Raymond Wardingley

Raymond "Ray" G. Wardingley is an American perennial candidate who has many times, unsuccessfully, sought office in Chicago, Illinois.

Wardingley was born at Cook County Hospital on February 13, 1935, to Albert and Thelma Wardingley.

He was the sixth child born of ten children.

His family lived on the Southeast Side of Chicago and were poor.

After his parents separated, he and a number of his siblings were sent to catholic orphanages.

He attended Mendel and Chicago Vocational High Schools, but did not graduate high school.

He later obtained a high school diploma.

He later attended Goodman Theatre School.

Per his official biography, Wardingley enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1955 at age 20, but was given a medical discharge two years later, in 1957, after an eardrum was injured in an accident.

Wardingley worked numerous jobs, including taxi and limousine driver, a taxi dispatcher, steel mill worker, stagehand at movie studios in California, a motion picture extra, as well as an actor in commercials.

Wardingley also performed as a part-time clown under the name "Spanky the Clown", a fact which attracted attention during his later turn as the Republican Party's Chicago mayoral nominee.

He sometimes performed as Spanky the Clown at Chicago Sting games.

He also would sometimes fill-in at their games as their mascot Stanley Sting.

He created Spanky the Clown to entertain children with cancer at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

He also performed as Spanky the Clown to raise money for St. Jude and other causes.

During his 1979 Republican mayoral primary campaign, he performed as Spanky the Clown to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Wardingley unsuccessfully ran in the Republican primary elections for the 1979, 1983, 1987.

In 1983, he failed to get on the ballot due to issues with his ballot petition.

He also once ran as a write-in in a general election, garnering only a single vote.

Wardingley managed his local neighborhood watch from 1989 to 1995.

Wardingley has been a perennial candidate.

He has never been elected to any of the numerous offices he has sought.

Wardingley co-founded the Coalition for Restoring Social Standards (C.R.O.S.S.).

He is most famous for having been the Republican nominee in the 1995 Chicago mayoral election, and for having previously performed as a clown under the name "Spanky the Clown".

The embarrassment that many in the Republican party felt about Wardingley having been their party's 1995 standard-bearer in the Chicago mayoral election has been cited as a reason that a Republican-led Illinois General Assembly and Republican governor passed into law legislation that made all subsequent Chicago mayoral elections nonpartisan.

By the time of his 1995 mayoral campaign, he had retired from clowning.

In 1995 Wardingley narrowly won the Republican primary, thereby becoming the party's nominee for mayor of Chicago.

The Republican field in the primary was regarded as weak.

This was Wardingley's fourth mayoral campaign.

However, his victory in the primary was nonetheless considered surprising.

His platform included abolishing the Chicago Board of Education, eliminating the employment-based head tax, eliminating desegregation busing, and eliminating bilingual education.

He supported school prayer, making inspections of nursing homes stricter, firing many government officials and replacing them with "senior citizens, disabled veterans, Americans, at $10,000 a year."

Wardingley also supported increasing the number of veterans' parades.

He spoke about wanting to sentence "drug pushers" to life imprisonment and possibly castration or death by hanging.

Wardingley characterized himself as someone capable of relating to working class voters, and hoped that by running he would help keep a two-party system alive in a city so dominated by Democrats.

Wardingley's candidacy was not taken seriously by many.

Many Republicans stayed silent on the mayoral race, rather than endorsing, and a few even went as far as endorsing Democratic incumbent Richard M. Daley over Wardingley.

In 2004, Warringley launched an effort to try and persuade Cardinal Francis George to excommunicate Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, after Daley publicly supported same-sex marriage.

Politically, he has identified himself as a Reagan Republican in the past.

Since 2005, he has been a member of the Illinois Right Coalition.