If The Mayoral Election Was Tomorrow

Here is a bet guaranteed to win. If the Naperville mayoral election occurred tomorrow, the winner would be Scott Wehrli. You can bank on it for the following three reasons:

• Scott Wehrli has never lost an election. Never as in zilch, nada, not ever, el zippo.
• All he needs to win is have every Wehrli in town vote for him (yes, there are a lot of Wehrli’s)
• He is the only person to announce he is running for the office of mayor guaranteeing victory.

OK, chances are someone else will decide to jump into the fray, but whomever it is, needs to have a powerful resume of community involvement to match Wehrli’s, who is 53 years old, with 32 years of Naperville participation.

Mayor Steve Chirico had barely announced his intention not to seek a third term and before he could put down the microphone, Scott Wehrli pulled out his industrial size microphone to announce his candidacy. Word has it, that Wehrli has been seen in the inky shadows of the Municipal Center with a tape measure waiting to measure the mayor’s office preparing for remodeling designs.

If Wehrli does win the election, he could become the greatest mayor Naperville has ever had since Steve Chirico, or possibly as far back as my personal favorite, Mayor Alexander Grush, 1921 – 1923, and then again from 1931 – 1935. Grush was involved in the meat business and oil trade. He may have been the first person with the tagline “Hey where’s the beef!”

I am biased towards Mayor Grush since I played the part of Grush in Naperville’s sesquicentennial in 1981. I think I only had six words, which is about all I could handle. The time capsule is buried in the Riverwalk to be unearthed and shown in 2031 for Naperville’s bicentennial. If I can hang in there for another nine years, I can take the grand-kids to  see me 50 years ago.

That would be the beginning of Scott Wehrli’s third term.