Short History of Oak Park

A  Short History of Oak Park, Volume One, 2004-2005 is on sale at Oak Park’s independent Book Table, on Lake Street across from the Lake Theater.  $14.

Chatting with Debby Preiser, the events lady at Oak Park Public Library, yesterday, I got a glowing account of a recent session with Iraq and Viet Nam war vets, all but one of whom (five in all) regretted their and our participation in those wars.  Interesting, she said with a smile, and I smiled back.  She had glimmed my No Obama ‘08 cap (my Rohrshach test of tolerance levels) before recounting the vets’ session, held I assume in the library’s Veterans Room.

I felt somewhat buffeted by the account, but Debby is a sales person, and selling gets that way sometimes.  In any case, it put me in mind of a trend I have been noticing and storing in the back of my crowded, cluttered mind, that our library serves its supposed constituency a steady diet of progressive (let no man say liberal) programs. 

In this case, the vets endorsed an anti-war position, and that could have been merely the luck of the draw, reflecting Oak Park and literary Chicago’s widespread firmly held convictions.  A similar program in Mississippi or Oklahoma would have produced a different response, I imagine.

Nonetheless, assuming it was accidental in this case — pure chance, let us say — we cannot help notice that library programs tilt heavily to the left.  That’s us in Oak Park, yes, but we are also literate, urbane, highly educated, and keenly interested in intelligent, even intellectual debate and discussion, are we not?  Including conservative ideas in a debate atmosphere. 

Why not a debate, to give an example, between an Al Gore acolyte (Al would be great, but he declines debate) and a nay-sayer, each of some professional heft and platform style.  Sounds like money to me, and not available from the Great ATM in Washington probably, but who knows?  Stranger expenditures have happened and will happen, now that happy-go–lucky times are here again.  Meanwhile, our library movers and shakers might give it a thought.  After all, why be left all the time?

The good news was, the metal detectors worked at Proviso East last night.  The man behind it, among many milling about on both sides of it, kept calling out to us on the other side, “Single file, folks.  Single file.”  And hats off, not to anyone in particular but to the goal of civility in closed places.

The bad news was, the Huskies lost decisively to the Dolphins of Whitney Young.  As Fenwick had seen the writing on the wall after two, maybe three quarters, but wouldn’t believe it but bounced back to provide excitement for the finish, so did OPRF come back from nowhere at the end, giving us something to cheer about.

But Shumpert the Man fouled out late in the 4^th.  He had put the Friars away almost by himself on Friday at OPRF, but this time he got flummoxed by better players who seemed, truth to tell, better coached.  Too often in the first half, after Young’s 17–0 run following OPRF’s opening 7–0 run (!), the Young team drew the whole damn OPRF team to the ball carrier, leaving the guy in corner or even closer to take his shot unmolested on the pass.

The Young team also too often spread the OPRF field, biding time for their opening, leaving lots of room in the middle.

Anyhow, nobody loafed, and the season ended not with a whimper but with feverish, if not successful, effort.

Meanwhile, long past metal detection at the entrance, we got another slice of life at P-East with the nutty announcer at courtside who regularly, maddeningly served up the latest for the severely sight-impaired among us for whom the two big, brightly lit scoreboards, one at each end of the generously proportioned gym were inadequate. 

We all were sight-impaired in his book; he gave us the score and time remaining at every opportunity, and in dramatic fashion.  He also now and then told us who was entering the game as subs — but at least once assigned a number 31 to the Young team, which had none, and another time told us in dramatic fashion which team had the ball after a time-out, getting this wrong too.

He was like the barking dog that keeps you awake at night but stops now and then to catch his breath, at which time you doze off, forgetting about him completely.  But then he starts again.  So we could watch this game and forget about him periodically.  But then he’d start again.

I beg to differ with Wed. Journal’s esteemed features editor, Ken Trainor, in the matter of “cuckold.”  First, how old is the word as for being available for use today?  Answer: it’s current.  It’s not obsolete, that is, and won’t be as long as male adulterers festoon our land. 

(Adultery is expensive, concluded the very young but highly literate Edith Wharton, on reading the ferry boat sign, “Adults 50 cents, Children 25 cents.”)

However, Ken T. gives time in his latest column to the meaning “cuckold” has acquired in a sexual underground: some sort of kinky sex.  Not necessary: neither John Hubbuch nor the objectors to his column had this in mind — though it did occur to a Wed. Jnl co-worker.  Hmmm.

