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Citizen-Sailor of the Month Story by: Loni Ingraham Photos by: David Hobby |
LT Jim Kelly splits his time between family, serving his country and serving the citizens of Maryland
Reprinted with permission from the Towson, Md. Times
Editor’s note: Each month since September 1998, we’ve been featuring our Coast Guard Reservists’ civilian occupations as many did not make it into the annual “Citizen-Sailor” issue due to space constraints. This month, we feature LT Jim Kelly, USCGR, who, in his “other life” is a delegate to the State House in Maryland. Kelly ran unopposed this past November, winning a seat for the second time. Currently serving on ADSW-RC at CGHQ for the Director of Reserve & Training, Kelly drills at Activities Baltimore. He was D5’s nominee for the 1997 ROA Outstanding Junior Officer Award and named Outstanding Junior Officer in 1995 and 1996 for Activities Baltimore. If you know of any Coast Guard Reservists that serve at the local, county or state level of government, please let us know for future issues. Also, we still are accepting and welcoming citizen-sailor submissions.
If the man didn’t have to sleep, he wouldn’t.
“Sleep is a waste of time,” says Delegate Jim Kelly, a lieutenant in the Coast Guard Reserve, who also represents Towson, Md.’s District 9B in the Maryland House of Delegates. “But I have to put in four or five hours a day or my body would give out.’
This spoken by a 38-year-old “real sweet little boy with a baby-doll face,” as one constituent put it. But his appearance and his low-key manner disguise a type-A personality striving for perfection in all things. He is just so darned earnest.
“Tell me three things I’m doing right,” he says to his supporters. “But tell me one thing I’m doing wrong.”
The man invites criticism; it gives him just one more chance to improve.
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Perfection is usually reserved for the gods. But Kelly
still strives for it, beginning when most of us are still asleep. He begins his day at 5 a.m. by lifting weights 45 minutes in the basement of his Towson home. Then he goes jogging. On some days he hits the weights again just to drain off the excess power. “I always like to be doing stuff; I don’t like to sit still,” he says. That’s when his wife, Melissa, sends him to the basement. |
During the legislative session, when he has to be at the state capitol in Annapolis each day for three months, his schedule could cause lesser souls to falter. Many of his colleagues take an apartment in town. Kelly comes home every night.
“It’s too easy to get caught up in the power games and to forget about the people who sent you there,” he says.
And he has small children, Timmy, 10; Maura, 8; Bryce, 6; and Grace, almost 4. Family is most important to him.
“It’s a matter of priorities,” he says. He has been known to proffer straight-A report cards as well as bill amendments during meetings of the Economic Matters Committee.
He gets the kids up each morning by seven.
“Daddy always makes breakfast,” he says. “I know it’s a great chore being a single parent most of the day, so I try to give Melissa some personal time in the morning. And I can’t always control my evening schedule but the kids know they can depend on seeing me then.”
At 0745, “The Kelly Bus,” as he calls it, leaves for school at Immaculate Conception. “Anybody not on it can thumb a ride,” he tells them.
He used to carry a briefcase to Annapolis, but he wasted too much time getting things out of it. So now he juggles a stack of material with a cup of coffee.
“I can get to the information quicker,” he says.
Sometimes he gets home early enough to help ferry the children back home or to sports games or dance lessons and, of course, Wednesday nights he coaches — session or not.
The kids are in bed by eight, he spends time with Melissa until 10, then he hits the basement again to work the computer — he’ll have a disk or two ready for his aides when he shows up the next day; or he reads pending legislation and other material.
“That was the biggest shock,” he says. “All the reading. I’ve got the glasses to prove it.”
And then, at midnight, he hits the sheets. God help him, he has to sleep.
| It becomes apparent that there is almost a military
precision to the scheduling of the 18 waking hours that Kelly can control each day. No
coincidence: Kelly, a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and a former Maryland
state trooper, thrives on control. Maryland’s District 9B has only one delegate, and
that is Jim Kelly. “I can’t share the blame or the rewards with anybody else,” he says. “It rests on my shoulders and I love the responsibility.” He was enforcing laws when he was a trooper, he continues to enforce laws as a reserve lieutenant and now he is creating laws in Annapolis (but not enough of them yet; that is one of his frustrations). |
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Watching him return messages in his small office in Annapolis is like watching a military drill, as he summons schedules and copies of bills from aide Brian Baugus and intern Anne Singer and has the material placed in his hands just in the nick of time to refer to it in detail during each phone call.
