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TEXT FOR INTRODUCTION
Dan Rutherford is an executive with a Fortune
500 Company and an accomplished State Legislator. He was first elected to the
Illinois Senate in 2002, following a 10-year term in the House of
Representatives where he served as Assistant Republican Leader.
Dan has a history of involvement in politics.
He began his career as a Legislative Assistant in Springfield. In the GOP
Primary of 1980, Dan coordinated a Congressional District for Governor Ronald
Reagan’s campaign where he caught the eye of the Reagan National Campaign and
was tapped to be the state-wide Executive Director of Illinois for the General
Election.
Declining an opportunity to serve in the Reagan
White House, Dan stayed in Illinois, working with Governor Jim Thompson as head
of the International Business Division of the Illinois Department of Commerce.
In the mid 1980s, Dan joined the ServiceMaster
Company and eventually became responsible for expansion of the company’s
businesses internationally, licensing services in sixteen different countries.
ServiceMaster is a family of service companies with trade names such as
ServiceMaster Clean, Terminix, Tru-Green Chem Lawn, Merry Maids, American Home
Shield, and Rescue Rooter.
On the lighter side, Dan is an adventurer. As a
young person, Dan enjoyed camping, fishing, and adventure. In high school he
was a foreign exchange student to Barbados. After graduating from college, he
back-packed across Europe and in his mid-twenties he took a few months to lead
safaris in Kenya.
Dan learned to sail boats and crewed for
numerous Chicago to Mackinaw Island Races, competed in regattas off of
Melbourne, and cruised the southern coast of Australia.
Before his 30th birthday, Dan joined
a small group of adventurers and the 12 of them took three months crossing
Africa in their diesel Bedford truck. They started in Algeria and went south
through Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Zaire, and Burundi.
Having been on all the continents of the world
but one, Dan had to figure out how to get to Antarctica before his 40th
birthday. With a lot of luck and a few connections he found himself in the
Falkland Islands meeting a Russian icebreaker with a group of naturalists. He
spent two weeks exploring the continent, including Christmas floating on the
tabular iceberg in Antarctic Sound!!
Last, but not least, after skydiving in college
and learning to fly in younger years, Dan decided to master scuba diving. He is
an Advanced Certified Diver, logging well over 200 dives. He is a
conservationist, personally establishing wildlife habitat and planting over
13,000 trees and shrubs at his rural home.
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