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A Setback. Percy's postwar rise at Bell & Howell astonished the Illinois business community. He so impressed Joe McNabb that when the old man died, he left a kind of corporate will designating Percy his successor. As a result, Chuck was elevated to the presidency at 29, and along with that, picked up options on 25,000 shares of stock at $5 less than market value; the stock is now worth $550,000. Against an avalanche of foreign cameras in the U.S. market, Percy diversified the company, put it into electronics and business machines, saw its annual sales volume grow from $13 million to $160 million.
Even as a captain of industry, Chuck Percy's horizons have always been wider and brighter than his company's best lens could encompass. He was always fascinated by politics. In 1955 he took charge of the United Republican Fund of Illinois, developed a pattern of party fund raising on a broad base; in 1957 he became vice chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee. In 1959 he headed Dwight Eisenhower's 42-man committee charged with the responsibility of drawing up a blueprint of party goals. In 1960 he became chairman of the G.O.P. National Convention's Platform Committee—which turned out to be a humiliating experience. Committee conservatives, enraged by what they considered to be Dick Nixon's platform "surrender" to Nelson Rockefeller, rebelled. Percy simply was not seasoned enough to put down the revolt, and toward the end he was relieved of the chairmanship by Wisconsin's Congressman Mel Laird.
Toward the Slum. That setback only whetted Percy's taste for politics. By 1962 he had moved up to chairman of the Bell & Howell executive board, and the prospering company demanded less of his time. "I was approached by a number of people who asked me if I would go into public life," he recalls. "It wasn't quite a draft, but it was something like that. I was really encouraged by a lot of people. On the governorship, if I'd waited for a draft, I'd have waited forever."
A Percy friend, William "Pat" Patterson, chief executive officer of United Air Lines and a Bell & Howell board director, urged him against running for Governor, suggested that he wait until 1966 and run for the U.S. Senate against Paul Douglas. "Springfield is no place for you, Chuck," Patterson said. "It's a slum. It's a place where there's nowhere to go but down."
To Chuck Percy, that was a challenge—and he has never failed to respond to a challenge. Says Percy: "I think I probably decided right then I'd run for Governor. If state government was held in that kind of ill repute by responsible leaders of our society, it was something that badly needed attention and leadership." Thus, in July 1963, Percy announced his candidacy for Governor, chucked his family into a "Chuckwagon" and began campaigning.