Dan Rutherford is an executive with an International Company and an accomplished State Legislator. He was first elected to the Illinois Senate in 2002, following a 10-year term in the House of Representatives where he served as Assistant Republican Leader.
Dan has a history of involvement in politics. He began his career as a Legislative Assistant in Springfield. In the GOP Primary of 1980, Dan coordinated a Congressional District for Governor Ronald Reagan’s campaign where he caught the eye of the Reagan National Campaign and was tapped to be the state-wide Executive Director of Illinois for the General Election.
Declining an opportunity to serve in the Reagan White House, Dan stayed in Illinois, working with Governor Jim Thompson as head of the International Business Division of the Illinois Department of Commerce.
In the mid 1980s, Dan joined the ServiceMaster Company and eventually became responsible for expansion of the company’s businesses internationally, licensing services in sixteen different countries. ServiceMaster is a family of service companies with trade names such as ServiceMaster Clean, Terminix, Tru-Green, Merry Maids, and American Home Shield.
On the lighter side, Dan is an adventurer. As a young person, Dan enjoyed camping, fishing, and adventure. In high school he was a foreign exchange student to Barbados. After graduating from college, he back-packed across Europe and in his mid-twenties he took a few months to lead safaris in Kenya.
Dan learned to sail boats and crewed for numerous Chicago to Mackinaw Island Races, competed in regattas off of Melbourne, and cruised the southern coast of Australia.
Before his 30th birthday, Dan joined a small group of adventurers and the 12 of them took three months crossing Africa in their diesel Bedford truck. They started in Algeria and went south through Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Zaire, and Burundi.
Having been on all the continents of the world but one, Dan had to figure out how to get to Antarctica before his 40th birthday. With a lot of luck and a few connections he found himself in the Falkland Islands meeting a Russian icebreaker with a group of naturalists. He spent two weeks exploring the continent, including Christmas floating on the tabular iceberg in Antarctic Sound!!
Last, but not least, after skydiving in college and learning to fly in younger years, Dan decided to master scuba diving. He is an Advanced Certified Diver, logging well over 200 dives. He is a conservationist, personally establishing wildlife habitat and planting over 16,000 trees and shrubs at his rural home.
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