Shirley Klem was an Oak Park village trustee for eight years, mainly in the 1970s. That means she was on the village board for two of the four most consequential, most innovative, most daring terms in our community’s history. The mid-1960s through the 1970s were the years when Oak Park reinvented itself as a fair-housing pioneer, determined to create resourceful ways to build a racially integrated community.
In retrospect, it seems preordained. What else would this ultra-liberal community have become? Except that in the 1960s, Oak Park was very conservative, almost 100 percent white and perfectly content.
A generation of leaders — Gearen, McClure, Loevy, Klem, Philbin, Osborn, Callahan and more — shook Oak Park out of that comfort zone and directed its attention to the east, where the city’s West Side was being cynically resegregated, block by block. The Oak Park of today, where we whine about this or that inconvenience, was born out of the courage and never-ending innovations that Oak Park created out of whole cloth to accomplish things no other town in America had contemplated.
Shirley Klem died on Monday. She was 85 and a confluence of illnesses had conspired over recent years to limit her physically. But she was “mentally sharp” to the close, said her daughter Becky. “Mentally sharp,” “acerbic,” “dry,” “keen,” “spunk and spirit,” “straightshooter,” “incisive,” “forceful,” were all words I heard used in describing Shirley. That’s how I remember her, too. Filled with common sense, totally unpretentious, always ready with a wink to let you know she was in on the deal and the joke. Great smile. Great chuckle. When, as a kid reporter, I needed something explained to me because I knew I was being spun but didn’t know why or in what direction, I’d call Shirley and she’d just lay it out.
I talked Tuesday morning to Ginny Cassin, for decades Oak Park’s village clerk and guiding light. She talked about Shirley and her plainspoken approach. To that point, said Cassin, “women [on boards] were all sort of token women. Soft, ladylike women. But Shirley made no apologies. Sometimes she stepped on toes. But she was one of the more incisive minds we had in the village and her conclusions were well thought out.”
Becky Mills and her brother, Jon Klem, grew up on South Clinton. Lived there for a long while. Becky remembers her mom as a homemaker with a degree in psychology from Northwestern. Before she got involved in village government, Becky says, she was deep into the PTO and all things school for her kids. “She had a sharp wit sometimes,” says Becky. “But she was my best friend.”
A memorial for Shirley will be held this Friday evening at 8 p.m. at Unity Temple on Lake Street.
I asked Ginny, who’s a bit older than Shirley, about the accelerating passing of Oak Park’s civil rights generation. “I hope we did a good job among the next generation in creating a sensitivity of what a major chapter that was in our community. It didn’t just happen. A generation of people thought it was worth the time and the effort. None of us are looking for fame, but in passing the torch, we need to tell the story well. If we don’t, then it is our own fault. It has been a privilege, and I think a good bit of what we did took root.”
