Life on the trail with 5th District candidates
With farm, family, Ogonowski touts his homespun values
DRACUT - Before dropping by his boyhood home the other day, Jim Ogonowski spoke with admiration - and gave fair warning - about his father, Alex, who was out pitching hay in fields he bought in 1948.
"My dad's 87," said Ogonowski, 50, the Republican candidate in the Fifth Congressional District race. "No disrespect to you guys, but he could kick your -"
And so it seemed, when Alex Ogonowski drove up in a pickup truck from the fields for a quick greeting and revealed forearms - and hair - thicker than his son's.
Ogonowski attributes his father's strength to a boyhood of stump-pulling and a lifetime of labor. He says his father, a World War II-era veteran who worked the farm and drove a delivery truck to put five kids through school, instilled in him the values he has emphasized in his campaign: the importance of family, thrift, and hard work.
Jim Ogonowski has placed his family connections in the Merrimack Valley at the center of his campaign, where he has attempted to portray himself as a homespun populist.
Himself a hay farmer and retired Air Force and Air National Guard lieutenant colonel, Ogonowski is leaning heavily on his biography in his bid to pull off an upset in the Democratic-leaning district, which last elected a Republican to Congress in 1972.
The mailer he sent encouraging voters to go to the polls for him on Oct. 16 doesn't list issue positions, nor does it mention his GOP affiliation. Instead, it contains pictures of himself in uniform, on a tractor, and with his family, along with a series of messages saying he wants to end "business as usual" and "fight the political insiders" in Washington.
"Our founding fathers never envisioned that our Congress would be filled with lifelong politicians and millionaires, because they're out of touch with the people," Ogonowski said, this time while behind the wheel of a dusty pickup at another Dracut farm, a mile down the road from his dad's place.
For the past six years, Jim Ogonowski has run White Gate Farm, the 100-plus-acre hay and produce outfit that his late brother, John, a Vietnam veteran and airline pilot, purchased in the 1990s with the help of the state's Agricultural Preservation Restriction program. John Ogonowski was the captain of American Airlines Flight 11 that was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Until his retirement from the armed services this year, Ogonowski tended to his late brother's farm while working full time as a lieutenant colonel at Pease Air National Guard Base in New Hampshire. There, he commanded the Tanker Task Force Mission, planning and coordinating the movement and in-air refueling of fighter jets going between Pease and Southwest Asia or Europe. Jim Ogonowski retired after 28 years of combined service with the Air Force and the Guard, rather than accept a promotion to colonel that would have required him to move to Illinois, he said.
He said he didn't want to leave his parents and his children - Charlie, 20, and Catherine, 18 - to say nothing of the 200-plus other relatives he says he has in the Merrimack Valley.
Jim Ogonowski's familiar style serves him well on the campaign trail. He works rooms in a flurry, with lots of physical contact - back-clapping, shoulder-hugging, hand-shaking - and an economy of words.
"Hi. Jim Ogonowski. Running for Congress. Special election," he said, over and over, drawing fliers from his back pocket that display the election date prominently. "Appreciate your vote. Spread the word for me."
When people ask, he pauses to talk about his plans for the district or Washington - bring home the troops "after the Iraqis stabilize and secure themselves." When they tell stories, he stops and listens intently, nodding his head, interspersing an "Oh, no kiddin'," or a "wow!"
"Everybody's got a story to tell, and I like to shut up and listen," he said, after a campaign swing through the Billerica Council on Aging, where a bingo game was in progress. "It's fascinating."
His back-pocket fliers, like his mailers, tell of his desire to seek "the endorsement of regular people" and they also list a couple of issue positions - opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants, support for making the federal tax cuts permanent - in a grid contrasting them with those of Democrat Niki Tsongas.
Illegal immigration is his number one issue, and he's quick to distinguish it from its lawful counterpart. He talks about the paternal great-grandmother who left Poland in 1904, a widow with four children, and found work in the Lowell mills.
At White Gate, Ogonowski continues a program started by his brother that gives farm plots to Cambodian refugees.
He lives not far from the farm in a renovated garage. Ogonowski, who often says he's just the "guy that lives next door," bought the property from his former in-laws for $70,000 a decade ago, to stay in the neighborhood after a divorce. His ex-wife lived down the street, and each parent saw the children daily.
"I don't know if there's a perfect environment in a divorce, but that's about as close to it as you can get," said Ogonowski, who remarried two years ago, to a woman on the hay-delivery route he assumed from his brother.
Before working the hay farm, he supplemented his military income for 15 years by growing chrysanthemums. When gas prices spiked above $3 in May, he felt it on the farm and in the Buick he uses to drive himself to campaign events.
"But the millionaires in Congress didn't flinch, because it doesn't hurt them at all," he said. "That's why I think we need people that represent the people's values that struggle to pay the bills, that got a couple of college-age kids. I think I represent what we need in Washington." 