Dan Walker Finds Comeback Trail in S.D.

Dan Walker was striding through a crowded airport terminal recently when a stranger posed the question he himself has spent years trying to answer:

“Didn’t you used to be Dan Walker?”

The 68-year-old San Diego native flashed an awkward smile. He was still Dan Walker, he told the man.

In reality, however, he no longer is the same sure-fire corporate lawyer who in 1972 brashly walked the entire length of Illinois in a successful campaign to become governor--an upstart who disrupted the state’s infamous and well-oiled Democratic political machine.

He was no longer the savvy statesman who once considered a run for the U.S. presidency. Nor was he the society-page standout who gadded about Chicago in a Rolls-Royce while managing his growing business empire of quick-oil-change outlets.

This Dan Walker is an ex-governor and ex-felon who in April quietly moved back to his hometown of San Diego to start a new life after serving 18 months (he was released early because of poor health) of a seven-year federal prison term for bank fraud and perjury.

These days, the applause of political supporters is only an echo out of the past. The expensive cars and 78-foot yacht, the social engagements with such international notables as the emperor of Japan and the king of Sweden are only memories of vanished status.

Walker now earns $250 a week as administrative assistant to Father Joe Carroll at the St. Vincent de Paul/Joan Kroc Center for the homeless in downtown San Diego. In a few painful years, he has gone from being street-wise about politics to learning firsthand the politics of the street.

And, although he is eager to apply his no-nonsense, reformist style to helping provide for the homeless, Walker concedes that he’s just lucky to have a job.

“When you’re a 68-year-old ex-felon, jobs aren’t easy to come by,” he said slowly. “A lot of doors are closed to you.”

After several unsuccessful weeks in Los Angeles, seeking out past business and political contacts in search of a break, Walker finally used an old affiliation with the Boy Scouts to find work at St. Vincent De Paul.

“I’ve lived the life of a top executive and governor, and so this is a long ways to come down,” he said. “But I’ve faced the fact that I brought it all on myself. I do believe I’ve served my time, paid my price, felt my shame. It still hurts, though. It hurts bad.”

Informing only a few close friends, Walker moved west after his early release from custody because of his health. Because of the protracted battles with the Chicago press while in office, he still refuses to speak with reporters from newspapers that once covered him as governor.

In his first formal interview since his release, Walker detailed his months inside a tiny Duluth, Minn., federal prison camp as well as the personal penalties he continues to pay for his crimes.

Divorced by his second wife after his sentencing, distanced from his seven children and 17 grandchildren in Chicago, he now lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Mission Valley.

Driving a subcompact car on loan from his brother, he spends his free time renewing contacts with the few friends left from his naval career and law school days.

And he walks. The man who walked his way into the Illinois governor’s mansion still logs 15 to 20 miles each week--up and down the beaches of San Diego--as he contemplates the twists of fate that eventually brought Dan Walker down.

He still owes more than $375,000. Some of the debt is for legal fees. The rest involves past debts to the now-defunct savings and loan corporation he once owned--the same Chicago-based thrift from which Walker was convicted of fraudulently obtaining some of the $1.4 million in loans that prosecutors say he secured in the early 1980s to keep his businesses afloat.

Walker is barred from practicing law as part of a five-year probation agreement. He lives on his salary from the homeless center, in addition to a $900 monthly Social Security allotment.

He has no savings, no assets, no retirement plan. When he flew to Chicago recently, his children had to pay his fare.

But Walker maintains a stubborn hope for the future.

“Yes, I am destitute. But I do want to earn a place in the real world again,” he said. “I’ve got to prove I can do it. But I have to do it my own way. All I can do is take it one day at a time.”

Walker said he has been encouraged by Carroll and members of his staff, who urge him to forget his past and concentrate on the job at hand.

“People tell me not to think about what happened,” he said. “They say they don’t want to know the details, that it’s more important to me than it is to them.”

Time spent volunteering at two homeless centers--one in Miami during the early 1980s on his own, the other in Virginia Beach, Va., as part of his probation agreement--have offered Walker an insight into problems regarding the homeless.

He insists he’s not attempting any moral atonement by working for the nonprofit organization.

“I’m helping a cause here, and, above all, that makes me feel good,” he said. “And I have a lot of respect for Father Carroll and what he’s doing here. If that sounds corny, so be it.”

