Dan Kontoff for Allston/Brighton City Councilor

Dan (The Bagel Man) Kontoff

Candidate for Allston/Brighton City Councilor

Dan Kontoff for Allston/Brighton City Councilor

Wed 02/23/05 The Daily Free Press

On a snowy night at B&D Deli in Brookline, the waiter takes an elderly couple's request for two Rubins. The order would not prompt a lengthy response from most servers, but for Dan “The Bagel Man” Kontoff, a perfect excuse for politicking has fallen into his lap.

He begins a conversation about Jerry Rubin, a political radical and one of the Chicago Seven who went to trial for trying to incite a riot following anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After all, Kontoff has no time to waste. He's vying for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and the election is fewer than two months away.

“I'm not a politician,” Kontoff says. “My goal is to make a political difference. The weird thing is I'd have a desk job. I've never had a desk job.”

The 44-year-old Kontoff moves around the deli with the energy of someone half his age, jumping around from table to table, delivering sandwiches, wiping counters, making small talk, all the while breaking every couple of minutes to answer questions about his political ambitions.

Dressed in plain pants and a B&D-logo shirt, Kontoff lets his personality shine through by adorning himself with a large white, red and blue beaded Native American-style necklace and two earrings, one of half of a fork and the other of half of a spoon, both of which dangle from his left ear.

“I run the poor people's campaign,” Kontoff says, referring to his run at a City Council seat in 2003 on a budget of $200, compared to the thousands he said the elected Councilor Jerry McDermott raised. “A lot of people who run for office don't have to work, but I have to work to pay my bills.”

Kontoff says “we did very well” in the 2003 City Council race, although according to the Allston-Brighton TAB, Councilor McDermott won close to 82 percent of the vote.

He adds that the Green-Rainbow Party, the party he hopes to run under, is “not about money” and that “we have to take the money out of politics” and use it for better things - such as feeding the hungry. Continued...