Short History of Oak Park

You were wondering where Greek Town is, you thought on Halsted south of Eisenhower or thereabouts?  You should have asked Chi Trib’s Pamela Sherrod, who locates “Chicago’s predominantly Greek neighborhood near Oak Park.”  Kidding you not, am I.  It’s in an article, “Living lean in a ’stuffaholic’ world” as it ran in the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times 1/21/06.

Later, from Len:

Well, it’s only 10 minutes on the Ike..

and then there’s papaspiros… a neighborhood in itself.
(Not to mention George’s, Thyme and Honey, Maple Leaf…)

OR maybe she is thinking about the neighborhood around Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church on [Central] next to Loretto Hospital.., must have been a Greek
neighborhood onceuponatime.

True.

Is it possible OP police chief Tanksley would prefer not to have told Chi Trib — “Crime Drops in Oak Park” — that the 61% of OP’s 58 assault victims in 2005 who are juveniles were a case of “kids having a problem with other kids”?  A few years back, one of those kids, son of the elementary schools superintendent, needed eye surgery after being attacked in Whittier playground by kids from Austin.  If reported assaults, as Tanksley said, do not appear to be gang-related, they are something else bad that should not be dismissed cavalierly.

Veronica Micklin, of 1001 Wenonah, has great things to say about neighborhood life in Oak Park.  For a look at “children, independence and play,” she says in a letter to NYTimes, come to

the south section of Oak Park, where we live. My son, who is now 18, still walked over to his friends’ homes to play when he was home over holiday break, rather than call them on his cell phone. Here the kids draw with chalk on the sidewalk, ride their bikes and walk to the playgrounds and parks. They play whiffle ball in backyards and throw footballs on quiet Sunday streets. Kids walk to school–grade school, middle school and high school! The sound of a ball hitting the pavement under a garage-mounted hoop is stronger than any ring that can be downloaded!

Readers Respond: Taking the Child Out of Childhood – New York Times

For a lot of smart kids, they provide confidence and validation that are hard to come by in the day-to-day environment of middle school and high school, where academic skills are seldom on top of the heap in terms of recognition.

That’s Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, in Slate Mag two years ago, talking about spelling bees and other contests and making top-drawer sense.  He reflects problems that were front and center in Oak Park’s elementary & junior high District 97 back when our kids were in school, in the 80s and 90s.  How to validate academic skills, yes.

He said it while reviewing the documentary “Spellbound,” about the National Spelling Bee, but linked it while discussing actress-producer Patricia Heaton’s new documentary, “The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania,” about a 50–year-old talent and beauty contest in SW Pa. — Patricia Heaton, of course, having been Raymond’s wife on TV in “Everybody Loves . . .”

The coal-queen film is also about people and coal mining, which “has shaped this area of the country, instilling a strength and pride in its citizens.”

This lady didn’t like it in OP,

the only place [she] ever lived where she didn’t feel welcome.

“They were so suspicious of the Eastern establishment,” she said. “‘Harvard’ [her alma mater by way of its women’s college, Radcliffe] was a dirty word. I always voted Democrat, but there was only one other person in Oak Park that I know of who did. I was scared to death to mention it to anyone.”

Still years before the Civil Rights movement, [she and her husband, Rev.] Martin [Sargent] — fed up with the racial intolerance they saw around them — began to organize ways to document the racism, mostly by bringing black people in from Chicago and having them try to shop at segregated local malls.

It was a difficult time for the Sargents in many ways, and a time of change. They had their first two children before Martin was reassigned to a church in Foxborough, Mass. — a place where they felt more at home.

This would have been in the mid– to late 40s.  She is Barbara Sargent, 84, interviewed in the Bath, Maine, Times-Record News, “in her stately living room with her dog sleeping on her lap.”  She had grown up in NY City, daughter of a Lutheran pastor in mid-town Manhattan across from Central Park, where a flock of real sheep was tended by a real shepherd.

In Massachusetts “they felt more at home.”  Then there was Maine and Paris, France, where she thrived.  They got to know Martin Luther King.  She got over her Oak Park experience, apparently, which is nice.