Louis 'Skip' Sander
Home   |  Lou's Creations   |   Lou's Background   |   Lou's Interests   |   Other Cool Stuff   |   Contact Lou
Lou's Interests...

Government



















.
Government
Governmenr
Lou is interested in government at the local, state, and national level. It's a specialized part of his interest in executive leadership.

His mother says that he knew all the states and their capitals when he was two years old. He still knows them, and if pressed, he can write them all down from scratch, usually without any mistakes. He knows a lot of world geography, too.

His adult interest in government started when he was a Naval Officer. The Navy is heavily involved in statecraft, and Lou got an early taste of it—his first midshipman cruise was part of a Presidential "People-to-People" program, and he enjoyed that part of it immensely. Later, his duties as a Beach Jumper officer exposed him to national planning at very high levels.  

As a library trustee, he had over ten years of intense involvement with local and state government. He was involved in many elections, including two referendums for library funding (both of them passed handily, by the way). He recruited and helped elect local officials who were sympathetic to library matters, and he helped defeat others who were known or thought to be corrupt. He served briefly as a committeeman in his ward, and one time he even ran for Township Treasurer. For a year or so, he was a widely-read political columnist for a large suburban newspaper.

For a year or two he sold IT services and election equipment to state and county governments, and he got to meet dozens of elected officials from Pennsylvania—County Commissioners, Recorders of Deeds, Registers of Wills, Clerks of Courts, Prothonotaries, and more.

Harry Truman, upon encountering a Prothonotary in 1948, famously asked "What the hell is a Prothonotary?" Lou knows that in Pennsylvania, the Prothonotary is the county official responsible for recordkeeping in civil courts.