Tony Evers as a child watched his dad combat a deadly disease plaguing society. In 2020, it was his turn.

PLYMOUTH – Before a wall of television cameras — as reporters’ cell phones buzzed with headlines declaring international travel banned, NBA players falling ill, and cruise ship passengers marooned at sea — Tony Evers stepped into a role he learned as a child.

Fourteen months into his first term as governor, Evers declared a state of emergency in Wisconsin as the coronavirus pandemic picked up speed in the U.S., outpacing knowledge of how to combat it. On a military base in Madison, Evers assured the public that his administration would prioritize keeping people healthy and called for shared sacrifice.

That approach was one he learned as a child in the 1950s living on the campus of a publicly-run tuberculosis sanatorium his father oversaw as medical director on the outskirts of Plymouth, and its consequences to businesses and the political strife that followed has become central to Republicans' case against giving Evers a second term.

But Evers has no regrets.

“We had kind of a science family. Science was important to us. And his public health persona is something that still drives me to this day,” he said of his father, Raymond Evers, at a table in the dining room of Dino’s Pizza in Plymouth. “The science was clear that in order to stop this pandemic, we needed to be careful. We were very careful for the first couple of months, and then it became a political thing. And there’s no surprise there — we’re Wisconsin. I knew that was going to happen. But we tried to do the best we could.”

“We saved lives. We saved thousands of lives by doing that. That’s worth it — that is worth it. I’ll take all the criticism coming.”

Evers, 70, is the Democratic incumbent in the nation’s most expensive race for governor. He faces the co-owner of the state’s largest construction company, Tim Michels — a Republican who ran for state Senate and U.S. Senate in the past but has not held public office. Michels has made Evers' coronavirus order a key part of his argument to voters — handing out campaign T-shirts that say “Hey Evers, my job is essential.”

Evers has spent an entire career in public positions — working as a teacher, principal, school district superintendent and state superintendent before being elected governor in 2018.

Childhood spent at a tuberculosis sanatorium

One of Evers' first unpaid jobs was at Rocky Knoll Sanatorium, the county health facility his father oversaw, cooking brats on Fridays for staff and families. Evers said memories of his father there are distilled into flashbacks of 3 a.m. phone calls to their home on the sanatorium's grounds, where he lived with his two older brothers and his father, a doctor, and his mother, a nurse.

“You knew at 3 o’clock in the morning, calling my father, somebody was having trouble and more likely were at the end of their life,” Evers said at a September ceremony at Rocky Knoll honoring his father. “He would get up, come over and do what he needed to do to either save a life, or get the family of the deceased comfortable.”

“And so that is just something that I absolutely will never forget — not only the timeliness but the caring enough at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Following the ceremony, Evers toured the facility with his wife, Kathy, and their three children: Erin, Katie and Nick — walking the halls of the long-term care center where Evers' mother and father lived before their deaths. The family ran into people they knew before Evers was known nationally as the governor of the most evenly divided battleground state in the country — like a classmate of Evers and Kathy, who met in elementary school, visiting his dad — and those who knew the governor was before he said hello.

"I'm going to fall to pieces here!" Rocky Knoll resident Margaret Haas exclaimed after Evers introduced himself to her and kissed her on the top of her head. "I got kissed by the governor!"

Growing up at a place like a sanatorium in the 1950s and 1960s, Evers watched patients recover, families grieve, and staff become anxious over getting sick themselves. Decades later, he was thrust into the same environment — responsible for overseeing the state’s response to a deadly pandemic.

The onslaught of COVID-19

Throughout 2020 and much of 2021, Evers and his administration oversaw vaccinations, the distribution and analysis of COVID-19 tests, tracking who was getting sick and dying, keeping the public up-to-date on the status of the outbreak on a near-daily basis, getting protective gear and federal funding to health care facilities and schools, among other tasks.

That approach included executive orders mandating face masks indoors and one that shuttered hundreds of businesses, and also school buildings for the last two months of the school year, a lockdown that began when the pandemic first hit the state and lasted until Republican lawmakers convinced the Wisconsin Supreme Court to strike it down.

GOP leaders of the state Legislature have fought Evers on nearly every action he has taken, or tried to take, since Evers was elected. After a very brief detente when the pandemic began, the political battles began again in April 2020 when Evers sought to delay the spring election to avoid increasing COVID-19 infections.

Soon after, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos then moved to end Evers’ stay-at-home order that had designated only certain businesses and industries essential.

One of the state’s signature industries — bars and taverns — was not on the list.

“Utter shock,” Jim Billings, who owns two bars in Stevens Point, said about learning of the order. “We were only given about just a couple hours’ notice.”

