As a boy, Ruben Gallego slept on the floor of an Evergreen Park apartment. Today, his goal is the floor of the US Senate

As Ruben Gallego retraced the daily walk he made a quarter century ago from the small first-floor Pulaski Road apartment he shared with his mother and three sisters to Evergreen Park Community High School, the memories of a sometimes difficult childhood came back quickly.

There were the taunts and bullying he endured as a kid from one of the first Latino families to move into the community. There was the juggling act of taking his younger siblings to school and back while his mother, Elisa, worked as a secretary, and the odd jobs he held to help the family make ends meet.

And there were the times he recalled “hearing my mom crying just because of the stress that she was dealing with.”

Sleeping on the floor because there was no money for bedding, “I just remember it being the middle of the night and I just started crying, not because I was angry or mad. I felt I had to succeed to get everybody out.”

For much of his 44 years, Gallego has struggled to fit in. He successfully competed for a coveted scholarship to an elite college, but found himself unable to relate to his Ivy League classmates. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve and watched his best friend die in combat in Iraq, and subsequently suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome. He eventually made his home in Arizona, where he channeled his business marketing acumen toward a career in politics.

Now Gallego, Evergreen Park Community High School class of 1998, Harvard class of 2004, corporal in Lima Company 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment 2005-2006, and a member of Congress since 2015, thinks he knows where he might next fit best: The United States Senate.

Gallego is the only major Democratic candidate in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races. He’s looking to replace Democrat-turned-independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has disappointed Democrats with her support of corporate interests. Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor and acolyte of former President Donald Trump, is running in the Republican primary for the seat.

“I’ve never really fit in anywhere. I think that’s what makes me very comfortable in walking into every room — which is a good thing,” Gallego said.

“You do notice things as you grow older. Your schools aren’t the best schools. You work hard and sometimes that check doesn’t go that far. One of the good things I talk about on the trail is that of the many people in the Senate, I would probably be one of the few that still remembers working minimum-wage jobs,” he said. I’ve been working, legally, since I was 14. Before that, I was working on job sites doing day labor.”

‘The Sauce Guy’

One of those early jobs was at Barraco’s Pizza on West 95th Street, where Gallego recently gathered about 25 members of his family for a preholiday reunion. As young nieces and nephews ran around the room to the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” soundtrack, two of his sisters chatted with his aunts and uncles while Gallego and his wife, Sydney, took turns holding daughter Isla, who was born in July.

“I love you all,” he joked over the din, “but the pizza is really what I’m looking forward to.”

Taking his 6-year-old son Michael into the kitchen, Gallego explained how as a high school freshman he was relegated to being “the sauce guy” because his dough-tossing skills were lacking. He lamented that now the dough is pressed through a roller machine rather than hand tossed.

“That’s absolutely cheating,” he said later of the machine-rolled dough. But as he showed his son how he would sauce up the pizza in swirls using the back of a ladle, Michael comforted his father by saying, “Not everything has changed.”

Change has been a constant for Gallego. His life experience informs his political agenda, with a priority on promoting assistance for mental health, education and military and veterans’ issues.

Gallego was born in Chicago to a mother from Colombia and a father from Mexico. His father was in construction but turned to dealing drugs and left the family. When Gallego was in seventh grade, he, his mother and three sisters moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a nondescript tan-brick three-flat in Evergreen Park.

“It was a hard time definitely growing up. I do remember feeling stress a lot as a kid — trying to have a job, get good grades, help raise the family,” he said. “When you’re 14, 15, you don’t know how to process any of that. I now recognize, unfortunately, I put that off for many years. But I just remember trying to figure out how to survive mentally.”

In Evergreen Park back then, the arrival of a Latino family “was a cultural change for a lot of people here. I did encounter some racism from other students and some parents,” he said.

“But also I’m not sure I would be the person I am without this place, because there were so many people who took care of me,” he said, recalling teachers who gave him rides home when the weather was bad, friends’ parents who let him use a computer, neighbors who paid him $20 to shovel their walkways and driveways.

On his recent preholiday visit, no one was home at his family’s old apartment, #1 North, just off busy Pulaski Road.

“We kinda hit the low point,” he recalled. “My grandfather had died. He was my grandfather but also like a real father figure. We had just moved into that apartment. I had just started sleeping on the floor. It’s kind of what kicked me into real overdrive and understanding that I needed to really push myself.”

On an inside wall of the entranceway was the mailbox that, on an afternoon during his senior year of high school, bulged with his ticket out — acceptance and a scholarship to Harvard.

“I knew I had made it because the envelope was stuffing outside the mailbox, otherwise it would have been a one-page rejection letter that would have fit inside,” he said.

This is what I’m going to be up against?

As he retraced his walk to school, Gallego made a brief stop inside the public library. It’s where local librarians helped by pointing him to the materials needed to prepare for college exams and applications. He became emotional as he remembered the time he broke down in tears when he didn’t have enough change for the copy machine to make copies to take home to study.

