Anthony Schinella

It only takes one troublemaker

by Yvonne Abraham

Anthony Schinella has never been as important as he is right now. On July 10, he was just your average grassroots political activist/community-radio talk-show host. Then he read a Globe piece lamenting the fact that there'd be no preliminary election for the city's four at-large council seats, because there were only four challengers: for a preliminary, there have to be five or more. On July 11, he decided to run, and quickly collected enough signatures to make the ballot.

"When I was gathering the signatures," Schinella recalls, "people said, `Oh, I don't have time.' And I said, `But they're gonna cancel the election.' " That did the trick.

Now all the at-large candidates -- incumbents Dapper O'Neil, Mickey Roache, Peggy Davis-Mullen, and Steve Murphy, and challengers Paul Gannon, Suzanne Iannella, Frank Jones, Pamela Smith, and Schinella -- will face a runoff on September 23 after all. They'll have to earn their place on the November ballot, as council candidates have in this town for as long as anyone can remember.

"[The other candidates] smile at me when we meet, and they say, `Ha, ha -- you're the kid that's making us work.' Truth is," he says, "they don't want to work."

Having made his philosophical point, Schinella is now running for real. That's why the 32-year-old is outside the Jamaica Pond boathouse on this perfect late-summer evening, handing out fliers, trying to coax votes out of Lycra-clad power-walkers before he starts his graveyard shift working the boards at the radio station.

"Hi, are you registered to vote in Boston?" he asks a woman who's in the zone. She doesn't slow down at all. Schinella walks with her, shaking her hand and doing his spiel at the same time. "I'm Tony Schinella and I'm running for city council. Can I give you my flier?"

He goes back and forth like this with lots of folks, racing to keep up with them when they don't want to lower their heart rates, somehow getting through the routine anyway.

Nobody is rude to him: Schinella looks too friendly, too teddy bear-like -- round, with a beard and wet brown eyes. About half the time, he manages to slow his quarry down, even enticing some victims to stop and pluck out an earphone. Then Schinella really gets going, laying out the platform he's recently hammered together: cheaper housing, more public parks, better use of vacant city properties -- all progressive, JP-friendly causes.

Schinella has done this before. In 1992, he worked on Jerry Brown's presidential campaign. In 1994, he was a campus coordinator for Ted Kennedy's re-election race. Last year, he tried to get Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot for the Green Party, a campaign that was especially disappointing for Schinella: too many factions, too tough a battle. "After that, I said I'd never work on another campaign for free again, unless it's my own," he says.

Still, he didn't expect his own to come so soon, or on such short notice. Right now, he's struggling with the basics. "That damned campaign paperwork," he says, his voice rising in outrage. "It's unbelievable what they make you go through." He's already been to a City Hall campaign-finance seminar and made countless inquiries, but he still can't understand all the reporting requirements. "And we'll be lucky if we raise a tenth of what Iannella has. They do this to keep ordinary people like me from running!"

But Schinella plows on anyway, learning as he goes. In front of the boathouse, he stops a woman in her 40s, with dark hair and very big sunglasses, and introduces himself. As she and Schinella talk neighborhood issues, the woman does stretching exercises -- languidly raising her right arm, then her left, then her right, and so on, about a dozen times. Schinella is not put off. "Well," she says, moving seamlessly from arm-raises to dainty knee-bends. "You just happened to speak to a powerful person. I'm Deborah Galiger, and I'm on the neighborhood council. And here's a tip for you. Would you like a tip?"

He would.

"Have you heard of City Life?"

He hasn't.

"Well, they're working on some of these housing issues, and if they like you, they might help support you."

Schinella is grateful. He could use the help, especially since he still works full-time at WMUR, bicycles to all his engagements (he has no car), and, with girlfriend Christine Thompson, runs his own campaign.

Still, at least he'll have a little extra time now, because he won't be hosting his talk show for a while: the radio station asked Schinella to stop doing it during his city-council run. Apparently a few concerned citizens called to complain that it gave him an unfair advantage.