In fact, as recently as last September “The Magnificent Cuckold,” billed as “the astonishing classic farce (“Le Cocu magnifique”), written in 1920 by the Franco-Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck,” was presented at the Connelly Theater, on East 4th Street (between Avenues A & B), in New York City.

No need was determined in this announcement to specify that the sexual-underground meaning was not intended.

BTW, personal to Ken: you made the right choice in running the Hubbuch column as is.  BTW 2, where the heck is this column of yours on the WJ site?

The fire-Hubbuch movement is under way.  Good.  Throw him and his out on the street.  It’s in this letter from an Oak Park woman whose attention he caught with a column in which he mentions Hillary as “the most famous cuckquean in American history,” explaining for the semi-literate that this is “a woman whose husband strays” from connubial obligations. 

Comments by me are in brackets:

2/26/2008
Dear Mr. Trainor,

You should have pulled this [column] or excised part of it. Remarks regarding Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for president were derogatory to all women. [Italics added]  She does have the qualifications independent of her husband.  [Matter of opinion here, but not to be excised.]

Bill Clinton was a fine president. His term of office grows in stature compared to our current president. He and John Kennedy were womanizers during their entire terms. The U.S. sees these actions as more important than George Bush’s pre-emptive war in Iraq and the destruction of the U.S. economy. [Italics added.  Don’t bother putting H. and his out on street; we are all heading there already.]

Hillary has a longer term as senator than Barack Obama. I support her, but will work for and vote for the Democratic nomination.

Hubbuch lacks intelligence and sensitivity. You have control over his employment. [Fire him]

Donna L. Cervini

It’s give and take like this that makes Oak Park great, yesssss.

INSPIRED BY CHANGE MAYBE? — A letter writer has warmed globally to Sen. Obama as reminiscent of JFK almost 50 years ago with his stirring “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” But O’s message is just the opposite, consisting entirely about what your country should do for you, though admittedly details are vague even about this.

Call just now from AFL-CIO, the caller-i-d told me. 

Yeah? says I, expecting a recorded message.

It was state rep. Deborah Graham, promising what?  You got it,

CHANGE!

Something here worth noting about CALEA, the Fairfax VA-based national police dept. accrediting agency whose deadline passed for Oak Park police’s doing required paper work:

“That process is really, really burdensome,” said Randy Criswell, Canyon [TX] assistant city manager. “It’s costly from a manpower standpoint; hours and hours a week just working on it. The results are good, you have a police force as trained as they can be, but it’s a little burdensome for a small agency.”

So Canyon police dropped CALEA, mainly because of the cost of complying

“Re-accreditation for the third time would be about $13,000 for three years,” he said. “This program, we would spend about $1,600 for all of four years, plus a little travel, so $2,000 to $3,000.”

Instead, they turned to the Texas Law Enforcement Agency Recognition Program through the Texas Police Chiefs Association.

In this Wed. Journal news flash, the OP deputy chief says these assaults are not a matter of race:

“It doesn’t appear, from what we’ve seen, that race plays a part in selecting a victim,” said Scianna. “It’s the first poor soul you come across that piques your interest. The three Chicago kids were walking around and saw the man washing his car and said ‘Let’s mess with him.’”

This is meaningless, in view of the attackers’ being black (though the story does not — dare not? — say it) and the victims white.  How does he know a black victim would have been spared?  We reader-residents would like to know.

I once shouted at black kids on a Green Line train when they had gotten out of hand without attacking anyone, and a black man rose immediately to tell them to pipe down.  Said hardly anything, but spoke with authority that I as a white man did not have.  Would not these attackers rather not meet with such authority when they attack?

We have a border problem in OP, as civilized people have always had when living near uncivilized.  Highlanders used to raid northern England.  Barbarians raided the edges of the Roman Empire.  So the attackers come from Austin, looking for vulnerable white people.  Or so it seems, until someone shows us otherwise.

She is Emily L. Hauser, of N. Lombard Ave, and she could use a keeper, to judge by her 7/13 piece in the Christian Science Monitor, “Feeling way too white.”  “On a recent beautiful Sunday,” she wrote, “I undertook an unusual experiment: I crossed a street.”  That street, Dear Reader, was Austin Boulevard, and what she found on the other side was a shock.