Born to run

Guy Glodis hits the campaign trail

by Walter Crockett

It's 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning and state representative Guy Glodis is pursuing the love of his life -- the electorate.

The 29-year-old Worcester Democrat is downing breakfast at Shaker's Café on Hamilton Street -- two boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios topped with frozen strawberries. But his real nourishment is politics. Red hair, a ruddy complexion, and intense blue eyes showcase his Irish side. An extra 25 pounds on what should be a 200-pound frame -- neatly packed into a dark suit, white shirt and tie -- reveal a politician too tied to the campaign treadmill to find time for the health-club treadmill. He's busting a move to state senate.

At the end of the counter, a man in a baseball cap is looking for a job. "You get together a résumé," Glodis tells him. "What I'll do is I'll call 'em at the Voke school and tell 'em `He's a good friend of mine.'"

Another man calls out, "I know who you are. I knew your father when he was a counselor at the school."

"My father and I are very different people," Glodis replies. His outspoken father, Bill Glodis, made a few enemies in 17 years as a state representative. Guy Glodis wants to be seen as his own man.

Meet the hardest working Generation X'er in local politics.

Up at 6:30 a.m., out to breakfast by eight. Bolting for Boston at 9:30 when the legislature is in session. Campaigning from here to Hopedale and back when it's not. Filling his evenings with community meetings and neighborhood obligations. Sliding home by 10:30 or so to write thank-you notes and to drain 25 messages off his answering machine. Chilling out at 11 to Star Trek reruns. Tossing and turning all night as campaign strategies parade through his head.

Call Guy Glodis what you want, but don't call him a slacker. He's been primed for politics most of his life, making his first campaign speech for his father at the age of 11 -- but this is just his third run for public office. In 1992, fresh out of UMass-Amherst, he took on Senator Matt Amorello (R-Grafton) in the 1st Worcester and Middlesex District. Amorello trounced him.

In 1996, after licking his wounds, mending his fences, and joining every neighborhood group in sight, Glodis found a more realistic goal: he ran for the 16th Worcester District state representative seat held by his father, who was retiring. This time Guy kicked butt, winning 78 percent of the vote and racking up more votes than his old man had ever pulled in.

His district takes in Vernon Hill, Grafton Hill, and Quinsigamond Village. Every precinct of it lies within Amorello's senatorial district. So when Amorello decided to challenge Congressman Jim McGovern this year, Glodis plunged into the race to fill Amorello's seat.

His Republican opponent could be lawyer Karen Polito of Shrewsbury, a Generation X'er of another stripe. But Glodis first has to beat a couple of Democrats to get a shot at her -- Jennifer Callahan of Sutton, and the well-heeled Paul Nordberg of Auburn, who was an aide to former Congressman Joe Early.

On this winter Saturday, Glodis is crisscrossing the senatorial district, which includes several wards in Worcester, plus Leicester, Auburn, Millbury, Grafton, Upton, Hopedale, Sutton, and Shrewsbury. There's no better day than today to solidify his base, because Democrats in the towns are holding caucuses to elect state convention delegates.

He stops by a labor breakfast at the Holiday Inn where the big cheeses laud his 100 percent pro-labor voting record and pledge their support. Then he points his '91 Buick Regal toward Millbury Town Hall for a caucus, scoots over to Auburn for some signature gathering, rides the back roads to Leicester for another caucus, zips to Shrewsbury for a third, and caps the day with a senior-citizens dance in Sutton.

Guy's got his ducks in line. He's been working the towns for almost a year. He's king of the road. He knows every issue in every town. Twelve of the 16 Democratic ward and town chairmen are in his camp partly because he's taken the time to listen to them. His paid consultant is Worcester Mayor Ray Mariano, who hasn't lost a state senate race for 15 years. His campaign manager is Paul Westberg, who managed Mariano's runs for mayor.

"The single most important part of any campaign is the candidate," Mariano says. "The harder he or she is willing to work, the easier it is on the rest of the campaign. Guy is a relentless campaigner. . . . He's everywhere."

Guy Glodis is an only child -- three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Lithuanian. As a Massachusetts pol he would have been better off with an Irish surname, but the Lithuanian moniker will at least earn him points on Vernon Hill. And the Glodis family name surely helped him inherit the seat of his silver-maned maverick of a dad. When Guy ran for Bill's seat, the lawn signs simply read "Glodis."

But Guy has been very much his own maverick since he arrived in the modest Glodis home in Quinsig Village back in the late '60s.

"As a little kid, two and a half, Bill would take him to the Lithuanian club on Vernon Street, and Guy would go from table to table and sit and talk with all the old cronies," his mother, Pat Glodis, recalls. When Guy was three, his neighborhood companions were seven-year-olds. He stood up to them from day one.

Bill and Pat sold a small house on Cape Cod to send Guy to Worcester Academy. The working-class kid from the village was elected president of his eighth and ninth grade classes. "He had signs outside the cafeteria, `Vote for Glodis and you'll be noticed,'" his mother recalls. And when Guy became the only freshman ever elected president of the entire Worcester Academy student body, his future was sealed.

He was the starting center on the Worcester Academy football team, but he was too small to play college ball at UMass. An average student, who considers Eddie Van Halen the best guitarist ever and Breathless the best movie, Guy has had his share of fun. "My father didn't get his gray hair for nothing," he says.

"I think he likes a good time," his mother says. "I think he could be a little bit too frisky at times. I'll say one thing: his love and his devotion for a political life have kept him walking a straight and narrow line."

Only one skeleton has been found in Glodis's closet. In his senior year at UMass, peeved at a campus atmosphere he once called "so liberal it would make Clark look conservative," Glodis staged a TV debate in which he reportedly baited radicals and gays, appeared with a leggy babe on his arm, and attacked affirmative action. The campus newspaper branded it "organized bigotry." Glodis says it was a big joke that got blown out of proportion.

The Boston Globe wrote about it in 1992. Carolyn Serra Grenier, Glodis's primary opponent in 1996, called it "the sign of a sick mind." But that didn't keep him from creaming Grenier in the primary.

Glodis is still opposed to affirmative action -- but he's pro-choice, and he supports gay rights. He favors workfare instead of welfare. He owns a couple of guns, and he says he's a big supporter of the right to bear arms. He's in favor of the death penalty for first-degree murderers. And he votes pro-labor every time.

In short, Glodis is a conservative democrat with liberal trimmings who calls himself a moderate. And his brand of "moderation" is right at home in Central Massachusetts. "I like his issues," says Tom Brennan, chairman of the Leicester selectmen, who sported a Glodis pin at the caucus. "I find his conservative stands refreshing."

There is another love in Glodis's life -- his fiancée, Tina Campanale, a public-school art teacher with whom he shares an apartment off Massasoit Road. They're getting married on April 17. Five days in Aruba on honeymoon may be their last quality time together this side of November. "I knew what I was getting into," she says. "This is what he wants though. It's his every dream and hope and desire."

It's not just his favorite dream. It's his favorite reality. You can see it in his face as he approaches voters outside the Auburn post office. It comes pouring out in a big, good-natured laugh. If people don't like him, he shrugs it off. If they have a good word for him he'll write their names down and send them a thank-you note when he gets home at night.

"You know when I like holding signs the best?" Glodis asks. "When it's raining. Then the people say, `This kid wants a job. We'll give him a vote.'" n