Carroll said he encountered little resistence from the organization’s board of directors in hiring Walker. The move was not only the right thing to do, he said, but it was also a good business decision.

“Being the Catholic Church, we’re supposed to represent a forgiving image in the community,” he said. “But, on the other hand, here was a man with great talent, great connections who I can get at a reasonable price.

“From strictly a business point of view, it was a great investment for St. Vincent De Paul. We decided the man had paid his debt. Leave him alone. Let him go to work.”

For Walker, however, it’s not easy to dismiss the past. He is reminded each time he picks up a newspaper or watches a newscast detailing the latest S&L; crisis or some far-flung governor’s decision.

Insiders say the story of Dan Walker is a rags-to-riches rise from a modest home in Encanto to political prominence.

His fall from grace, they say, resulted from his desperate attempts to preserve the lifestyle and social standing he had enjoyed as governor.

“Dan just got used to the lifestyle he’d earned in public office,” said Robert Ellis, an Illinois journalist who is writing a biography of Walker.

“It was a status he never thought he’d achieve. It allowed him to meet important people and reach a level of social prominence that enchanted him. He missed the roar of the crowd. He didn’t want to give that lifestyle up.”

One Chicago reporter said: “Dan Walker could have joined a blue-chip law firm like a lot of other ex-governors and done very well. But he just thought he was a real smart businessman, someone trying to live the millionaire’s life without being a millionaire. It’s a sad story.”

At Walker’s sentencing in 1987, after pleading guilty to bank fraud, misapplication of funds and perjury, a stern-faced U.S. District Judge Ann Williams chastised the ex-governor for his arrogance and for such conspicuous displays as his “Gov Dan” license plates.

“You were--and you lived--the American Dream,” she said. “And, in this court’s view, that was not enough for you.”

A half-century earlier, as the son of a career Navy enlisted man, Walker took the first steps toward that dream, distinguishing himself at an early age as an intense achiever.

Valedictorian of San Diego High School’s class of 1940, he joined the Navy a short time later. He eventually entered the U.S. Naval Academy--not by appointment, but by taking the competitive exams.

He then served briefly on a destroyer stationed off Korea toward the end of World War II. During the Korean conflict, Walker was recalled to active duty and served on yet another destroyer, achieving the rank of lieutenant.

At the age of 28, Walker graduated second in his class at the Northwestern University Law School, where he was editor of the law review. He then served in various prestigious posts, including law clerk to U.S. Chief Justice Fred Vinson and aide to Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson II.

In 1966, at the age of 44, he became general counsel of Montgomery Ward & Co. at an annual salary of $118,000--at the same time engaging in such civic duties as conducting a study of the riots after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination for a city commission.

Walker’s first big political break came when President Johnson named him to investigate the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. His findings, which became known as the Walker Report, attributed much of the violence to a “police riot”--making Walker the patron saint of Vietnam War-era liberals throughout the Midwest.

He quickly cashed in on the notoriety. In 1972, in his first attempt at public office, and without the party’s blessing, the young political greenhorn defeated then-Lt. Gov. (and now senator) Paul Simon in the primary and eventually moved into the governor’s mansion.

The campaign included what most insiders remember as The Walk--in which Walker, dressed in khaki pants, hiking boots, and blue denim shirt around which hung a red bandanna, made the 1,197-mile trek crisscrossing Illinois.

For four months, he walked--shaking the hands of people he met, at night sleeping in their homes.

Chicago “Mayor (Richard) Daley and the others always told people I never walked those miles, that I always jumped out of a car on the edge of town,” Walker recalled with a smile.

“I wasn’t the candidate selected by the party. But people realized that I was for real. I related to people, right down to where they were on the street. The message came through loud and clear, the message that I cared.”

The Chicago press has called Walker’s one term as governor a free-for-all, citing his constant battles with the Legislature, reporters and Mayor Daley--wars waged over Walker’s opposition to a Chicago cross-town expressway and his reinstitution of the death penalty in 1973.

But Walker says he is proud of his accomplishments as governor and especially misses the weekends he would walk the streets of Illinois communities, stopping in stores and bars to talk with real people--many of whom called him Governor Dan.