“I remember talking to these kids at youth camps and they’d say, ‘I take four hours of prep classes a week.’ This is what I’m going to be up against?” he recalled. “And (I’m) trying to save up every piece of change I could just so I could make copies?”

“And that one day,” his voice trailed off, “the sad part about this is that I remember the times I broke down in tears. The first one was that one in the apartment. The second time was here (at the library). The third time was when I got into Harvard.”

Getting into Harvard was the culmination of his decision to buckle down on his high school studies to take his family out of poverty.

“I became possessed by the idea. I wish I still had that sometimes,” he said, laughing. As an added incentive, his Uncle Al got him a job at a meat packing plant on the 5 a.m. shift. “He joked that he did it to make sure I finished college.”

Harvard proved not to be a good fit. He struggled with his grades, had difficulty making friends with his more well-off classmates, and in his sophomore year admits he spent too much time partying and broke some rules. He was asked to leave Harvard but was told he could reapply in a year. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve during that break from school and resumed his college studies the following year, graduating in 2004.

“I didn’t fit into Harvard. I fit in more in the Marines than in Harvard, without a doubt. I tried. I don’t think I ever really adjusted,” he said.

We just kept going, and dying

With the Marines, Gallego joined a group of men of similar socio-economic status, though he took some heckling over his Harvard connection.

A year out of college, Gallego’s Marine Reserve unit was shipped off to Iraq and assigned to Lima Company, with the role of conducting sweeps to seize weapons and eliminate supporters of Saddam Hussein.

In its first two months, the unit did not have a casualty, and was dubbed “Lucky Lima.” But the luck soon ran out. During his deployment, 22 Marines and one Navy corpsman in his unit were killed in action. Ultimately, Lima lost 48 men, the hardest hit battalion in Iraq. It was the largest death count of any Marine unit since a 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed 220.

Among the unit’s casualties was Lance Cpl. Jonathan Grant, who was killed when an improvised explosive device struck his amphibious assault vehicle.

Gallego had promised Grant’s wife he would watch over him. When Gallego returned home, he suffered from post-traumatic stress. His first marriage, to a woman he met at Harvard, ended in divorce.

Gallego recounted his military and post-combat experiences in his 2021 memoir, “They Called Us ‘Lucky’: The Life and Afterlife of the Iraq War’s Hardest Hit Unit.”

“I think for many years, I carried a lot of anger and resentment. Going to war … I layered more trauma on top of trauma,” he said. “Before dealing with the PTSD, I had to deal with all of this other stuff I had grown up with.”

But when Gallego sought help for PTSD from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, he said he was rejected because, according to his service record, he never saw combat.

In his book, Gallego wrote that his service record hadn’t been updated properly when his unit’s command failed to forward information about the reserves’ deployment to Iraq through proper channels. The records of other members of his units suffered from the same omission, Gallego wrote.

“There is like a whole documentary on my unit that had already come out and in it and I’m actually, literally, in combat. I even brought it to my next appointment with the VA. I said, ‘See. This is me!’ And they said, ‘Sorry, if your record doesn’t show it, we can’t rate you for this or that,’” he said. “Not just that it was me, but I heard other veterans were having this problem. A couple of guys I served with ended up being homeless because of this.”

Gallego said it took years to straighten out the situation but he now has a Combat Action Ribbon.

His problems with the VA eventually helped steer him toward politics, even though his experience in Iraq had led him to detest politicians.

“I didn’t care about politics. Actually, I was mad. I was so mad at politicians. They left us to die. S----y armor. S----y command,” he said. “I had a lot of friends who were already politically involved. They were calling politicians, saying, ‘Hey, my friend’s unit has no armor. They’re getting blown up. Do something.’ And nothing. Nothing. We just kept going, and dying.”

Selling salsa and politics

After his military service, Gallego moved to Arizona to join his future wife, Kate Widland, a New Mexico native he met at Harvard who had moved to Phoenix to work on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

His first post-military career move was in marketing and public relations, hoping to eventually create a business catering to the ever-growing Spanish language market in Phoenix. He joined a public relations firm through a friend of a friend and oversaw production of a few Ortega salsa commercials while also working on some political campaigns.

The firm thought he did a better job selling candidates than salsa, and he ran the campaign for a severely underfunded Phoenix City Council candidate who ended up winning by 11 percentage points. That led to jobs as the councilman’s chief of staff and vice chair of the Arizona Democratic Party. A successful 2010 run for the Arizona House followed and he rose to become assistant Democratic leader in the GOP-run chamber.

In 2012, Gallego founded a group called Citizens for Professional Law Enforcement with the goal of removing controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office.

Arpaio had used taxpayer money to investigate Barack Obama’s citizenship and created an armed posse of citizens to help deputies conduct roundups under an immigration law later deemed illegal. He faced numerous lawsuits over his department’s activities.

Gallego said he feared becoming a victim of Arpaio’s well-documented bullying tactics because of his work against the sheriff.

