RACIST SCUM: Breathes there an Oak Parker with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, "I love diversity"? Of course not. Nonetheless, there are racists among us who joined white flight out of Austin, making that neighborhood slide into rack and ruin.

Take the white newlyweds who set up connubial housekeeping in 1969 in an apartment at 334 1/2 North Lotus, in an 18-unit building. The building was all white because Baird & Warner as management company was keeping it that way by not advertising vacancies, because the largely Catholic-funded and St. Catherine of Siena rectory-based Alinsky-style Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) had told it to.

A young ex-Jesuit seminarian was OBA point man for the building. The building’s manager, also young, had his orders: OBA was trying to keep the neighborhood from being overrun, and this building was to be a sort of rampart. This hard-nosed Alinsky approach was being applied on neighborhood issues in Woodlawn, where Nick von Hoffman, later a newsman and national columnist, was helping to start The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), and on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the Organization for the Southwest Community tried to stem the tide of white flight and black inundation. If politics ain’t beanbag, as we hear from its practitioners, neither was trying to keep Austin from going all black.

The newlyweds established their household in July. In October the woman drove past Austin High on time to be pelted with rocks by students getting out of class. The windshield of her Chevy Nova was shattered. She got back to Lotus Street in a hurry, ran up to their third-floor apartment, and knocked on neighbors Gretchen and Richard’s door across the hall. Gretchen called the man at work. He rushed home on the “L.” She was O.K., though shaken.

In January a first-floor apartment was burglarized and set afire; the racist couple told the property manager they were leaving, lease or no lease. O.K., he said, we’ll advertise the apartment. The heck with the OBA. The building would no longer be all white. The rampart was breached.

Among people who came looking was a man who asked why the couple was leaving. Burglary with arson, the white man said. Oh, we’re used to that, the other said. In due time, a woman with a child took the apartment. Unfamiliar with Oak Park and being told the rental office was on North Boulevard, she misunderstood and took a bus all the way to North Avenue. She became the first black tenant. The couple moved to Oak Park.

There they met other white liberals who had flown. One hosted a meeting at her very nice house where guests were asked to volunteer as bail-money-suppliers for arrested members of the Black Panthers at any time of day. The couple declined but in conversation learned that the hostess and her husband had left a South Side neighborhood when their black professional neighbors had told them it was time to go. She said nothing of any urge to tell the neighbors where to put their advice or to say, “Wait, this is my neighborhood, we ain’t leaving.” Actually, it wasn’t their neighborhood any more. It had become someone else’s.

WOMAN AT WINDOW: A little past 8:30 on a recent week day morning at Bank One, a somewhat bent-over woman standing in line dropped her cane. A man behind her picked it up for her, they chatted. As they waited, she opened and shut several small purses, checking on the money in each. She volunteered that she was 90. No, he said, surprised. Where was she born? Down south, Mississippi. She had come to Chicago when she was 23. On the IC? he asked, meaning Illinois Central Railroad. She smiled. Yes.

On this day she hoped she would not have to pay another fare, referring to the two-hour free-transfer time on a CTA card. She had come on the “L” and would return that way, getting off at Cicero, where she would catch a bus, her little purses emptied, their contents deposited – if she could just find it all.

Each little purse, a sort of miniature carpet bag, snapped at the top. Each had bills folded inside. But she couldn’t find all the money and rummaged for it, muttering as she did so, blaming herself for misplacing things as she grew older. Maybe she had left it on the L, she wondered. She stepped aside from the teller’s window, letting the next customer get to it.

Finally, “I’ve got it,” she said. The missing money, in one of the little purses. She moved back to the window, only a step away, to resume her business.

NOW HEAR THIS [5/4/05]: Civility is the third rail of column-writing, but let us count the ways in which reason might prevail in our public forums. There should be no lying on the floor and kicking one’s feet, no name-calling or other vituperation such as “So’s your old man” or “Your mother wore army boots” or even a simple but effective “Yo’ mama,” and no imputation of unworthy motives such as “You just don’t like Negroes” or “You just don’t like Caucasians.” Boards and committees, hop to it.

