Odds and ends with some a bit odder than others:
Coffee with Boykin: Sat down with 1st District Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin last week for coffee. Turns out he has been in office now for 500 days. Asked him what he had accomplished in 500 days and, presto-chango, his aide handed over the multi-page list.
Might have been a little bit of overkill. But that’s Richard Boykin. His predecessor in the office, Earlean Collins, couldn’t have filled a post-it note with her accomplishments after multiple terms.
So, the ramp up from Collins to Boykin can be a bit head-spinning.
Boil it down and I’d list Boykin’s accomplishments like this:
Boykin treats the explosion of gun violence on the West Side as the societal failure that it is. There is nothing normal or acceptable about this mass murder in our midst. And, he has faith that government can take steps to control it. He demands that government take steps.
Boykin assesses the decades-long abandonment of the West Side and the entire 1st District by the city of Chicago, Cook County and the state as a conscious and heinous act. No planning, no economic investment, failing schools, failed justice system, lousy health care, no mental health care. It doesn’t happen by accident. And, he says, it is time that people who live here demand their share.
Boykin connects the interests and the people of his large district in a way that has never been attempted. He builds alliances – in a way no one bothered to in the past.
He can be a showboat. He denies it and bristles at it some. But there are worse things.
Stunning comments from Oak Park officials: No, not going to Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb’s desire for a full-time salary. But how about the sly comment a couple of months back from Trustee Colette Lueck that she has stopped plugging parking meters in town. If there is ever a revolution in Oak Park it is going to be over parking.
Or how about Township Assessor Ali ElSaffar’s quote in a recent Sun-Times column by Mark Brown, who discovered that another ripple in the state’s meltdown was that a small program that subsidizes property taxes for certain elders was no longer being paid, and that an Oak Park woman was being pestered by her bank.
ElSaffar, one of the most astute and attentive elected officials, stepped in with the bank but told Brown that he “was embarrassed trying to explain Rauner and Madigan” to a bank bureaucrat in Texas.
The Butler Bros.: Wrote a few months back about family letters I’d found in an old dictionary I bought years ago. Moving thoughts passed down from an uncle to his three nephews. But, I confessed, I knew nothing about the three Butler boys receiving the Webster’s as a gift except that they lived in Oak Park in the 1930s.
Last month I heard from the children of one of those boys as the family gathered up near Chicago for a reunion. The brothers all grew up, served in World War II, came back to civilian life and lived good lives, was the report.
Two promotions: Happy to report that two of my valued colleagues here at Wednesday Journal Inc. have stepped up into added responsibility. Dawn Ferencak, our advertising director, has taken on the added role of associate publisher for our Community efforts. And Tamara O’Shaughnessy, editor at our Chicago Parent, is now also associate publisher of CP.
What’s in a name? Finally, only the most persistent readers might know that I’ve never been a fan of the moniker Wednesday Journal, even though I was the one who signed off on it in a combination of desperation and failed creativity 36 summers ago.
So, after long consideration, I am ready to announce that we are renaming our company. We are now “tronc.”
What? How can it be that Tribune Publishing rebranded itself as tronc just last week? What are the odds?
