Karl Monroe Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Karl Monroe 14
A: Well, at any rate Orville Hodge, of course as a lot of people remember
was the Illinois state auditor who was caught up with and people discovered
that he had stolen maybe a million dollars of the state's money. Orville
had a rather phenomenal success as a politican. He was a back slapping,
well, he was what people expected a politican to be like. He was a back
slapper, he picked up the tab, he spent money pretty freely, he tried to
be friendly to everybody. He was the man of the year in Granite City a
couple of years before he was caught up with in Springfield. It turned
out that he had been picking up the tab with the state's money and had
been on the make every way he could be.
One of the really odd stories about hlm was told to me by a local gambler
who was pretty friendly to me, who used to stop in and chat and so on.
He told me one time that he had a reputation, he never made an awful lot
of money, but he had a reputation among the gamblers and among the people
around the edges of crime of being a straight shooter. They felt like
they could trust him and I trusted him. He wouldn't con you. He'd tell
you the straight dope. And he wouldn't steal your money. He might get
into a gambling game that wasn't legal qrd make some money on you that
way, but it'd be honest.
Q: This was Orville Hodge you're talking about?
A: No, no. This wasn't Orville. This was the fellow I'm talking to.
Well, this man told me one time that they came to him and they wanted
somebody to be the collector from the houses of prostitution on Route 40.
And he said he wasn't about to become involved in messing around with
prostitution. He didn't hold with that. He felt that gambling was a
nice clean business even if it wasn't legal. But prostitution he wanted
no part of. But he said he got a little curious. So he asked these
fellows, "Well, how would you keep books on a house of prostitution? How
could you tell whether they were giving you an honest count?" They said,
"Well, you count the towels," and this turned his stomach. But the thing
that ia amusing about it is that this job he says was the start in the
rise upward for Orville Hodge. And this sort of startled me that he told
me that, and I hope this doesn't get published because I couldn't prove
that. The man's dead now. And I think Orville is too, for that matter.
But it kind of goes to show how somebody can start pretty shady and end
up very high, and it turns out that the shadiness comes right on out
anyway. You asked about my father and the politicans and so forth. Dad
opposed Henry Horner on many things. He respected the man but he opposed
him on the sales tax. And he opposed him on numerous other things. And
as Henry got older, he came to have a serious illness. I don't know what
his illness was, but it got to the point where he simply couldn't function.
And a pipsqueak named Nudleman, Sam Nudleman, from Belleville who had
been in the clothing business and gone broke, got some kind of minor
league political job in the revenue department in Springfield and by
shear guts and pushiness and the fact that Horner was not really able to
function, this man Nudleman emerged as running the state of Illinois for
a while. It was a terrible situation. He was on the make.
Q: In what capacity was he working in when he did this?