I wonder if Dan Haley can take what he dishes out. I also read his “editorial” about Geoff Baker two weeks ago and was fairly appalled. But it is so typical of you, Dan. I have tried to read your column for years, thinking, “This paper has been voted one of the best community newspapers in the country.” Well, I was raised by community newspaper journalists-mother and father-and I took “the importance of the community press” quite literally with my mother’s milk.
“Community papers,” my mother used to say, are an essential part of the democratic process. They should act as the watchdogs and advocate for ethics, fairness and progressive politics in a community. Occasionally, Wednesday Journal does such things, but never by any fault of Dan Haley’s column, which is consistently childish, trite, petty, and, worst of all irrelevant to most of what is important in Oak Park.
Basically, the editor of WJ, who should be setting the serious ideological course of the paper, is busy writing what is essentially a gossip column on whatever strikes his fancy that particular week. (My favorite DHism was when he actually wrote on the houses he didn’t like in Oak Park.)
Who do you think you are? Do you get that actual people live in those houses, or are you just too arrogant to realize that the citizens of Oak Park are human beings, including, I might add, Geoff Baker? I was no great supporter of the man, but the point is that he quit and is therefore no longer terribly relevant. Wish him well and send him along. If you feel it is important, tell us what you disagreed with him about. But then try writing something useful like what direction you would like to see the replacement take.
It has long been my contention that Dan Haley stands for nothing much except a very thin veneer of liberalism not far under which lies a self-absorbed rich man who finds himself terribly funny and who runs an ever-expanding business which dictates that he take the positions of the business community first if he can be bothered to take any real position at all.
Mary Kay Ryan
Oak Park