Al Garver says he loves to work. He loves to talk about work, too, reeling off anecdotes about projects, promotions and highlights from every phase of his career as a military man, salesman, manager and independent consultant.

He says he learned to value hard work while growing up in Oregon as the youngest of 11 children. Garver was born in Newport, Ore., on April 22, 1963, and five years later the family moved to North Powder, in the northeastern part of the state. His father, previously a carpenter, was by then a millwright who traveled around the Northwest to work on big projects. He was often home for months at a time between jobs, collecting unemployment and doing cabinetry to make ends meet.

In North Powder, there were seven children still at home. The five boys shared one bedroom, and the two girls shared another. As the youngest, Al slept on the floor until his oldest brother moved out and freed up a berth on one of the two bunk beds in the boys' room.

The family had very little, Garver said, but he never felt deprived as a boy. He did feel cheated that he had to hold down all kinds of little jobs to make spending money while the children of rich ranchers drove into town in their own cars.

"I was always working," he said. "I was the kid in town that mowed the lawns and sold Christmas cards and raked leaves and weeded gardens, shoveled chicken crap out of coops. … I was the only kid in town that worked like that."

He said he was also the hardest-working of the Garver children.

"Looking back now, that cultivated the incredible work ethic I have that made me do so well in the military and every other endeavor that I do. And I look at my other brothers and sisters that didn't work nearly as hard, and most of them have lives that are - uh, how do you even put it? - they're just not productive members of society at all."

'Wired for service'

Garver is hoping to take his work ethic into the Billings mayor's office. He placed second in the September primary and will square off against former Police Chief Ron Tussing in the general election on Nov. 8.

Garver said his run for mayor is not about setting the stage for seeking higher office. "My goal is to be a successful businessman and make a lot more money than I could make as any other officeholder," he said.

Then why run for mayor?

"It's the being wired for service," Garver said. "I serve in my church, I serve in the Guard, I serve as state president of the Air Force Association. It's like a compulsion. It's like an obligation. When you know you can make a difference, you have to do something. You can't just wait for somebody else to do it."

Waiting for anything has never been one of Garver's strong points. He said he was a straight-A student early in high school, but he was also easily bored and established himself as the class clown. As a result, he said, he got in some trouble, and his grades started to fall because of his conduct. He dropped out of school in his junior year.

During the winter of what would have been his senior year, he earned his GED, as good as a high school diploma. For three years after quitting school, he bounced around from job to job, washing dishes, working as a night janitor at a bank and as a DJ at a Christian radio station.

That last job followed one of the most important moments of his life - his conversion as a born-again Christian. Garver said he was raised in a strong Catholic household, then practiced Mormonism for two years in high school because his girlfriend was a Latter-day Saint. He even tried to be baptized into the LDS church, but his mother wouldn't hear of it.

After quitting school, "I turned into a little pagan for a while," he said. It was while he was living with one of his sisters, herself a born-again Christian, that he experienced a conversion. He started attending her church, he said, but then came "a particular moment when I just felt I had to get down on my knees and pray and ask the Lord to come into my life."

'The best decision'

Another important event, soon after that, was his decision to join the Air Force. All but one of his brothers had gone into the military, and Garver figured doing so himself was the only way he could afford to get a college education. The year Garver joined the Air Force, in 1983, his oldest brother retired from a 20-year career in the military.

Garver immediately felt at home in the Air Force.

"That was the absolute best decision I ever made," he said.

He thinks the Air Force also turned his life around.

"I have no doubt that I could have ended up like most of my brothers. … I have brothers that are homeless and sisters with their minds fried by drugs and illegitimate kids and just terrible life situations from bad choices. I think by getting on the straight and narrow, I was able to start learning how to make good choices."

Garver spent eight years in the Air Force, serving on five bases from Greenland to Tucson, Ariz. He was assigned to the Military Police and rose to the level of staff sergeant in eight years, also serving as unit historian. He said he was involved in every facet of law enforcement, including setting up D.A.R.E. programs in base schools, providing munitions security, working on crime prevention and leading an anti-terrorism unit in Tucson. He said he wanted to fight in the first Gulf War but his anti-terrorism role was considered a critical-duty position, and he remained stateside.

It was during that period that he met his wife, Debra. He was attending a Foursquare Church, and she was the pastor's daughter. They started dating in the fall of 1990 and were married in May 1991. When his active duty ended in September 1991, he and Debra headed for Oregon, where they both hoped to attend Portland Bible College.

They arrived too late for the fall enrollment, however, so they went to visit Garver's father in North Powder, where he was living alone. Since Garver's father needed some help, Al and Debra ended up living in the next town over, in La Grande, where they both served as apprentice youth pastors in a Foursquare Church.

His first real job after leaving the Air Force was working as the membership and leadership coordinator for the La Grande Chamber of Commerce, then as a program director for a child care resource and referral agency run by the county. He did so well in that job, Garver said, that his professional social worker colleagues voted him into a position on a new statewide commission on child care resources.

"They thought I had the leadership qualities … and the ability to really get things done," he said.

Those leadership qualities are what Art Geiger likes about Garver. Geiger, the owner of Better Business Systems in Billings, recently sponsored a small meet-and-greet event at the Petroleum Club, where Garver could talk to potential donors.

Geiger said there is a leadership vacuum at City Hall these days and that Garver seems like the kind of determined person who can get things back on track.

