By Eleonora di Liscia
Charles Troy is paying for his sins—by volunteering at Tenth Dems! Since 2013, Charles has served as a graphic designer for the newsletter.
In 1992, Charles had his own graphic design/copywriting business. An Evanston client asked Charles if he would mind doing work for a political candidate: a Republican running against Congressman Sid Yates, who was then 88 years old.
“I read this guy’s positions, and I thought, ‘That sounds all right.’ I could make a case for a younger guy against a guy who is past his prime. I believe in a two-party system. The guy then lost to Yates 60-40. Yates got the message to step down in 1994, and Jan Schakowsky ran and that was that,” Charles explained.
“Then I forgot about it until 2010 when we were living in Mundelein and represented by Melissa Bean, who I liked a lot. There was a Republican primary, and I was horrified to see one of them was the guy I had done work for in 1992. It was Joe Walsh. I saw what his positions were now, and I thought, ‘How sad. Eighteen years ago I did work for this guy, and now I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’ And he won. I was in agony for two years being represented by this jerk.”
In 2012, Mundelein was redistricted into the 10th. “Then Brad Schneider won in my new district, and I was so appreciative and grateful that as expiation for my doing work for this awful Joe Walsh 20 years ago, I offered my services to Tenth Dems to do the newsletter,” Charles said.
But volunteering for Tenth Dems isn’t all penance. Charles appreciates the chance to give back “by using the skills I have developed, in support of the local outpost of the national political party that I strongly support.”
Born in Chicago, Charles was raised in Skokie, graduating from Evanston High. “My parents were Stevenson Democrats, and I remember being very excited about the election of 1952 when I was 6 years old. That conditioned me to Democrats losing,” he said.
Charles attended the University of Michigan, earning a B.A. in English. He had hoped to become a musical theater lyricist but, because of Vietnam, Charles went on to obtain a Master’s in English from New York University.
Returning to Chicago in 1969, Charles eventually worked for Foote, Cone and Belding, one of the largest advertising agencies. But the job was nothing like Mad Men. “I was on the least glorious account. I was on International Harvester. I wrote about farm implements. It was talking about manure spreaders and combines,” he said.
In 1972, Charles joined the family textile distribution business, but he was never happy. After his mother died in 1990, he decided “there was no one left to please except myself,” so he hung his own shingle as a graphic designer and copywriter in desktop publishing. “I was basically a creative fish out of water, badly cast as a businessman,” he said.
Charles worked out of his Highland Park home from 1990 until 2003, when he got an account laying out the catalog for OASIS, a senior learning center in Northbrook.
“I saw they had a number of classes in musical theater, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is something I should be doing,’” he said.
Charles let his accounts “wither away by attrition. What I’m doing now is something different and very exciting.” He creates and shows multimedia presentations on musical theater topics.
“I do the stories behind the show or the stories behind the songwriters who wrote the great musicals. I do the research, I do the graphic design, and I put them together in a program called Keynote with audio tracks and film clips. That’s what I do mostly these days,” he said.
Charles presents monthly at the Skokie Theater. His most recent production is “The Creation of A Little Night Music,” the show by Steven Sondheim. He also appears at an annual Cole Porter festival and has done presentations on Christmas songs from the Great American Songbook and a recent collaboration with the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band on the history of Yiddish theater, which included a live band.
Essentially a lifelong Democrat, Charles remembers “when you could legitimately think of voting for the man but not the party. And I don’t think that has been possible for 20 years. I think anyone who calls themselves an independent now is fooling themselves,” he said. “I never had a time where I was flirting with the basic precepts of Republicanism, although there are certain things like welfare in the extreme, people not relying on themselves, that’s where it gets sticky for me.”
Charles sees government as having a role in balancing “off the baser impulses of human nature. That to me is the core of what the Democratic Party stands for. We simply cannot tell government to stay out of everything. It doesn’t work.”