Hoellen was the unsuccessful 1975 Republican nominee for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Democrat Richard J. Daley.
[4] After law school, Hoellen served in the United States Military and worked in the Illinois Attorney General's Office.
[1] Hoellen was a "good-government" focused politician, who often delivered passionate speeches criticizing waste, corruption, and inefficiency.
[4] In 1961, he was one of only three alderman who voted against an urban renewal plan to bulldoze much of Little Italy to build the campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago.
[5][4] In 1965, he led a campaign to see Wilbur Wright College remove James Baldwin's novel Another Country from its reading list due to it having what he regarded to be "filthy" themes of interracial and homosexual relations.
[6] In 1979, he was appointed by Illinois Governor James R. Thompson to the Chicago Transit Authority Board, on which he served until retiring in 1990.