He liked being recognized on the street, he said. It pumped him up and gave him satisfaction he was to find nowhere else.

But, while on the verge of making the final step to political greatness--shortly after he and several close aides weighed possible strategies in opposing Jimmy Carter for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination--Walker’s personal and political life began to unravel.

First, his bid for a second term as governor ended in defeat, a setback that ended his presidential aspirations. After leaving the governor’s mansion, there came a string of unsuccessful business ventures.

They were followed by the illegal loans from the thrift that prosecutors say Walker and his second wife, a management expert, used to finance their oil-change chain franchise and for personal expenses, including the operation of their yacht, the Governor’s Lady.

Many of the loans involved a close friend as well as one of Walker’s sons--both of whom have been ordered to repay debts totaling more than $275,000. Walker secured loans from other banks as well, submitting applications with exaggerated personal financial figures to get them.

Walker to this day disputes the $1.4 million figure prosecutors say was illegally obtained from the S&L; he purchased and from other banks, which a judge said Walker used as “a personal piggy bank, a personal kitty.”

Walker places the figure at less than $100,000 and says he never used it to maintain a lavish lifestyle. In the end, he says, the money will all be paid back.

“There was no massive rip-off here, no one was hurt personally,” he said. “I was not a good businessman--was just not good at it. That was my mistake. I’m certainly no (Charles) Keating. I’m not the father of the S&L; crisis.”

Despite that defense, Governor Dan became Inmate No. 96928-024.

During those 18 months, Walker worked on two books--one about 1st Century origins of Christianity, the second a cookbook.

He laughs when he recites the title of another book--the biography being written about him. “Governor, You’re Eating My Salad,” he said, refers to the Nixon White House dinner in which Walker mistakenly began eating the First Lady’s salad.

The federal prison where he worked as a teacher and counselor and had to clean toilets and pick up cigarette butts, was a far cry from those heady days.

“It was a minimum-security prison but those places are not country clubs,” he recalled. “Yes, I played tennis, but at a guard’s whim you had to take off all your clothes or submit yourself if he decided to look up each and every one of your orifices.”

Both the high-rolling and prison are past now, and Dan Walker is on the move again.

Each weekday morning he reports to a small office overlooking the homeless organization’s thrift store on Market Street.

He spends his days working with regular donors who might want to set up a trust fund for the group following their death. On some mornings he breakfasts with homeless men and women at the mission--research, he says, for an informal study of the makeup of San Diego’s homeless population.

On the walls surrounding his desk hang the mementos of a former life--pictures of Walker with Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, as well as King Gustaf XVI of Sweden and the late Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

There are family shots, a picture of Walker’s first State-of-the-State address as Illinois governor and the image of which Walker is perhaps most proud--a snapshot of himself and two sons during The Walk.

The man in that picture stands ramrod straight, looking much like a young Jimmy Stewart as he flashes his patented smile at contender Paul Simon, now an Illinois senator.

The tired-looking figure who now reflects on those images is a much older man. The piercing eyes are more deeply set. But Walker, dressed in a neatly pressed beige suit, still moves with the aura of someone aware of his own significance--although with a new-found humility.

“This whole thing has taken a . . . toll on Dan,” biographer Ellis said. “He’s lost all he had personally and professionally. His health is failing. He has chronic bronchitis, emphysema and arthritis.

“But he’ll make it. Whatever it was that got him to become governor will get him through this.”

For now, however, the future holds as many questions for Dan Walker as he has regrets about the past.

Friends tell him he should return to law, or teach--that his life is a study of how to run for political office and win. He says he may help reopen a friend’s sandwich shop in Pacific Beach, working nights and weekends.

Walker says he’s just happy with the anonymity he has found in San Diego. Other than checking in with his probation officer once a month, he can try to forget about life as Governor Dan and all the rest.

“But I still can’t meet people without that nagging thought ‘What does this person know about my past? What are they thinking about me?’ ” he said. “I can’t get it out of my mind. What are they thinking about me?”

There are moments, however, when Walker is reminded of the good times.

Recently, while walking along Imperial Beach, a stranger called out a question: “Hey, Governor Dan, how the hell are your feet?”

Walker smiled at the memory. “He was from downstate Illinois and he remembered The Walk,” the ex-governor said. “It makes you feel good when they remember The Walk.”