The following is a typical day in the life of former Park Forest Mayor Jon Vanderbilt.
At 9 a.m. each weekday, he goes to his full-time job at L3VEL 3, a repository for a cosmetics company engaged in worldwide sales located inside the old Barnaby’s Restaurant on Western Avenue in Park Forest.
At 5 p.m. (“or sometimes at 5:05,” he says), he locks the doors of the warehouse, picks up his oldest son, Lucas, at school and then home for dinner with his wife, Kathleen, and their three sons.
On the last Tuesday of each month, however, he drives to Prairie State College. As the vice chair of the school’s board of directors, he dutifully attends these meetings. His position on the board enables him to maintain a fairly normal schedule. This routine is a far cry from his daily, six-year grind, first as a village trustee then as mayor from 2019 to 2023.
Vanderbilt won a seat on the Village Board in 2017 and two years later, when then Mayor John Ostenburg retired after 20 years, he beat Trustee Mae Brandon by 23 votes in a closely contested mayoral race.
There is a nasty little secret about running for public office. Some voters may think since they voted for you, they now own you. For Vanderbilt, his days were split in trying to govern a community while needing to earn a living for his growing family. All the while he encountered increased expectations of residents demanding answers to questions ranging from streets in need of repair to why the village has one of the state’s highest property tax rates.
A carpenter by trade and an entrepreneur by choice, Vanderbilt tried to manage his work schedule, his 24-hour-a-day duties as mayor and his duties as a parent. It soon became a juggling act, but instead of manipulating balls in the air, he was trying to catch heavy bricks.
Vanderbilt invested himself in the job, trying to make all the meetings he needed to attend and shaking the all the hands that needed to be shaken. In 2022, he held a fundraising event at the Aqua Center and by November the Vanderbilt election signs popped up on front yards throughout the community.
After announcing his desire to run for a second term, Vanderbilt did not attend the first Non-Partisan Committee forum, but began posting photos of his construction work from Pennsylvania to Washington State for his company, Mr. Fourth of July Construction, an enterprise that tried to combine building work with pyrotechnic displays.
Life always spoils the best of plans, and it was getting impossible to keep those bricks in the air all the time.
After the deaths of both his father and father-in-law during his first term, Vanderbilt saw himself as “the only adult male figure” of his tight-knit family. In a post on social media, he tried to explain his decision to withdraw from the mayoral race.
“My boys (Lucas, Mason, and Nehemiah) need more of my time and not less,” he wrote. “Once re-elected I would have less, not more time with my family. I want to coach my boys’ sports teams and not sit on the sidelines on the phone.
“It’s been a joy to serve the village that raised me,” he wrote, and then added “it is time to focus 110 percent on my family.”
At the time, village manager Tom Mick said the mayor’s job is stressful and was difficult for anyone to balance family responsibility, a full business work schedule and still maintain a public persona.
Vanderbilt says he’s “gotten rid” of his business and his phone does not ring at all hours, but he is still uneasy about the future of the south suburbs. He remains determined to keep working for a vocational high school facility at the shuttered Rich East High School campus. That, he envisions, could be linked to a proposed manufacturing plant west of the L3VEL-3 facility.
Did you see that new ball in the air?
Jerry Shnay, at jerryshnay@gmail.com, is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