ONE SIDE OR LEG OFF: The whir of the cyclist is heard in our villages. Not soon enough for the unwary walker, however, who must keep more things in mind than these villages dream of. He better not get dreamy, for instance, because his reverie may be prelude to an enormous shock that leaves him sputtering and expostulating. His problem, to be sure, is that he thinks the sidewalk, except for the occasional toddler on three-wheeler, is for walking. Silly man!

GULP: The Book Nook on Lake, the one with the big glass wall overhanging Scoville Park, as if to swallow it, swallows books and videos when you slip them into its user-friendly maw. We know that, but do we know that if it’s a book or video gotten from some other library, fed inadvertently to this one, that book or video is forthwith forwarded to that other library? It’s your tax dollars at work.

JUST WARMING UP: The Book Nook’s warming room is handy for rambling folk, who arrive like clockwork at 7 a.m., unless they come from Forest Park or Berwyn, when it’s 8, the coffee shop man said on a nippy February week day. He mostly ignores them. When a customer wants to sit where they are sitting, he asks them to move, and they do. And he can always call the cops if need be.

Meanwhile, they sit looking, sometimes chatting, unless you look at them too closely, when one of them might glare at the intrusion. A visitor showed up about 8:15 with a thermos of coffee and toast he had wrapped in a paper napkin. A nice lady, a regular, invited him to join her and a companion at table. He said he was fine where he was, seated at the window at the end of the room – thermos on floor, toast on ledge, where also lay his hat and coat, flung there while he sat and ate and read.

It was just as well that he didn’t sit at the table. In conversation drawn from the day’s headlines, the companion turned out voluble and opinionated and also began casting resentful looks towards the visitor, who returned these noncommitally.

Next day, passing the warming room at 7:30 or so, the visitor, now stroller, was hailed by a dark-bearded young fellow who had just shuffled out. "How you doing?" the young fellow said in greeting, surprising the stroller, who stopped to chat. The young man had been lucky to wake up that morning, he said, having "got out of rehab" two weeks earlier. "Lucky you woke up at all," said the stroller, making sure what he meant, sensing the fellow had had a scare. Yes, he said.

A few weeks later, they talked some more. The young man, an OPRF High alum, had a sad tale of being advised by an employer to go out on his own in his chosen trade. This had not worked out: he got only two calls, ended up watching TV in a friend’s apartment. He had his money in Suburban Bank, which “went computerized without [his] permission.” His earthly goods had been stolen. A PADS social worker in Forest Park was “trying to get [him] on Social Security.”

He complained matter-of-factly about "air" moving up from his legs (he gestured), the result of standing a long time the day before. (He had stood at Oak Park and Lake, while high-schoolers cavorted around him, paying him no heed.) It had made him cold, he said. But there was no room left in the warming room on this day; so he took a bench seat.

A week or so later, on Holy Thursday at 8:30 a.m. or so, the stroller spotted him smoking on a bench and stopped to say “Hi.” The young man returned the “Hi” but remained busy talking to himself between puffs, perhaps of Winston or Marlboro but probably not. The stroller did not catch the smell but is quite sure also that it was not Lucky Strike, which as any 1940s radio listener knows is made of fine tobacco.

MYSTERIOUS: Did anybody ever find the $5,000 ring taken from a desk at Holmes School on Wednesday, March 16, between 10:45 and 11:45 a.m., as this paper reported March 23? Taken from within a closed environment for which you need a permit to enter? How is the investigation coming?

CALL ME [4/6/05]. . . It’s sooooo 2004 to complain about cell phone conversations in public. But we can talk about it, can’t we? Yes: Caribou customer’s phone rings loudly, he answers, other customers hear that he is in Oak Park – they knew that – and is buying a hot chocolate – the counter man knew it but not the guy at the window table, slightly out of earshot.

