.  He got his law degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology Kent College of Law in Chicago in 1949.  From 1950 he practiced law, became a US attorney in 1954 in Chicago, and in 1958-61 served as special assistant to the US Attorney General, and was in charge of a unit fighting organized crime in Chicago.  In 1962 he was elected Cook County sheriff.  In 1967 he became president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

He was elected governor in 1968 along with  Lt. Gov.  Paul Simon, a Democrat who later went on to become a US Senator from Illinois.   Aided by large Republican majority in both Senate and House in the state, he was able to call a constitutional convention in the state, instituted the first income tax for the state, and increased social spending.  The income tax resulted in the voters sending him home in 1972.  

After serving as Governor he practiced law in Chicago, where he was considered for the position of FBI director by President Nixon before giving the job to Patrick Gray.  He served as a trustee for the bankrupt railroad, the Milwaukee Road in 1979, which became as a result the Wisconsin Central.  In 1987 he was on a committee to study the feasibility of shutting down Amtrak, which never happened.  He died in 1988 and was interred at Rosehill Mausoleum in Chicago.  The Metra commuter rail station in Chicago is named in his honor.  
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