Thursday, January 24, 2008
Chicago Tribune
by Gary Washburn

John Stroger, the young man from little Helena, Ark., who came to Chicago seeking better opportunities more than five decades ago, was lauded Wednesday by the powerful of Illinois politics who knew him as one of their own.

At Stroger's funeral service, Mayor Richard Daley became emotional as he remembered his old friend and political ally. Rev. Jesse Jackson had the crowd of mourners on their feet. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recounted Stroger's contributions to the needy whose cause he made his own as president of the Cook County Board.

"A few days ago, his great heart failed him," Durbin said. "But his great heart never failed the poor, the voiceless."

Stroger, 78, died last Friday of complications from a debilitating stroke he suffered in 2006.

Seeking re-election that year, he won the Democratic primary from his hospital bed a week after the stroke but retired from office four months later without ever appearing in public again. Three months after that, voters elected his son, Todd, to succeed him in the county's top job after he replaced his father on the ballot.

On Wednesday, long lines of mourners walked up the center aisle of St. Felicitas Catholic Church on the South Side to pay their final respects at Stroger's casket before the start of a memorial service and funeral mass that lasted more than 2 1/2 hours. Family members, politicians, elected officials, union leaders, old friends and residents of the 8th Ward, where he served for years as Democratic committeeman, filled the pews of the large church and stood in aisles along the walls when the seats ran out.

Stroger built a dominating organization and aligned himself with the city's premier political family on his way to serving three terms as the County Board's first African-American president. He came of age during the heyday of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley's political machine and applied those lessons decades later, unapologetically doling out jobs and contracts to family, friends and supporters.

"He was good for the neighborhood," Roosevelt Bell, 89, a longtime Stroger neighbor from