Robert Sabonjian`s name is seldom mentioned without the title ”Mayor,”
an office from which he ran the City of Waukegan in a personal and often controversial style for 24 years.
Mr. Sabonjian, 76, died Wednesday in Milwaukee after suffering a massive stroke.
Although he retired from politics in 1989, his friends, family and political colleagues said Thursday that most still will continue to think of him as Mayor Sabonjian-as he was addressed over the course of four decades.
Or they also might continue to fondly remember him as ”The Rock,” a nickname he inherited from his younger days as a boxer.
Mr. Sabonjian unabashedly found city jobs for friends and family members. He enjoyed comparisons of himself to contemporary Mayor Richard J. Daley, the embodiment of old-time, person-to-person politics. He even invoked the Chicago patriarch in defense of his personal style of running city government from 1957 to 1977, and again in the late 1980s.
His office at the Waukegan City Hall was often filled with people who wanted to ask for his help face-to-face, said his daughter, Dana Depke, who worked for four years as her father`s administrative aide.
”He would talk to anybody,” Depke said. ”Sometimes you had to wait for a while, but he made sure he talked to everybody who wanted to see him. . . . Somehow my father would always be able to help them out.”
By the end of his tenure in 1989, the mayor was finding summer employment for the children of people who had taken their first jobs with him in the 1950s, Depke recalled. Some accused him of pulling too many strings, a charge that partly brought about his election defeat in 1977 and eight-year absence from the mayor`s office.
But in his heyday, Mr. Sabonjian`s reputation came from bold public tactics, such as the firing of more than 50 striking police officers to abruptly end a bitter 1970 union feud.
He also pioneered the expansion of Waukegan westward from the shores of Lake Michigan, across to the Tri-State Tollway during the 1970s, a drive for which he also weathered criticism.
In his later years, Mr. Sabonjian looked back on that accomplishment with particular pride, friends said. It was Mr. Sabonjian`s vision that brought about the expansion, said Waukegan Mayor Haig Paravonian, his friend and successor.
”The city had some great years under him,” Paravonian said. ”He took a lot of heat for the way he did things. He ran things the way he thought they should be run.”
His rise to mayor represented a high achievement to the people of the south side Waukegan community he and Mr. Sabonjian grew up in, Paravonian said. Mr. Sabonjian was born to Armenian immigrants, who had made their home along Genessee and Oak Streets with others of Armenian descent.
Friends from the neighborhood later became his political allies and proteges. Among them were Paravonian and Lake County Circuit Judge Jack Hoogasian.
Paravonian was 10 years old when Sabonjian made his first bid for alderman, and he joined several neighborhood boys in playing on the basketball team Sabonjian sponsored to get his name out.
He lost in that first election. But when Mr. Sabonjian was elected alderman and later mayor, the people of his neighborhood considered the achievement their own, Paravonian said.
Friends on Thursday noted Mr. Sabonjian`s sometimes controversial way of doing things.
But even the people who disagreed with Mr. Sabonjian respected and liked him, Hoogasian said Thursday. The former mayor had a humorous, impromptu speaking style, a trait that worked for him in his long life in politics and in business as a dry cleaner owner and insurance company executive, he said.
”The reason he was funny was because he was always one step ahead of you,” Hoogasian said. ”He was like that as mayor too. He was always working on a good comeback.”
After an eight-year hiatus from the mayor`s post in the early 1980s, Mr. Sabonjian returned to office, and immediately replaced several staff leaders with new appointees he said he trusted.
When critics complained, Mr. Sabonjian responded openly: ”I`m the first to say I hire friends. I don`t hire enemies . . . I`ll do anything in the world for a friend, and I expect them to do the same for me,” he said in an interview with The Tribune after he made his comeback in 1985.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Lorene; a son, Robert; a brother; five sisters; a grandson; and several nieces and nephews. Visitation will be in the Marsh Funeral Home of Gurnee, 305 Cemetery Rd., from 4 to 9 p.m. Friday. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at the First Christian Church, 326 Julian St., Waukegan.
On Thursday, city buildings lowered their flags to half staff. At Fire Department headquarters, firefighters draped black shrouds over the doorway to their offices.
