10/31/2025
In 2000 I dropped out of/took a semester break from the masters program at ASU I was in to run for Tempe City Council. I was young, running a campaign on just a few hundred dollars in student loan money, and wasn’t the least bit qualified to be on Council. But, I took it seriously, and spent most days knocking on doors collecting signatures to get on the ballot and talking to people.
I made the ballot and, eventually, had to start attending the candidate debates. This was Mark Mitchell’s first run for Council , as well as former Councilmember Barb Carter. With two open seats, there were at least eleven candidates, and only one incumbent, Dennis Cahill. Who was, rightfully, beloved. Jovial, friendly, warm, and genuinely listened. No pretense. From the first moment I spoke with him, I admired him as a role model.
So, when the first debate comes, I show up in my one dress shirt, and my one and only ill-fitting “job interview” suit. And, important to this story, no tie. I didn’t own one and, honestly, even if I had owned one, I didn’t know you were supposed to wear one to a debate.
A few minutes before the debate Dennis saw me and, in his good-natured way, asked when I was going to put on my tie. I sheepishly told him I didn’t have one. He promptly took his tie off and gave it to be to wear for the debate. I asked him, “Are you sure? Now you don’t have a tie.” To which he smiled in such a way as to say, “I don’t like them anyway” and “I’m going to win in a landslide regardless.”
He did win in a landslide and I came in, I think, nearly last, beating only three other candidates in the large pool of people. At the end of the election I gave Dennis back his tie, to which he responded, “It’s your tie, I’ll just hold it until you need it again.”
After the election we stayed friends; he would refer to me as his “friend with the E-Ticket life.” Eticket, being the most intense Disneyland rides as designated back in the day. I went on to live in Mozambique and Argentina. To join the Peace Corps, to finish my masters program, and to get a law degree. As time passed we went from periodic beers (Dennis liked to refer to drinking beers together as “Four Peaks Diplomacy," a spin on the phrase “ping pong diplomacy” from the Nixon era) to the periodic email and holiday cards.
In 2011 I decided to run for City Council again. I contacted Dennis and asked for his support. He said yes, and invited me to his house to take photos with him for the campaign. He was, as always, jovial, kind, and in absolutely no way changed from the kind politician I’d met years earlier; more interested in showing me the brickwork he’d done around the house than talking politics.
As we took campaign photos at his house he stopped, he snapped his fingers, and said, “hold on, I’ve got something for you.” He ran into another room and moments later returned with the very same tie from eleven years earlier. He handed it to me saying, “I’ve been saving it, I knew you’d need it again. You can wear it at your first debate.” Which, of course, I did.
I could end the story here, but I’ll add one addendum. Dennis insisted he host a fundraiser and talk at my house for my 2012 campaign. We invited some of his old supporters and got everything scheduled. The morning of the event (in late June) the AC in my house went out. No AC repair company could make it out on short notice and Dennis was in the process of medical treatment, having lost all his hair.
I called him to cancel the event yet he insisted it shouldn’t be canceled; that it was too hard to get friends and donors into a room and the event had to go on. I think he even said something to the effect of “You can cancel it if you want to, but I’m showing up anyway!”
So, I quickly rented blower fans and whatever evaporative cooler systems I could buy and the event happened anyway. And Dennis was, as always, jovial, and joke cracking, saying, “we turned the AC off just to ensure only real Tempeans could attend this event!”
This is all a long way of saying, over the many years of politics, I’ve gotten to know dozens of council members, several mayors, a few members of the US House and Senate (one now retired), and just a load of other political people. I’ve only met three I would consider friends. Three I would consider genuinely decent people, who were exactly in private who they were in public. And Dennis was absolutely one of them.
He was everything you would hope a citizen would be. He was both good and great, in a way that is absolutely timeless.
