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Senate candidates take different paths to politics

Submitted Ohio Lt. Governor Lee Fisher, who is running for the U.S. Senate, is shown as a young boy near his childhood home in Shaker Heights.

Submitted Sen. Jennifer Brunner as a child.

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Sen. Rob Portman with wife Jane and daughter Sally. In front of the summer house where Portman's family supposedly help hide runaway slaves.

Submitted Sen. Rob Portman with wife Jane and daughter Sally. In front of the summer house where Portman's family supposedly help hide runaway slaves.

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Sen. Tom Ganley Contributed photo

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Senate hopefuls’ Ohio roots run deep

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By Jessica Wehrman, Staff Writer Updated 7:30 PM Sunday, July 19, 2009

They’re all candidates now, but there is little in the background of the four people hoping to fill U.S. Sen. George Voinovich’s seat when he retires after next year that offers any clue they would be in the position they’re in now.

Consider this diary entry from Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher: “Jan. 19, 1960: Dear Diary, Today I told Ellen I liked her (loved) I will call her up probably (I did). Later I found out she doesn’t particularly like me. A couple of days later I don’t love her. I’m going back to Heidi.”

Only one of the candidates, Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, comes from a political family, and unlike her they were mostly Republicans.

They are all products of the state they live in, shaped by their own experiences and proud of their own heritage.

The Dayton Daily News asked each one to talk about the long road that led them to become candidates for the United States Senate.

The Businessman

Tom Ganley was a hotshot — 22-years-old, 6 foot 4 and full of confidence — when he first charged into the regional Chevrolet zone office in Cleveland and told the zone manager he wanted to own an auto dealership.

The zone manager, sitting behind his desk, chomping on a big cigar, stared back.

“How old are you?” he asked, peering skeptically over the cigar.

Ganley answered. The zone manager turned and opened a file drawer stuffed with papers.

“These are millionaires who want to own a Chevy dealership,” he told Ganley.

He opened another drawer, this one half-full.

“These are multimillionaires who want to own a Chevy dealership.”

The inference was clear: Ganley’s day would never come. But the son of a bowling alley mechanic and a bowling alley waitress was not to be deterred. He went next to Ford and Chrysler, then, finally, to American Motors, where he talked his way into two $80,000 loans and his first car dealership. Within 22 months he’d paid both loans off. Today, Ganley owns the largest automotive group in Ohio. He heads 32 dealerships and employs 1,000 workers, including six of his original 10 employees.

“This was my American dream,” Ganley said.

Ganley is a first-generation Ohioan. Both of his parents moved to Cleveland from Syracuse, N.Y., during the Great Depression looking for jobs. They found them, ultimately, at Turney Town Lanes in a working-class suburb of Cleveland.

Ganley found a job there, too — but not working for the bowling alley.

A high school jock who made regular visits to his parents’ workplace, Ganley got to know an introverted bowler who “wouldn’t look at you when you talked.”

Ganley impressed the bowler, who asked him to come work for him.

The bowler was Bud “Mark ‘Em Down Wright,” a used car salesman who was one of the first in Cleveland to sell used cars on TV.

That job led to a sales manager job at Frank Nero Lincoln-Mercury, and ultimately, to a chain of successful dealerships. Now, he hopes it will lead him to the U.S. Senate.

“I am running as a businessman, not a politician,” Ganley says. “I am not a career politician — I’m against those.”

The Congressman

After a meeting with the Dayton Daily News editorial board one August day some 10 years ago, then-U.S. Rep. Rob Portman, R-Terrace Park, dragged staffer Brian Besanceney to West Milton to dredge up some family history.

Family lore had taught him that his great- great- great-grandfather, Francis Jones, left Georgia in 1804 out of disgust with the practice of slavery, making his way across the Ohio River. He was elderly at the time — in his 80s, according to Portman — and he traveled with nine children. He was so feeble that at points in the journey he had to be carried in a chair. Jones, a Quaker and an abolitionist, was aided in his travels by American Indians who had respect for Quakers, Portman said he was told.

The family set down roots in West Milton. Jones’ son Samuel built a log cabin, then a brick house and, according to family legend, harbored runaway slaves in the attic above the summer house.

Portman was fascinated. So, that day in West Milton he drove around trying to find the old family house. “It was a wild goose chase,” he said.

Until he ran into a librarian. She dug up a map from the 1800s with the Jones family plot on it, just south of town.

Portman followed the map, found the house and knocked on the door. That’s where he met the Jett family, Joel and Sheila, who bought the house in 1983. They showed him the summer kitchen, and the attic over it. Since then, he’s taken his family back for a few family reunions. It’s a part of Ohio history of which Portman is particularly proud. In 1998, he and then-Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, teamed up to pass a bill appropriating money for the preservation of sites along the Underground Railroad.

“It’s been wonderful to rediscover our roots,” he said.

In June, Portman visited Miami County and talked of his own Miami County heritage.

The Underground Railroad, he said, “is a great story of courage and the quest for freedom and collaboration. There are great lessons for us even today.”

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