Another time, another store: man enters discussing his affairs loudly and clearly. One of the two customers shoots him a look involuntarily – can he be speaking to me? Man smiles and says “Hi,” friendly, not defiant, continues conversation. Speaks of man who "merged" a failing pet store on Madison "Avenue" [sic] in Forest Park, and to a woman who will either go to jail or make restitution, thanks to legal action he instituted. Certain details he won’t go into, saying he's in “the UPS store,” cruelly leaving others uninformed. Five minutes more and he winds up: he and the other will meet at "Mother's." "That will be fun," he says, and signs off.

LOVING NATURE . . . I don’t feed the squirrels at Scoville Park, but I look at them and they look at me. I sit with my coffee covered, lest they sip. My toast too, which is far more attractive to them. They hop onto my bench or timbered seat, probe a little, hop back down. I rise and stand before them; they approach indirectly, veering slightly, then probing to one side. This one primps, scratching, nosing himself, brown fur glistening in the sun. He’s light, almost blond in places, and holds his left forepaw or both forepaws bent at his breast. Why?

SHOWING THE WAY . . . Mid-morning of a blustery January day, the stroller is approached at Oak Park & Lake by a young couple from another country asking, in careful English, where Frank Lloyd Wright houses can be found. They wear leather mid-length jackets and are of olive complexion, black hair, unassuming demeanor, are prosperous enough looking but flaunt nothing. They apparently had just got off the Green Line train a block away, most likely from the Loop.

A block that way, says the stroller, pointing north, then four or five left until the park, then right, and there you have your Wright houses. Smiles and thank yous, and off they go.

BURYING MISTAKES . . . Oak Park’s own Debra Stulberg, M.D., a West Suburban Hospital resident, is quoted March 23 by the Sun-Times in a story about a Planned Parenthood protest of a Loop druggist who refused as a matter of conscience to supply morning-after contraceptive pills. Dr. Stulberg says a pharmacist's job is to fill prescriptions and not "get in the way of the best interests of the patient” but is grievously one-upped by a Pharmacists for Life spokesman who tells the reporter, "Pharmacists are the final checkpoint of patient safety. We correct doctors' mistakes all the time."

This is a case of “Pharmacists Strike Back.” They are still getting even for the depiction of Mr. Gower the druggist, who would have mistakenly sent poison to a patient if not for intervention by the Jimmy Stewart character (as a boy), who got his ears boxed for his trouble, which made him half deaf for the rest of his wonderful life.

Never mind. Dr. Stulberg has had a reproductive-issue bone to pick at least since her days not too long ago at Harvard Medical School, where she belonged to Medical Students for Choice, on whose web site she argued in 2001 for more training in how to abort. Teachers, she complained, were afraid to “take the risk” and give such training, having “heard the message of the anti-abortion movement loud and clear.”

More recently, she has worried about a decline in abortions, including at her own West Sub since Resurrection Health Care bought it last year – actually, saved it from abortion by operational deficit. “A lot has changed since the Resurrection takeover,” she told the National Women’s Law Center. “Patients [looking for birth control help] are being turned away. Rape victims . . . are being sent to an outside facility [for] emergency contraception.”

This is a case of “Pro-choice residents striking back” at “Catholics striking back” with their own institutions and should be watched for further developments, like Dr. Stulberg’s finishing her time at West Sub and going somewhere else.

Where Cheney Mansion stands on the 200 North Euclid block was once a beautiful many-porched house, a private residence big enough to be a sanitarium or nursing home. The owner tore it down.

Where there are houses on Ridgeland just south of North Avenue was the cutest brick farm house from the 1860s. Developers flattened it in the 1920s.

The area -- hundreds of acres -- north of North Avenue was a family farm. The owner, a man named Gale, trashed it for the sake of developing what we know as Galewood. And here's a shocker, he's commemorated in a shingle on the Unity Temple parish house.

No, we Oak Parkers have not always been as respectful of history and the land as we might have been. I'm not making it up. It's in a 1990 Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest calendar that somehow escaped the shredder in our house, with photos of long-ago houses by Philander Barclay, of Philander's Restaurant and Poor Phil's sports bar fame.

