Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)

THE LIVES BEHIND THE LABELS; PREDICTABILITY HAS WORKED SO FAR FOR ALLARD
Lisa Levitt Ryckman, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
October 12, 2002 Saturday

Turn Wayne Allard into a book, and any reader could guess the ending after the first 10 pages.

"He doesn't hide anything," says Christi, the eldest of his two daughters. "He's not a fancy person, he's not into labels. He's very straightforward, very kind, very approachable. You see him at places like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and he's just who he is."

Despite a lack of surprises in this story of small-town veterinarian goes to Washington, the fact that Allard has never lost an election reflects the comfort voters find in his brand of predictability. They sent him to the state Senate twice, the U.S. House three times and the U.S. Senate six years ago. Now Allard and Tom Strickland are locked in a close and costly rematch that has meant turning mean.

"Everything we've run out of my own campaign has been positive - up to this point," Allard says. "But the fact is, when your opponent goes negative, you've got to answer. Because it changes votes."

The 58-year-old senator considers himself an ear-to-the-ground kind of guy, proudly pointing to hundreds of town meetings held since he became a congressman. Every county, every year - in campgrounds, fire stations, museums. Once, in Creede, he and ever-present wife Joan held a town meeting in a mine.

"We just walk in, we open it up," Allard says. "I let them talk to me. Some of it is them asking me about my position. I'm never bashful about saying what my position is."

Those positions have been uniformly conservative: His voting record consistently earns a perfect score of 100 percent from the American Conservative Union and a zero from the Americans for Democratic Action.

Allard enthusiastically supports school vouchers, military spending and the death penalty; he just as enthusiastically opposes affirmative action, background checks at gun shows and a woman's right to choose an abortion.

But the issues closest to Allard's heart tend to be those closest to home, some of which surfaced during town meetings. The effort to turn Great Sand Dunes into a national park was one of those, he says.

Allard talks policy during the meetings; the veterinary questions come before and after.

"Actually, they just like to talk about their dogs or their cats or their horses or their cows," he says. "I always tell them that my advice is worth about what you paid for it."

Allard decided in sixth grade that he wanted to be a veterinarian, a logical path for a boy who grew up on a ranch in Walden, working with cattle and piling hay into perfect squares.

"Wayne was a beautiful operator of equipment," younger brother Kermit recalls. "You looked across his hay fields, and there wasn't a blade of grass missed."

The Allard family later moved to a farmhouse by the railroad in Fort Collins so the brothers could attend Fort Collins High School, where Wayne was president of his senior class.

Both Allard brothers went on to Colorado State University, living together in a trailer on their grandparents' farm and sharing cooking duties.

After Wayne burned the vegetables once too often, Kermit advertised in the CSU newspaper for a shapely blonde home economics major in exchange for "one male, 6-2, 185-pound vet student named Wayne."

"We had blind dates for a month," Kermit says.

Allard met his wife, Joan, when they were both students at Colorado State University. She noticed him at a fraternity party because he was a really good dancer.

Kermit Allard says both he and Wayne became good dancers by default.

"When we were growing up, when it would rain, we couldn't go out in hay fields, and there was usually a dance in town," he says.

The Allard brothers and their wives still dance to big band sounds whenever they get the chance.

Joan and Wayne crossed paths later because both were science majors - Joan in microbiology, Allard in veterinary medicine. He asked her out, unaware that she had sworn never to date a vet student.

"They were so obnoxious," Joan says.

When she learned the truth, Joan was philosophical. It wasn't the worst thing he could be.

"At least you're not going to be a politician," said Joan, who was raised in a home where politics was a dirty word.

Allard, on the other hand, was raised with civic involvement. His father, Amos, was chairman of the Larimer County Democratic Party in the late 1960s, and both father and son remained Democrats until the 1972 defeat of family friend U.S. Rep. Wayne Aspinall.

Allard is something of an accidental candidate. He was minding his own business - cows and cats and the occasional snake at his Loveland animal hospital - when he was approached to run for the state Senate in 1982.

"The first time, I told them no," Allard says. After talking with Joan, however, he changed his mind.

"When I first heard about it, every hair on the back of my neck stood on end," Joan says.

The Allards decided that serving in the legislature might give Wayne a chance to change the small business regulations that they had struggled with while running the animal clinic.

In 1990, Allard won Hank Brown's seat in the U.S. House when Brown moved to the Senate, and he sold his vet practice - much to his daughter's relief.

"No more cleaning cages," Christi says.

"Sometimes we'd pull the girls out of bed at night and they'd revive puppies while I did a caesarean," Allard says. "Joan would supervise the girls. It seemed everybody started to have an emergency at dinner time or at 10 o'clock at night."

The Allards have always worked together, and Washington hasn't changed that. Other congressional wives urged Joan to develop her own career. Instead, Allard caused consternation among his fellow congressmen by giving Joan her own desk in his office.

"All of a sudden, my colleagues started coming up to me saying, 'You have your wife in your office with you? I don't think I could do that with my wife."'

Having a place to park her purse gives Joan a base from which to give tours of the Capitol to constituents and to keep track of their hectic schedule.

"She's known all over Washington as someone who helps me," Allard says. "There's a lot of envy."

Christi considers her parents a perfect example of an old-fashioned marriage that works.

"Just because you don't run into that all the time doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it," Christi says. "Mom loves to be a support for Dad. That's who she is."

In recent years, family history has become an obsession; the Allards readily admit an addiction to genealogy. To the Allards' four grandsons, an ancestor who fought alongside George Washington has become as much of a hero as the general himself.

That's the kind of story the Allards want to keep alive.

"My family were always storytellers - they could tell as whopping a story as you ever heard," Allard says.

Allard's own story-telling ability pales by comparison - "He doesn't exaggerate as much as his dad did," Joan says.

But beneath Allard's stolid exterior beats the heart of a practical joker, somebody who thought it was funny to rouse his sleeping kids with a cold washcloth.

"Just throw it on their faces when they're asleep, it really wakes them up," he says.

Allard happily joined into a summer of practical jokes when his daughters were in junior high. He was the one who used a syringe to inject Christi's Hostess cupcake with hot sauce right through the wrapper, then pushed her competitive buttons by challenging her to see who could eat the most cupcakes the fastest.

"She was an easy set-up," Allard says.

He adores Christi's four sons, ages 10 to 6, and never hesitates to get goofy with them, she says. He loves a good card game, especially gin rummy. If his daughters brought home a boy he didn't like, Allard would waylay them with a hand or two.

Not much of a romantic himself, Allard once gave his wife Valentine's Day roses that were leftover at the Statehouse. And the Allard women complain that he makes it impossible to cry in peace during a sad movie.

"Right when it starts to get sad, and we're all weepy, he'll do this big fake snorty noise," Christi says. "Now all my little guys have learned that. They think it's totally acceptable because grandpa does it."

The Allards bounce between Washington and Colorado nearly every week.

"We're looking forward to the day when things slow down a bit, whether it's six years from now or after this election," Allard says.

Meanwhile, he doesn't mind being considered a vanilla-flavored politician. Most of Allard's colleagues are just like he is, Joan insists.

"If you compare me to a Gary Hart or a Bill Clinton, all right, I'm boring," Allard says. "And if that's the standard for boring, that's OK with me."

So far, it has worked for him. In fact, a recent disclosure that Allard's favorite color is brown might have won him some votes.

"You don't know how many people have come up to me," Allard says, "and told me, 'You know, I like brown, too!"