“Bob always wanted to talk about issues and, frankly, he took an interest in the local political scene, too,” said his longtime friend Taylor Pensoneau, a retired Statehouse reporter and lobbyist. “He always wanted to discuss individuals, political movements and people that he considered to be on the right side of things, and then there were those who he didn’t understand why they did certain things. But he always wanted to have that conversation.”
Bob was president and co-founder of Citizens Club of Springfield, a forum dedicated to civic engagement and community improvement. He had a long career in Illinois state politics and government from which he retired in 2002.
“He was Republican but he was, in my opinion, moderate – quite moderate – definitely not far right,” Pensoneau said.
Bob earned bachelor and master’s degrees from Southern Illinois University. During his early career he taught at Proviso West High School in Hillside, Ohio State University, and served as a school administrator at Dundee District 300. In 1967, he moved to Springfield with his wife, Judy. They were married 55 years before her death in 2019.
Kent Gray, Bob’s only child, said his father got his first taste of statewide politics when James R. Thompson asked him to be a part of his campaign staff during his first run for governor in 1976.
“My dad had become president of the Springfield Jaycees and then ended up being president of the Illinois Jaycees. And back in those days, that meant that you basically traveled the state of Illinois and gave speeches to other organizations and community groups,” Kent Gray said. “A lot of times, those speeches were on the same circuit as a relatively young U.S. Attorney named Jim Thompson. And he and Thompson got to be really good friends out on the road. When Thompson decided to run for governor in ’75 for the ’76 season, he hired my dad.”
Following Thompson’s election, Bob served in various state agencies, often as the governor’s “eyes and ears” monitoring just what was happening within the bureaucracy.
“Dad got in a position, like a lot of people do, where the money was pretty good working in state government. He was certainly politically active, and probably not in a position where anybody was going to do anything too troublesome to him,” Kent Gray said. “And so he made pretty good money and helped out (and) donated, did field work, worked his precinct and he raised me to do the same thing. As soon as I was old enough to ride a bike, he had me deliver all the brochures to everybody’s paper box. Basically, he had a really good life in Springfield, Illinois, and he stayed in state government a lot longer than most people do.”
Kent Redfield, a retired political science professor at University of Illinois Springfield, said Bob’s decision to help found the Citizens Club is one of his crowning achievements.
“It’s modeled after the City Club in Chicago,” he said. “The idea is to have a forum that gets people together to talk about civic issues.” Redfield recently moderated a forum at the Citizens Club where three area journalists analyzed the results of the November election.
Bob was president of the club for its first 16 years and stepped down in 2022. Shortly after his retirement, he told Illinois Times, “I think we’ve done a good job at getting a good mix of ideas and civil conversations on major issues.”
Speakers brought in by the Citizens Club have included local and statewide politicians along with area experts who have discussed issues such as race relations, health care, fracking, government efficiency and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sangamon County Board Chair Andy Van Meter said another highlight of Bob’s career is how he strove to make local government more efficient.
“He was really one of the instigators of the efficiency commission,” said Van Meter. “He was very much of the school that when government duplicated services it wasted money, because we were operating with legacy institutions from a horse-and-buggy era that needed to move into the digital age.”
The merger of the Sangamon County and Springfield Health Departments is one example of an efficiency that had its genesis in the commission that Bob helped start, Van Meter said.
Another brainchild of Bob’s that continues is the Regional Leadership Council, which is a group of area mayors and the Sangamon County administrator that meets monthly.
“I remember one of the things they accomplished early on was consolidating the creation of road signs, which saved the municipalities a lot of money,” Van Meter said. “And now they use either the county or the city (of Springfield’s) capabilities to make road signs. … It was a constant theme of his to look for ways to cooperate and consolidate.”
Scott Reeder is a staff writer for Illinois Times who knew of Bob Gray through his community involvement over the years.
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This article appears in Remembering 2024.