Some of the landscape-ravishing was done by or for churches, may the saints preserve us. A big "stick style" house from the early 1870s at Oak Park and Superior got out of the way in 1900 for First Methodist 25 years later. Two years later, in 1927, First Baptist replaced another stick-style house two blocks away, at Oak Park and Ontario.

This was O.W. Herrick's house. He had come from New York as a schoolmaster and had married the daughter of founding father Joseph Kettlestrings, whose name is on a plaque at the southwest corner of Scoville Park. Herrick was Oak Park's first postmaster.

That's not the half of it about the Herricks. Their son James B. Herrick was a trailblazing Rush Medical College medical researcher who described (discovered) sickle-cell anemia and coronary thrombosis. In his memoirs he spoke of watching the Chicago fire in 1871 from his house and later greeting his father returning from the city, where he had gone with food and supplies for homeless and hungry survivors.

To continue. In 1932 houses were torn down for a new post office at Kenilworth & Lake. Across Lake a splendid Italianate house became a tear-down, leaving room for what was to become the graceful Grace Episcopal church yard. Down the street Henry Austin moved his house in 1936 from Lake Street, where it was obstructing commerce, to what we call Austin Gardens. That lovely house was flattened 25 years or so later -- for noble purposes, to make room for grass, trees, and performances of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, on Lake Street just short of Harlem, an Italianate cottage dating from the 1860s had fallen years earlier to the wrecking ball, crushed by the wheels of commerce. So too a late-1800s stick-style house at Maple and Washington in 1927 lost out to an apartment building marvelously titled "Sulgrave Manor," whose architecture was meant somehow to evoke the tenth, 19th, and 20th centuries!

Apartment buildings -- the condos of their day -- also had their way with a late 19th-century turreted Queen Anne house at 228 South Oak Park Avenue, once called home by the family of Melancthon Smith, a prominent Presbyterian and treasurer of the Oak Park Band Concert. Nothing was sacred.

And around the corner and down a few blocks, at Washington and East, a three-story, multi-chimneyed "imposing colonial revival" house with a high-roofed wrap-around front porch was replaced in 1929 by the equally imposing sandstone of Fenwick High School, home of "Friars, men of steel," according to the school's fight song.

That was a good move, to inject a personal note. It meant I could plunge into the school's pool in 8:30 am. gym class on the coldest days of my freshman year in the winter of '45 and '46. Men of steel indeed.

FANTASTIC! [2/2/05] . . . Good morning, Oak Park. It's February 2, 2025. We're into the century's second quarter or the last year of its first quarter, depending on your approach. It's not all that depends on your approach, and that's putting it mildly, because the sound of the A-word is heard in our village. Oak Park, once known for banning handguns and nuclear weapons and officially opposing the Patriot Act, is considering what some consider the ultimate non-progressive ordinance - a ban on abortion.

Yes, Illinois has not banned abortion in the 10 years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the court during Newt Gingrich's presidency. It's still a Democrat-blue state but has acquired some Republican-red pockets, not least of them Oak Park, which as we know had been a liberal belwether since the 1960s. Analysts are puzzled by the change, including the dean of Oak Park journalists, Wednesday Journal editor and publisher Dan Haley. He spoke for many when he asked in a recent editorial: "Why us? Why here? Why now?"

Some look for an answer to the Great Migration of the 1990s and 2000s, during which Oak Park was reported in a 2004 survey as composed of one-third newcomers - living here five years or less - and half living here 10 years or less.

Early signs of change were the elementary school district's refusal in 2004 to dismantle its wireless computer networks for public health reasons and the village board's unwillingness in 2005 to ban smoking in public places such as bars and restaurants. Some contemptuously likened these decisions to the rejection by townspeople of Ibsen's "Enemy of the People," who warned about the water supply, or to the early rebuff of the police chief in "Jaws," who warned about the shark.

Others muttered about the nanny state telling people how to live. They also said the smoking ban, aimed at the third-rated preventable cause of death, would have no more chance of success than prohibition of alcoholic beverages, the top-rated preventable cause.