"He's confident he can initiate that leadership," Geiger said. Geiger also said the "open sores" that have plagued the city since Tussing's feud with former City Administrator Kristoff Bauer went public will never heal if Tussing is elected mayor.

A new start

Garver had also joined the Air National Guard immediately after his discharge from active service, and after leaving his social service job he spent the summer of 1995 as a Guardsman assigned to state police headquarters, where he helped coordinate community-policing programs.

Early in 1996, he went to work for the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group. "That was where I really found my niche," Garver said.

His job was to sell NFIB memberships to business owners. The strategy was fairly simple: "You basically get them mad and frustrated about the government and tell them, 'We're the cure.' "

He convinced so many business owners to take the cure and increase their contributions to the NFIB, Garver said, that within nine months he was promoted from territory manager to division manager, a process that normally takes three to five years. The division manager job was in Billings, where Garver moved in 1996 to run NFIB operations in Montana and Wyoming.

Garver said he was a successful salesman for the NFIB because he genuinely believed in the organization, which he said is run from the bottom up, with members choosing its goals and deciding on its legislative agenda. The division manager job involved a lot of travel and took 80 to 90 hours a week, Garver said, so he went on inactive status with the Guard for three years.

In 1999, the NFIB promoted Garver to "super division manager," a newly created position in which he would be responsible for Alaska and Washington. The trouble was, Garver wasn't asked whether he wanted the promotion. His already busy schedule got even worse, and for six months he worked long hours and was on the road most of the time.

After six months of that, he quit the NFIB, going to work as director of the MetraPark Foundation in Billings. Garver said he was suddenly working just 40 hours a week, which to him seemed like a luxury. To fill out his schedule, he did two things: He reactivated his Guard duty, signing up in Great Falls as a chaplain's assistant, and volunteered to work on Republican Denny Rehberg's campaign as he was making his first run for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Garver said his father was a hard-line union Democrat. Joining the military during the Reagan era soon turned Garver into a Republican, and he is now as strong a Republican as his father was a Democrat, he said. Garver stayed with the MetraPark Foundation only six months. He said he had some good ideas for making money off the American Bowling Congress national tournament that was coming to Billings, but when the board of directors sided with the bowling convention manager one too many times over the direction of fundraising and marketing efforts, Garver quit.

He put in another abbreviated stint - 10 months this time - as a sales rep for a dot-com startup business in Missoula. He said he got out just ahead of the bust in the dot-com industry, and unlike his colleagues, he stuck with straight pay instead of stock options and was one of the few employees to come out ahead as a result.

Back in Billings, he was applying for another job when he called Rehberg's chief of staff to ask for a letter of recommendation. Instead, early in 2001, he was offered the job of managing Rehberg's run for re-election in 2002. It was another line of work that Garver thought he was made for, calling on all his leadership and organizational skills.

"I'm just real anal retentive," he said. "That's just the kind of thing I do."

Garver talks proudly of the connections he made with prominent Republicans in those years. There's a photo of him with Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, now speaker of the House, and another in which Garver is flanked by Rehberg and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.

He mentions his party affiliation in all his stump speeches, and when he announced his candidacy on the lawn of the Yellowstone County Courthouse, he described himself as a "conservative Christian." The mayoral race is nonpartisan, and religious affiliation isn't usually something one hears about in Billings political races, but Garver makes no apologies for trumpeting his beliefs. Everybody running for office has a political ideology and a party affiliation, he said.

"That's what bothers me about other people, when they go to groups and try to pander to the groups and tell them what they want to hear, because they want everybody to like them. … It's definitely the nature of politics, but that's not me."

He said he details his beliefs because he is "a full-disclosure guy."

"I want everybody to know everything about me - who I am, what I stand for - and let them make the choice," he said.

Rehberg said he believes Garver's background in small business, the military, and as a family man and a Christian would make him a good mayor. "It's a complete package," he said.

Billings is on the cusp of becoming a much bigger, better city, Rehberg said, and it needs dynamic leadership to make the next leap. He said Garver would be a good fit because of his proven ability to work with people from all kinds of backgrounds.

"You need somebody with personal skills that gets along with people," he said.

After leaving his job as Rehberg's campaign manager in December 2002, Garver spent six months as executive director of the Montana Family Foundation, a nonprofit group associated with James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Garver said he stayed with the foundation for only six months because his "really major fundraising and program goals" didn't match those of the foundation board.

After leaving the foundation, he started his own media, education and political consulting business, OTB Consulting Inc. OTB stands for "out of the box," the kind of thinking Garver likes to characterize as nontraditional and nonlinear.

OTB's clients have included the group backing the unsuccessful bond issue that would have financed a new Cobb Field and aquatic center in the Heights, and a contract with the National Guard Bureau to publicize and provide educational tools on the role of the military in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. As part of that contract, he developed "then-and-now" Guard exhibits at Lewis and Clark "Signature Events" all across the country.

He also developed, wrote and narrated a series of daily radio spots on the expedition, highlighting the role of the military, that are now running on 42 stations in 12 states.

Garver earned an associate degree in criminal justice from the Community College of the Air Force during his years in the military, and these days he is still trying to finish up a bachelor's degree in small city and rural county management through Eastern Oregon University.

"I'm trying to cram a four-year degree into 20 years," he said.