Remembering Tony Immel

opinions

October 29, 2010 - 12:00 AM

Angelo Scott and Tony Immel were good friends. Played golf together. Partied together in their homes and at the country club. Talked politics ceaselessly. Scott was publisher of the Register and a crony of the state’s Republican officeholders. Immel was a state senator tabbed by many to become governor.
Scott liked to remember when the two of them were walking along the sidewalk on the south side of the square one afternoon and noticed a car without a driver headed toward a crash with parked vehicles. Immel sprinted toward the car, opened the driver’s door, jumped in and stopped it before it did any damage. Scott told the story — perhaps too many times — to illustrate Immel’s character. He was a man of action; a problem-solver.
A decade younger, my memories of Tony are different. He was to me the sterling example of a progressive politician. Here in Allen County he joined Walter Wulf of Humboldt and other progressives in advocating the consolidation of all of the county’s school districts and the construction of a county high school south and east of Iola. In the Legislature he was on a committee — maybe he was chairman — appointed to study and propose political consolidations around the state. Kansas, he would proclaim, didn’t need all those townships and had way too many counties.
Consolidation would save money and lead to more efficient government. Kansas would move forward and set an example for the rest of the nation, he said.
Preaching consolidation in the late 1950s was as courageous and politically risky as it is today. Immel did it so convincingly, however, that it enhanced his reputation for leadership and initiative.
Tony’s senate career was cut short. He was defeated in 1960 by a candidate from Yates Center because there had been an agreement between the Old Guard in Allen and Woodson counties — which dominated the senate district — that they would take turns nominating and electing a senator. It wasn’t Allen County’s turn. So Tony was defeated and that ended his career in elective politics.
Iola would have benefited in many ways that can only be guessed at if he had become governor. Iola did benefit in ways easy to enumerate be-cause he turned his energies away from Topeka and focused on his adopted hometown.
He was chairman of the Allen County Hospital board of directors for years. He was a charter member of the board of Iola Industries, Inc. and was a key leader during the years when Iola attracted the industries that have been so important to it over the past 55 years.
Tony also deserves enormous credit for en-couraging families and individuals to establish trusts to benefit the Bowlus Fine Arts Center. It was partly because of his dedicated interest in the Bowlus that the Sleeper Family Trust and the Helen Gates Whitehead Trust now make gifts in the tens of thousands of dollars annually to the Bowlus.
His energy, his enthusiasm, his great sense of humor, his dedication to his family, his church, his political party, to Kansas and Iola brightened every corner he touched. It was our great, good fortune that he came our way.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

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