8PAR@ ` hTEXT ` ZByrne, Jane Margaret1934╨public officialBorn in Chicago on May 24, 1934, Jane Burke was educated at Barat College and did postgraduate work at the University of Illinois and at Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University). In December 1956 she married William P. Byrne, a Marine Corps pilot who was killed in 1959. The next year she gained her first political experience as a grass roots organizer and campaigner for John F. Kennedy. That work in the Chicago Democratic organization attracted the attention of party leaders and eventually that of Mayor Richard J. Daley. While working as a teacher in Chicago public schools in 1963╨1965 she continued to devote much of her time to precinct and ward-level political work. In 1965 Daley secured her appointment to the administrative staff of the Chicago Commission on Urban Opportunity, and in 1968 he named her city commissioner of sales, weights, and measures. In the latter post she moved forcefully to weed out corruption in the office, in the process angering a number of aldermen but making a most favorable impression on the public and on Daley. She was subsequently made co-chairman of the Cook County Democratic Committee and appointed to the party╒s National Committee. Soon after Daley╒s death in 1976 Byrne came into conflict with his successor, Mayor Michael Bilandic, and following her charge that he had colluded with other officials to secure a quiet rate increase for taxicab operators he removed her from her commissioner╒s post in November 1977. She then began organizing a direct challenge to Bilandic and the proverbially powerful Democratic organization. Wrapping herself in the mantle of the still revered Daley and helped along by the inefficiency of the Bilandic administration in dealing with a record heavy snowfall that tied up the ╥city that works,╙ she confounded all observers by defeating Bilandic in the Democratic primary election for the mayor╒s seat in February 1979. She soon made peace with the stunned party leaders and went on in April to win election as mayor with an overwhelming 82 percent of the vote, a margin larger than even Daley had ever accomplished. She was the first woman to serve as mayor of a city of the first rank, serving from 1979 to 1983. She ran again in 1987 but lost to Harold Washington. She related her account of her term in a 1992 book My Chicago. «styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ , !I Σ 5¬ σ !I N !I X !I link `