In the end, pragmatism and a rough libertarianism did most to decide the matter. Restaurant owners claimed to know customers' wishes and wanted government to butt out. The village board, unwilling to hurt business, seemed also to agree in principle and declined to make indoor public smoking illegal. The conservative camel's nose was under the tent.

The village's newcomers, one-third of the population in 2004, may have contributed to a reluctance to support well-intended causes. Joining the Oak Park community was for them perhaps less a commitment to change than a vote for prosperity and convenience. They were more pragmatic than idealistic. The fire of the cause burned not in their eyes. For Oak Park's new libertarians, to be sure, abortion was not an issue, theirs being a live-and- let-live philosophy.

Indeed, many thought anti-abortionism was where things got creepy - a woman's body was her business, after all - and it was hardly a libertarian cause. But a few years ago, a funny thing happened. Abortion became a public health issue. Classed by a new surgeon general as the top-ranked preventable cause of death - of fetuses, that is, or as pro-lifers preferred, unborn infants - abortion shot to the top of public awareness of health issues. Drinking and smoking slipped to a distant second and third.

In short order, Oak Park's public health advocates caught fire in a manner reminiscent of earlier anti-gun, anti-nuclear, and anti-smoking campaigns. All along, it had been a matter of definition.

The upshot is that the village board has authorized the public health committee to hold hearings in the matter, per the committee's request. If the ordinance is passed, Oak Park will be an abortion-free zone, surrounded by municipalities that are not. Some observers say it can't happen here, in the land of Wright and Hemingway. Others say Oak Park has done odder things. We should all stay tuned.

He or she won't look like one of those bomb-throwers in page-one Chicago Tribune cartoons of the 30s and 40s, with hair and beard shooting in all directions. No, he will look like your other neighbors. It's scary.

Take Ron Baiman, who headed the recently abandoned effort to get wireless technology mothballed in Oak Park schools. It was in part a project of the Greater Oak Park Democratic Socialists. Baiman, a U. of I. at Chicago economist, was its spokesman.

He and Oak Parker Tom Broderick described it in the Democratic Socialist publication New Ground of January, 2002. In the same issue, Baiman had "Ode to a Fallen Comrade," a eulogy of his friend and fellow socialist Joe Powers, Sr., who had recently collapsed and died while jogging.

Currently, Baiman has a provocative essay at FreePress.org and other Internet sites arguing that our recent presidential election was with "little doubt" not "free and fair."

Take also Jean Darling, another Oak Parker, who recently addressed a small gathering, open to the public, at Democratic Socialists of Chicago headquarters on Milwaukee Avenue in the city. Darling, a Unitarian minister, has started a church in a West Side union hall - a free-lance effort, the sort her denomination frowns on, she said. In it she is pursuing a vision of non-coercion, or as she puts it, non-violence.

The vision stems from her lifelong opposition to muscling people argumentatively, what her father did to her less educated mother in their family's version of "class warfare," she said in her talk. Such coercion occurs in her Unitarian-Universalist (U-U) denomination, where she said "oppressive" use is made of Robert's Rules of Order to "run over minorities" at meetings.

At a Madison, Wisconsin, gathering, for instance, demonstrators yelling "You killed Rosa Luxembourg" -- a communist organizer killed in Germany in 1919 -- were "undemocratically kicked out." She envisions a church that abhors such coercion, that embraces "non-violent strategies" and rejects society's "domination system." For her own small congregation of eight to 10 worshipers, she is trying to devise such strategies, looking to the day when it has a "socialist Sunday school."

She is concerned that American "working people are voting against their own economic interests" and that "the spiritual values of the Left are in eclipse." She says "thousands of years are operating" to thwart these values, including "from Calvin to Wal-Mart." Echoing a common complaint of socialists, she rejects mere reform of society, which she considers "the impulse to fix things just enough" so as to prevent more sweeping change. In any case, "non-violence is essential," she said.

