My Dads First Election Sign …

John Malloy is ready to pay for his free election sign. Not because it’s his only election sign, even though it is.

Because his seven-year-old daughter Keeley spent a couple hours working on it in between rest stops to watch a few cartoons for inspiration. “I would have hung onto this one for the rest of my life,” the Meaford council candidate said Monday.

“If it wasn’t created by my little sweetheart, I wouldn’t give a darn.

It’s not going to make or break me in the election because it’s my only sign. It’s just a keepsake.”

Malloy isn’t a big fan of the plastic used in modern election signs so the 49-year-old businessman and Simcoe County School Board employee opted not to put up signs for the Nov. 13 election.

His daughter Keeley decided to create her own sign for her dad on Oct. 29. She used several colours of crayon on the upper half of the sign and then permanent black marker on the bottom. She also used biodegradable particle board for the sign, echoing her father’s sense of environmental accountability.

“She sprayed the back of it florescent orange so traffic could see it at night,” her father said. Malloy put the sign on a friend’s lawn on Aiken Street that weekend and it was gone three days later.

“The plan was to then move it to the Tim Hortons in town and then to Irish Block Road and then that would have been it,” said Malloy. “It was going into the family archives after that. It was a real keepsake.”

BILL WALKER
Owen Sound Sun Times – Tuesday, November 07, 2006