THE BRIGHT SIDE

BID Interview:
“I am a singer and a trumpet player. As a former band director, of course, you have to play them all. I was born in Elkhorn, raised in Lake Geneva for the first seven years, and then my parents bought a house in Genoa City. We lived there through my high school years and, once we got married, Barbara and I moved to Lake Geneva. I went to grade school in Genoa City at Brookwood Elementary, graduated from Badger High School in 1983, and Cornell College in 1987. I’ve been here my whole life. I’ve seen things change from 50 years ago. It’s just amazing.

I grew up in a musical family. My father was the high school band director at Badger High School. I graduated from college as a K-12 music instructor. I taught for three years at Fontana Grade School then went to Big Foot High School. When I started, we had 17 kids in the band. On my first day, I kicked out three kids because they were just screwballs. By the end of my band career, 15 years later, I had a 110-piece band.  Blue Lou Marini, that long-haired tenor sax player from ‘Blues Brothers’, was giving a concert with my jazz band at BFHS. After the concert, a prominent business owner in Walworth said, ‘I just booked your band to perform at the American Embassy in Berlin this coming July 4th. I thought he was joking.

Fast forward six months and it costs every kid in my 22-piece jazz band about 20 bucks for a passport for a 14-day tour of Germany, England, and France.  I served as the First District Alderman under three different mayors for a total of five years. My fellow Alderman appointed me as the council president almost every year, even though I was the youngest on the council. I loved it. I was the finance chair for three years and chair of every committee I was on. I averaged about 35 hours a week at City Hall while working full-time starting my business, Timeless Flooring. I could have been an absent Alderman and just showed up to meetings without having read my materials and pretended like I knew what I was talking about.

The way I’m wired is, however, that if I’m going to do it, it’s got to be done right. So I did it right and did it well and I was respected for it.  My most proud moment while on the city council was when we reconstructed the Wrigley Bridge early on in my aldermanic career. When we were meeting with the engineers, I said, ‘Look, I have one favor. Could you please design a knockout on the bridge so that it can be called the kissing bridge?’ They made it happen. Lake Geneva has been and will always be a tourist destination. So, you have to embrace it. We have a rule in our house that we will not travel in the summertime. We love to travel but when the lake is usable, we’re enjoying it. Whether it’s swimming or boating, we love the lake.  Anyone would be hard-pressed to go anywhere else and find somewhere more beautiful than Lake Geneva.” –

Todd Krause, Owner – Timeless Flooring, Mayoral Candidate 2024