In discussion following her talk, I asked if religious socialism is not a contradiction, having in mind dialectical materialism, "opium of the people," and all that. But before I could say Karl Marx or pie in the sky when you die, I was handed a copy of Volume 28, number 3 of the Democratic Socialists of America publication, "Religious Socialism: The Journal for People of Faith and Socialism." It had Princeton philosopher and Dissent magazine editor Michael Walzer writing on the good life and one of its own editors, Commonweal magazine contributor John C. Cort, reviewing books.

I was impressed but should have known better, having encountered another anomaly as a visitor some years back at Third Unitarian Church, on Mayfield Avenue in Austin, where believers in God were challenged in a discussion to come out of the closet and none did. You can lead Unitarians to church, apparently, but you can't make them believe. Whether you can make them bend or abandon Robert's rules, as Jean Darling would prefer, is another question.

ELECTION DAY [12/1/04]: I was never a teen-age werewolf, but I was a Republican poll watcher Nov. 2 at Heritage House, the senior citizens’ residence at Lake & Lombard. Identified as such by the judge at the door, I got a pariah’s greeting from another judge, sitting at the table:

“Republican?” she expostulated. “I didn’t know there were any in Oak Park!” She was sitting next to one, a fellow judge, but apparently thought that even Republican judges were Democrats. I heard later from an northeast Oak Parker that this had been the case a few years back, Republicans were so scarce.

The expostulator got an immediate talking-to from the man at the door. She was 70-ish, trim and alert, and looked like a sturdy New Englander of the kind that colonized Chicago business in the 19th century. He too was trim and alert – at 82, I was told. He asked what the matter was with my being a Republican. No one answered, but it seemed not an idle question. The complainer desisted but shot suspicious glances now and again.

I sat down next to the long judges’ table across from one of the Republicans, a former neighbor and Beye School parent. We talked family and such matters. He told about returning from Viet Nam, where he had served with the 101st Airborne Division, and hearing war protestors saying bad things about him. The Swift Boat Vets of the campaign did not come up, but I guessed what he thought of the candidate about whom they complained in those battleground-state TV ads.

Mid-day, voters flocked in. There were old neighbors, the realtor who had sold our house for us, school parents from years back, and a young contemporary of our younger children. “Hi, Aaron,” I said, having heard him give his name. Wouldn’t have known him otherwise, but he knew me. We chatted briefly.

Meanwhile, the judge at the door was telling voters to “stand at attention” while he stuck an I-voted sticker to his or her lapel. He’s done it that way for years, apparently. He did it once too often on this day, however. A woman objected not only to how he handled her ballot but how he applied the sticker. “Don’t touch me!” she threw back at him on her way out. Wounded, he wondered what happened. A discussion ensued about touching people in 2004.

Earlier, he had spotted a ballot not yet judge-initialed and brought it to the table for marking. He looked at me and said, “It’s the first,” adding, as if to make it official: “Tell them that in Springfield.”

Some voters needed provisional ballots. Others were sent to other polling places. One or two wanted to register on the spot. One voter, her legs giving way at the door, required the bipartisan services of the Democrat watcher and me, each holding an arm, to make it to a booth-with-chair.

That Democrat, a Chicago resident, 50-ish, was standing in for a 60-ish Mister-Something whom the judge knew, apparently as a regular. “Mister” vouched for him, taking a break while the other did the grunt work – what I was doing. That came down to waiting for the “tapes,” the final vote counts spit out by the ballot-swallowing machine at the door.

By 8 p.m. or so, these were ready. I got my tape, to take to a south Oak Park house party. “Mister” needed six, and they had to be signed by the judges. It was a case of Republican amateur (me) and Democrat professional (him), though I assume his day job had something to do with a labor union. Pleasant fellow he, as was his 35-ish sidekick, with whom he sat in the lounge outside the polling place for a good part of the day.

I got no names of these three – “Mister,” his sidekick, and the poll watcher. But if there was something Yankee about the judge who had been astonished to see a Republican, there was something that identified them as owing much if not all, genetically speaking, to the Emerald Isle.

I left first, shaking hands with all the neighbors of the place but not kissing colleens all. This wasn’t Donegal, for one thing, and I was leaving, not arriving. And it wasn’t necessary. The judges thanked me. And why not? I did a good job.