Bryan Bain Seated on Oshkosh Common Council

He just barely made the cut in the Oshkosh primaries, coming in sixth out of 14 candidates. After months of campaigning, he became the second most popular candidate in the April elections, a significant leap for a someone who has never run for public office in Oshkosh before.

A consistently snappy dresser with glasses and a plethora of neck-ties, Bryan Bain is now one of the three newly seated members of the Oshkosh Common Council.

Bain was born in 1975 in Logan Sport, Ind. to Rick and Karen Bain. He was raised there, but his most vivid childhood memory was his first family vacation to Disney World. After graduating from Logan Sport High School in 1993, Bain enrolled at Ball State University.

In 1996 Bain and several of his friends took a road trip to Spring Break in Florida. “We had nothing, but laughs the whole way down,” said Bain, “then when we got there, everything that could go wrong did. The luxury hotel we were going to be staying at turned out to be a dive with a two-foot by three-foot bathroom.” Despite everything that went wrong, Bain regards the trip as one of his best college memories. “The night before we were supposed to leave, three of the guys we were there with decided to get matching tattoos. I had no idea where they went, I thought they had been in a car accident and we’d never see them again.”

Graduating from Ball State didn’t stop Bain from attending classes there. He began to pursue his masters degree in student affairs administration, which led to his eventual hiring as a residence hall director at the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh. It was at UW-O that Bain would meet the woman who would one day be his wife, Amanda Kowald.

A year after she graduated, Bryan and Amanda were married and he left his job as a Residence Hall Director to work in UW-O’s Office of Admissions. After only a year there he was made an assistant director.

Then Bain decided to run for the Oshkosh Common Council. “I don’t like to be a Monday morning quarter-back,” Bain said. “I felt this was an important time period for the city.” Bain attributes his success in the general election to hard work. His post-primary election strategy focused on areas of the city which voted for candidates who had not made it into the top six. This included lots of going door-to-door by Bain himself. He also claims that William Castle never publicly endorsed him and he does not believe that any connection the two of them had not helped or harmed him in any way.

Despite all of his hard work and now being seated on the common council, Bain claims that his greatest challenge for the next two years will be building name recognition in the city so he can be reelected in 2007.

Bain hopes to gain this recognition through new initiatives which will bring Oshkosh residents and UW-O students into a more active role with city government. These Fifth Tuesday Forums, as Bain has titled them, would take place during the fifth Tuesdays of a month, which occurs about six times in any given year, in different parts of the city. The purpose of these forums is to hear about what city residents think the goals of the common council should be.

Bain will continue his job at the university, where he hopes to get students involved with city politics on a more consistent basis. With two years full of opportunity ahead of him, Bryan Bain is looking forward to the challenge of leading the city into the future.