After all, in some ways he has always been at war in the cause of the innocents. In this case they are his constituents. And at war in the cause of order, he likes things ship-shape.
“I hate dust,” he says.
He likes to give the floor a quick once-over before he leaves for Annapolis each day, and he passed up the traditional legislative social gathering the night before the Easter weekend to clean the house before joining his family at the shore (Eastern Shore of Maryland).
On Kelly’s well-ordered desk is the list of legislators he must talk to about a bill he is pushing. Miniature photos accompany each name to help him keep track of “who’s who.” The red file is for constituent requests. The black pen he uses on the message forms means one thing, the red pen another, and the yellow underliner still another.
“We have a $20,000 computer there,” he says, looking across the room” and we still do it this way. There’s nothing like putting the pen to the paper.”
He avoids identifying himself as a delegate when he makes some calls.
“I want to see the response a constituent would get,” he says. “If I’m given a hard time, I ask for the name of the boss.”
His favorite part of the job is constituent service.
“People who are at their wit’s end, with nowhere else to go, call you in desperation,” he says. “You can just hear the relief in their voices when you help bring resolution to their problem.”
And that’s when he uses “Delegate Kelly,” to get help for them.
People have suggested he run for the Baltimore County Council, but he sees more clout in being in the House.
“I can still get a pothole fixed but I can try to fix health care as well,” he says.
Nobody who was anybody had heard of Kelly when he ran for election in 1994.
But he took all but one precinct in 1994 and was unopposed in the 1998 election. He was voted into office by the people outside the circles of political power, the friends who knew him from Towson High School, the parents whose children he coached, the people who worked with him on the Towson Recreation Council.
For many movers and shakers, he seemed to come out of left field, but “he had a solid base of people who knew him and knew him to be a solid guy,” says former Baltimore County Councilman Doug Riley, who supported him as a fellow Republican.
Kelly says he ran because he looked around and realized his concerns reflected the concerns of the district.
“I’m a homeowner, I’ve got kids in school, elderly parents in the neighborhood,” he says. “All the factions are wrapped up in my family. I was willing to take the chance, to take the bat and make a few swings to see what I could do,” he says.
His surprise victory over Democrat Steve Lafferty was not so surprising in hindsight. Kelly went door-to-door through the entire district, often with one or more of his children, and plastered enough pictures of his appealing face in enough places to prompt even a four-year-old boy to point him out and say, “That’s Jim Kelly.”
But some people felt his victory was undeserved.
“I was devastated,” says Towson Manor Park resident Susan Gray, who had worked hard for Lafferty, a former president of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations. “I felt he was grossly inexperienced and lacked basic knowledge on several issues.”
Lafferty and his campaign manager, Justin King, who served a term as GTCCA president after the race, have chosen not to comment on Kelly’s performance as a delegate for the purposes of this article. But current GTCCA president Betsy Kahl gives Kelly good marks.
“He has come to meetings during the session — and I know that’s not easy — made a good-faith effort to keep us informed and he has invited comment about any issue that concerns us,” Kahl says.
And Gray says she has done a 180-degree turn. “I’ve found him to be intelligent and accessible,” she says. “He researches issues and he gets back to people with answers.”
Other Democrats who would have preferred a Lafferty win also give Kelly credit. Janice Moore, former president of the Rodgers Forge Elementary School PTA, says she has found him to be very responsive.
“It could have been an attempt to diffuse what he knew would be one of his harshest critics, but he has always returned my calls and helped me if I had a question,” Moore says. “I’ve been very happy.”
Vince Ercolano says Kelly has done better by his concerns than he thought he would, particularly in the area of the environment. But he faults Kelly for his failure to vote for abortion rights and gun control.
“I think he’s wrong,” Ercolano says, “but to his credit, he has engaged in discussions about it with me and he has listened. One time he wrote a handwritten note responding to a laundry list of my concerns. I found that a winning gesture.”
Constituent Lisa Hurka-Covington is less forgiving. Hurka-Covington, who has fought for gun control for six years since her sister took her own life with a gun, believes Kelly should not have been cited as Legislator of the Year by the Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1996, because the gun control bill he voted against would have made it more difficult for a mentally ill person to obtain a weapon.
“He comes off as Mr. Perfect Man, but there is another side to him,” she says. “He listened to me but he had his mind already made up. Unless the gun control bill read exactly as he wanted it to, he would not vote for it,” she says.