Billings has owned his bar and restaurant, Final Score, for 20 years. He said he learned he had to shut down his business from the Tavern League of Wisconsin, and not from state officials.

“We turned on the newscasts and heard about it,” he said. “It was kind of ridiculous. I mean, we had people in the bar, and when we told them they were going to have to vacate by five o'clock, they couldn't believe it.”

Billings closed up completely for the entire month of April and began offering take-out in May. He said at one point that year, he determined his sales were down by 65%. Other bar owners weren’t as lucky, he said, and were forced to sell. His employees were out of work for weeks.

The closures forced by the stay-at-home order, and by fears of getting sick, pushed thousands of people into a long outdated unemployment system that resulted in thousands of people waiting months to receive benefits — a major breakdown that forced Evers to fire the Secretary of the Department of Workforce Development and overhaul the benefits system.

“As the facts emerged, it was kind of sketchy what was determining what was essential and non-essential businesses … how they came up with what could stay open — it seemed like not much thought was behind that,” Billings said, noting large chain retailers like Wal-Mart and Target could stay open. “It had a huge impact. In our town, we lost some mom-and-pop taverns.”

“Overall, I thought it was terrible,” Billings said of Evers’ handling of the pandemic.

“I understand that when you're dealing with the unknown, that may be difficult, but I just think it could have and should have been handled differently.”

Throughout his pandemic response, Evers contended with Republicans successfully knocking down his orders and the proliferation of baseless COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

Various moments during this navigation of the pandemic are being used by Republicans against Evers in his re-election bid, including not calling on large school districts to stop providing virtual instruction that ultimately resulted in educational setbacks for children and releasing a recording of a conversation with Republican legislative leaders, who did not know they were being recorded, following the Supreme Court striking down the stay-at-home order.

Evers said above all, he sought to keep people alive. He said his stay-at-home order was more generous than other states’ orders and kept some key industries open — like construction — to ensure infrastructure didn’t deteriorate.

“You didn't see roads being built in other places across the country,” he said.

But he acknowledges the episode as the most difficult decision he has made as governor.

“The stay-at-home order was easily the most dramatic. But it's the one that saved lots of lives. So, no regrets. But that was difficult.”

Praise from health care

Ashok Rai, president and CEO of Prevea Health and appointed by Evers to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, was overseeing his health system's response in the northeastern part of the state that was repeatedly hit with high rates of infection.

Rai said Evers and his administration listened to healthcare workers providing frontline care instead of dictating to them, or ignoring their concerns.

"It was all hands on deck, but it wasn't like we would call Madison and be put on hold. You know, when we called Madison the phone was answered," Rai said. "We had somebody on the other side that understood what we were doing, but more importantly, was listening to our needs — because our needs were the community's needs, such as testing, such as beds, such as staff, and they listened to us. And really, when we asked, I'd say generally we may not have gotten it in the next hour, but there was definitely a plan put out there for us to get what we needed."

As of this week, more than 13,000 people have died in Wisconsin of COVID-19. During surges of infection, the Green Bay area was repeatedly hit hard — at one point a hospital Rai oversees was forced to turn away patients because of too few staff to care for the number of patients needing help.

Rai said he believes the governor helped prevent the situation from being worse.

"I think the combined effort, what was going on in Madison and everything that we were doing on the ground, without it we most definitely would have seen a worse outcome," he said.

"We had massive outbreaks at the meatpacking plants, and people were dying from that and for the governor to partner with us, and get us testing and allow us to mass test with local government partnerships and local public health here, and to get control over that major outbreak, and that was really early on a pandemic — if we had not had that partnership, more people would have been harmed. Without a doubt. That's a great example of asking for the help and it showed up."

Evers faces headwinds as a Democratic incumbent in 2022 and should he lose in November, will leave the governor’s office after holding it during one of the more contentious four-year terms of a Wisconsin governor. During just one of those years: a national uprising over racial injustice, a deadly riot in Kenosha, and a presidential election that is still being falsely accused of being rigged, in addition to the pandemic.

At the same time, Evers has vetoed more bills than any other governor in state history — a symbol of the intense political battle between Republicans who control the Legislature and the Democratic governor that embroils the state Capitol on any given day.

Evers’ oldest brother said Evers’ has handled it all like his dad would have.

“My father, like Tony to some extent, could be soft-spoken. He wasn’t an extremely outgoing person or anything like that … he was quite focused. He knew what he had to do and went ahead and did it and I would say certainly Tony has been like that,” Mike Evers said.

“Tony does not have to be told about the difficulties of his job and, you know, he’s learned how to operate within the system that exists. Obviously, it could be much better, but I think that he knows what he’s up against and what he has to do to resolve that as much as he can.”

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Tony Evers fight against COVID-19 colors race for governor