Hillmann: Remembering Dick Codey

OPINION

Two days before Dick Codey died, my wife Tracie and I were in the Governor’s Outer Office in the State House in Trenton, waiting for our son Tim, Governor Murphy’s Chief of Staff, to return from a meeting.  The Outer Office is a huge room used for official ceremonies, swearings-in and press conferences, and a main feature of the room is the official portraits of the 10 immediate past governors, posted on the four walls. It happens that the official portrait of former Gov. Richard J Codey hangs outside Tim’s office, which opens on to the Outer Office.

Tracie and I have known Dick Codey for nearly 50 years. In the mid-1970s, he was the first elected official I ever covered as a reporter for The Star Ledger who was younger than me.  At the same time, Tracie began her lobbying career as the intergovernmental affairs director for Essex County Executive Peter Shapiro and Essex County government.  For years, we also lived in the same town as Dick Codey, West Orange, and had the opportunity to vote for him numerous times. We’ve known him as much as a friend those 50 years than as a public servant.

I’m not sure what prompted me, but I moved the open door to Tim’s office, which was partially obscuring the Gov. Codey portrait, to get a better look at the portrait. For sure, it is a very nice portrait of the former Governor, a casual pose standing with a book or file in his hand, and flatteringly portrayed for future generations a little younger and thinner and more “official” than he actually was.

After he died and I thought about it for a while, it is not the picture of Dick Codey that I will remember. The Dick Codey I remember had a rounder physique than his official portrait.  A rounder friendlier face with a slightly double chin, less hair and half-closed eyes with a very mischievous twinkle.  And a perpetual Irish Leprechaun smile, so permanent an expression it reminds me that any time he leaned in to tell me anything, it would be a witticism or humorous anecdote for which he was famous.

So I pulled a copy of Dick Codey’s 2011 book, “Me, Govemor?” (one of the best “non-political” political memoirs I have ever read) off the shelf to look for one of those anecdotes, and there it was: The cover photo on his memoir…the perfect image of the Dick Codey that I admired and respected and will remember. A perfect smiling pose with an expression of wonderment at what he had achieved.  I defy anyone to look at that smiling cover photo and not have the urge to smile back.

It also reminded me of a President Abraham Lincoln anecdote about the importance of the look someone conveys as they mature. Lincoln once said in rejecting  advice to appoint a particular politician to his cabinet, “I just don’t like his face!”  When the advisor questioned Lincoln about how anyone could be responsible for the way their face looked, Lincoln declared: “Every man over 40 years of age, bears the responsibility for the way he looks!”

I’m sure Abraham Lincoln would have loved Dick Codey!