When it wasn’t a staff member pushing the idea, it was a village president or nonprofit director: “Why isn’t Mike Kelly the Journal’s Villager of the Year?” they’d demand.
“Great idea,” I’d say. “Now find me someone who will talk about him!”
Until this weekend, no one ever talked on the record about Mike Kelly and his work at Park National Bank. So aware were people that being talked about made Kelly uncomfortable in an altogether charming way.
But now that the feds have closed his remarkable bank and spit it back out into the hands of a faceless company, everyone’s talking. Everybody’s got a story about Kelly’s good works. This week, we’re telling as many of those stories as we can because, make no mistake, something powerful and unique has been ripped from this village, from the West Side.
For most people in Oak Park and River Forest, Mike Kelly was an unknown. You might have driven by his banks and had a vague sense they were unusually handsome buildings in unlikely locations.
People outside the area who followed banking inevitably developed an odd fascination with Kelly’s extraordinary story. “The Billionaire Next Door: Rich, But Not Famous” was Crain’s headline on a classic profile years back. In most stories, you’d find the “reclusive billionaire” reference.
Mike Kelly is anything but a recluse, though. He’s quiet. He’s humble. He’s determined not to be the story. But he is entirely in the world. He just wants to live in the world on his terms. One letter writer noted seeing him most often eating lunch at Wendy’s on Madison. I’d see him pull up many mornings to Caribou at Oak Park and Lake, driving an older Jeep, a bank repo.
Lynda Schueler of PADS tells of Kelly coming to the office and listening to the challenges they faced in dealing with homelessness. Paul McKenna of Village Players appreciates that Kelly joined the board during a financial meltdown and offered advice on how to make a fix permanent. Marty Noll of Community Bank writes that there isn’t a charter school or new private school on the West Side that Park National hasn’t helped substantially fund.
I’ve been talking to conflicted veteran staffers at Park National who wanted nothing more than to extol Kelly’s generosity. But then they’d catch themselves and go quiet: “My loyalty belongs to Mike.”
Oak Park’s loyalty belongs to Mike Kelly, too. No one else has had such an impact on this community and its vital neighboring West Side. And so, while he’ll undoubtedly squirm at all this attention, ultimately what we can do after the drama and the pain and the loss is to say thank you. Then we’ll wait, quietly, for his next chapter.
