Odds and ends with some a bit odder than others:
Chicago’s Studs: I never met Studs Terkel. Wish I had. And I know he had many friends in Oak Park and River Forest. But I can say that back in the very early 1970s his book, Division Street: America, opened my white kid suburban eyes to a world more complicated, unjust, dynamic and wonderful than I had ever understood.
The insights came from all directions. Black men with roots in the South. White working people steeped a generation or two in America. Privileged folks without much connection to anyone who worked for a living. All their voices sympathetic, complex.
This is a book that is coming down off my shelf for an early winter rereading.
Did you register for Halloween?: A couple of weeks ago, one of our ad designers, obviously with too much time on his hands and too much Oak Park in his blood, knocked off a “Residential Halloween Candy Dispersal Form” that looked for all the world as if it had been freshly promulgated from Oak Park’s village hall. The right logo. The right shade of green. The right political impulse to solve a perceived problem by imposing a village-hall-centric solution.
“Due to the growing concern of consumable products being tampered with and distributed on Halloween, the Village Clerk has issued code 13666. Code 13666 mandates that all Oak Park Village Residents who wish to participate in distributing consumable products on October 31, 2008 register with the Village Clerk by no later than October 24, 2008.”
The new Halloween code goes on to specify that registered homes will be issued a placard to be displayed prominently and a roll of stickers to be affixed to each individual unit of consumable product. The form goes on to ask for your name, address and PIN number before listing the 21 village-approved consumables permitted for Halloween.
It says something bad about our town that this faux form had people in the office going for some time before the hoax was revealed.
Repeat: This was a hoax. It wasn’t a real form.
Real Halloween: On my block of Humphrey, Halloween was an entirely happy occasion with the usual crowd (hundreds and hundreds) of West Side kids coming over for some Obama-esque candy socialism.
Let’s hear it for Pan’s: Love to hear about local businesses reinvesting in Oak Park. But when it is an independent grocery store that is growing rather then closing, it is cause for celebration. Last week the Journal reported that the venerable Pan’s Food Center on Oak Park Avenue at the Ike has made what appears to be the winning bid for the hideously vacant village-owned parcel to its south. The store will expand its offerings into the new space. While we accurately reported that the store has been vacant since an art gallery decamped in 2005, the truth is that this space has been abandoned since Avenue Pharmacy closed shop. And that has to have been at least 15 years ago.
And now, village elections: You thought the election was over this morning? We’re just getting geared up for local elections next April. A couple of notes as candidates and slates start to shape. District 97 is going to lose a stellar school board member with the announced retirement of Carolyn Newberry Schwartz. She’s done her eight years and done them well. Word that John Rigas will close out his terms at OPRF and now run for River Forest village president has been among the most speculated of topics for months. It will be an interesting spring in the suddenly contentious River Forest.