“I remember being followed home by sheriff’s deputies. I remember telling my then-wife, ‘Listen, if somebody comes knocking at the door and says they’re a sheriff’s deputy, we’re just going to the ground right away. We don’t want to give them any excuse to shoot us,’” Gallego said.

Gallego’s efforts to bring down Arpaio fell short, but the sheriff was defeated four years later and, in July 2017, convicted of criminal contempt of court for failing to follow a court order to stop racial profiling. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump a month later.

Two years after the Arpaio effort, Gallego launched a run for Congress in a heavily Democratic district around Phoenix to replace retiring 12-term congressman Ed Pastor. He effectively won the seat by getting almost 50% of the vote in a four-way primary. The first Iraq War veteran to go to Congress from Arizona, Gallego coasted to victory in each of his reelection contests.

Seeking higher office

In 2018, Gallego backed the U.S. Senate candidacy of Sinema, a progressive who grew up in poverty, “because we came from the same background.” But a month after she announced her switch from Democrat to independent in late 2022, he formally announced his candidacy for her Senate seat.

Sinema has alienated many Democrats over her refusal to support efforts to end the filibuster in the Senate, particularly for passage of Democratic voting rights legislation, as well as for siding with corporate interests and dramatically voting against a minimum-wage increase, giving a thumbs-down hand gesture and then curtsying after bringing a chocolate cake into the chamber.

“When you’re poor, besides your family, the only other people that can look out for you are the politicians that you put in office. And to have someone use her time, her effort, her power for the already powerful after I had helped her? She screws us over,” Gallego said.

“I did not know who was going to run on the Republican side. It could have been anybody. But I knew, one, Kyrsten was not going to be helpful anymore to working-class people and two, that we’re going to be able to win despite whatever Republican ran,” he said.

One prominent group that supports a woman’s right to abortion, Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, backed Sinema previously but has endorsed Gallego, as has the Arizona Democratic Party. Democratic-aligned groups, including EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, have said they would not support Sinema again.

Sinema has not formally announced she is seeking reelection as an independent but she has privately been seeking fundraising support, including in visits to the Chicago business community, according to one Illinois Republican who is knowledgeable about her efforts but asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about them.

Lake, a former Phoenix TV news anchor turned politician, has backed Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election and has repeatedly been unsuccessful in court challenges contesting her 2022 loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race.

Disciplinary proceedings are pending for Lake’s attorneys, who have already been sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making false claims that 35,000 ballots were illegally inserted into batches of legal ballots in Maricopa County. Another one of her attorneys contended the CIA and the Justice Department forced the Arizona Supreme Court to “create misinformation boards” in the run-up to the 2020 election to prevent lawsuits challenging Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.

Lake recently posted on “X,” “Time to wake up America!” that questioned the justice system for going after “truth seekers” such as Trump, herself and Rudy Giuliani.

“We are becoming a corrupt third-world dictatorship — a Banana Republic,” Lake’s post said.

In a separate post on the same day, she added, “Speaking of accountability, will @RubenGallego be held to account for denying the 2016 election & calling Trump ‘illegitimate?’”

In October, the National Republican Senatorial Committee revealed an internal poll showing Gallego leading the Senate race with 41%, followed by Lake with 37% and Sinema with 17%. The poll findings found Sinema was taking support away from Lake, which the NRSC said it would work to reverse.

In November, the NRSC launched an ad attack titled “Rotten Ruben Gallego” that noted his divorce while his wife was pregnant with their first child and his remarriage to a “DC lobbyist.”

Gallego and his ex-wife, Kate Gallego, who is now the mayor of Phoenix, co-parent their son. His current wife is a lobbyist for the National Association of Realtors.

Republicans also have alluded to Gallego’s sometimes forceful personality and temperament, possibly foreshadowing an effort to make his PTSD diagnosis a campaign issue.

But Gallego readily discusses the issue and the need for improved mental health services and said he believes by being open about his PTSD it can encourage others to seek help.

“I think the NRSC is trying to make the best of a horrible situation, to be honest,” Gallego said of Lake’s candidacy. “They can do whatever they want. At the end of the day, when people know me, know my family, know our story, know what we’re going to do, we’re going to win. I think that’s what scares them.”

Lake has sought at times to shift the conversation to border security, saying Gallego is a hypocrite for his recent call that President Joe Biden declare the southern border an emergency and allow Arizona to receive federal help.

Yet she keeps returning to the claim she was cheated in the election for governor and the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“For all intents and purposes, Kari Lake should be doing significantly better. She just ran a fairly close gubernatorial campaign. She has statewide name appeal being on TV forever. And yet, she’s less popular now than the last day she was campaigning for governor. And why is that? Because she continues with election denialism,” Gallego said.

“People are worried. You have Donald Trump talking about it and now you have someone who wants to be in the Senate and wants to be a vote for him, especially when it comes to overturning elections and having us move slowly into autocracy,” he said.

As for the intensity of the campaign attacks against him at such an early stage, Gallego said it is fitting.

“There’s nothing that I’ve ever gained in life that didn’t come with some kind of struggle,” he said.

rap30@aol.com