Thoughts on Peter Traczyk’s death

Peter Traczyk’s death on Saturday, by suicide the medical examiner announced on Sunday, is as profound and unexpected a loss as our community has faced in recent memory. Each year we lose great citizens and, in retrospect, we mourn them and celebrate their piece in making Oak Park what it has grown to be.

But Peter’s death comes in midflight. His accomplishments as a school board member, as president of the District 97 elementary schools are many and culture changing over eight years of service. And now he was clearly the favorite in his bid to move to the OPRF school board this spring.

I can make a long list, and maybe I will by the time of Wednesday’s paper, of issues that Peter led the charge on at District 97. As I wrote about in last week’s column, he was in our offices just a week ago selling the virtues of a new contract between the schools and the teachers that was dramatic, creative and generous in its shifted expectations.

But more than policy, important policy, there was the bright energy that Peter Traczyk brought to every effort. I saw it each time we talked going back a lot of years to the first time we met when we worked a shift together at the Beye School Book Fair.

He was very smart, very strategic, very funny, very kind. That’s a lot of verys you don’t often find in one man. And you see it in the long list of reader comments piling up on OakPark.com this Sunday as people grapple with the catastrophic news of Peter’s death. Kindnesses and connections. Helping kids make Halloween costumes – a really big Beye thing – shoveling out the curb cuts near his house last week so high school kids didn’t slide into traffic, building actual bridges between local school boards and village officials that had fallen into pitiful little ruts of non-communication and suspicion.

Peter Traczyk was one of our best and brightest. Maybe over time we will come to understand his death. Maybe not.  But no circumstance alters in any way our respect for him, the love we know he felt for his family and friends, for this village.

This loss is deep and for many of us personal.  My prayers go to his wife and to his three kids.