Kelly “can weed out the one sentence in a 10-page bill” that needs work, says Delegate Martha Klima, who shared the 9th District office with him in Annapolis.
“He has a real knack for reading bills and going right to the nuts and bolts of the issue.”
Yes, he is picky about the language in a bill, says Kelly. “If a bill has a flaw in it, I can’t support that bill. You have to determine what its intent is. Then you put it in the best possible language. And only then do you deal with it as a philosophical issue.”
If there is one thing he has learned, it is that there are no easy solutions.
“It’s like you squeeze a balloon and it will come out somewhere else,” he says.
He wishes he had his older brother‘s brains — he’s a lawyer — and his older sister’s drive — she’s a school teacher. But in lieu of that he does his homework, he says.
“I don’t think people can fault you if you do your homework to make a decision,” says Kelly. “And when you go back home you have to be able to explain why you voted the way you did.”
He consults his brother if a bill affects lawyers, his sister on education issues. There’s a doctor in the family when it comes to medical issues and a monsignor close to the family who serves as a sounding board for religious issues. Every time he meets with someone, he asks for three reasons that he should vote for a bill and three to oppose it, he says.
He says he feels immune from the pressure to vote according to party line because at this point in his career he doesn’t have a chairmanship, a position of power to lose. He thinks of himself as “maverick on the fringe.”
But it can be tough when he doesn’t fall into line, for example when he voted for the Baltimore City stadium despite the Republican stance against it.
“For a long time after that it was pretty lonely to walk the halls,” he says. “But they are not my constituents. My concern is the people of Towson, not the Democratic or Republican leadership.”
There are laws of conduct in Kelly’s world. “Everything you do should get the utmost attention,” he says “What I won’t accept is excuses like ‘It isn’t important.’”
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His dad is his hero, Kelly says. His parents came from
Ireland and “he stuck it out as a bookkeeper for the railroad for 43 years and he
worked a second and sometimes a third job to provide a life for us. We may not have had
money but we had all the important things. “I teach my kids there is no quitting,” says Kelly. “Maybe you stop and get your bearings but you don’t just throw your hands up and walk away from the table. There is no substitute for hard work.” What will he do when “the well-behaved children he has been blessed with” reach the teenage rebellion stage when they break the laws of conduct? He himself missed that little window of opportunity. He was too busy plodding through Towson High School taking courses in plumbing and auto repairs. And he was in the Coast Guard Reserve by the time he was 16 and in boot camp by the time he was 17 and getting letters from friends who were drinking in Ocean City, Md. He didn’t drink beer until he was about 19, he says. “My philosophy is if a child is constructively busy in terms of family, school and church, it limits the time he can get into trouble,” he says. “The window of opportunity shuts.” Yes, his children attend Catholic school. His easy explanation is that Melissa laid down that law before they were married, but it belies a deep religious conviction. |
“I think one of the main problems we have in our society is that God has been removed from the family and that has trickled down to society in general,” he says.
When Kelly came to Annapolis he didn’t even know where the men‘s room was.
“He was as green as he could be,” says former Senator minority whip Vernon Boozer, “but he’s made up for that.”
“I didn’t even know how to file a bill,” says Kelly. “But I think I’m a quick study. I learned in the Coast Guard that two people can sink your ship —the cook and the storekeeper. So I learned who they were in Annapolis and I treated them special. When you don’t know, you have to ask and you have to ask the right people.”
He tackled Annapolis with the same perseverance that he tackled any project.
“He is one of the most serious people I have ever met,” says 9th District delegate Wade Kach. “He has loosened up some but he’s just dedicated to doing a good job.”
Former Delegate Frank Boston, a Democrat who heads the Baltimore City delegation, was one of the people who showed Kelly the ropes.
“Our relationship has centered around me explaining who the actors and the players are and what seems to be happening,” says Boston. “Kelly’s zealousness is typical of new legislators. There’s no bull about him; when he asks a question, it is well thought out and timely and it sheds some light on a situation and he sticks with his position when the odds are against him. This has led me to believe that he may go far in politics,” says Boston.
Boozer agrees.
“He’s a hard worker, he’s level-headed and a good family man,” he says. “He is learning to cross the aisle to build consensus. I think he has a good future.”
That’s just fine as far as Jim Kelly is concerned.
“My wife says I’m in my element,” says Kelly.
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