Milstein talks

“He does that a lot,” OP village president Pope told a person addressing the village board, meaning “Don’t mind him.”  This was trustee Robert Milstein, who was taking forever, with multiple asides, to ask his question.

Death of a barber shop

Dino Dini’s barber shop is in its last days.  He’s retiring after 40 years at 66.  So are his barbers Frank, 89 (!), and Tony, 69.  It’s here and here. That didn’t keep recruiters away.  Two were there this afternoon, checking on their plans: retirement, retirement, retirement.  So the recruiters were going away empty-handed.  What then of the shop?  Dino has had four or five inquiries, none of which have led to a lease with Kehoe & Co., the building managers.  The building, a big one, on the SW corner of Marion & Chicago, was bought a few years ago by a group of investors.  There apparently is no replacement barber shop in its future.

Meanwhile, a half mile south, also on Marion — on the pedestrian mall, from Lake to the tracks — rents are going up, says one merchant, and the smaller shops will probably be moving.  A very big condo development is going up just beyond the viaduct, on the SE corner of Marion & South Blvd.  Its units will not be going for peanuts.  Its residents will be flocking to nearby shops which will reflect their ability to pay more.

Times are a-changing in OP.  Weep and wail if you must, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, not while there’s a tax base to keep in mind for our schools and parks and library, to name three OP-required amenities of the first water.  Goodbye, Dino.  Enjoy your retirement.  And haircut-seekers, take note: Saturday the 17th is the last day.  Dino will take his chair.  The other two are pretty well spoken for by loyal customers, a number of whom shook hands with Dino and the other two on their way out this afternoon.

OP&RF today

Dominican U.’s easement-seeking enters a new phase, as here, where we read in Wed. Journal of OP&RF:

With the belief that any legal uncertainty over the ownership of a small swatch of wooded land along Thatcher Avenue has been resolved in its favor, Dominican University will move ahead with zoning applications to build a parking garage and classroom building on the west side of its River Forest campus.

. . .

At the heart of the matter is village approval for a driveway curb cut along Thatcher Avenue between Division Street and Greenfield Avenue. If that driveway is OKd, it would allow new access to the west side of the campus and lead to construction of a 550-car parking garage and a new Academic Building.

Legal advice and Forest Preserve District support in favor of DU is bolstered by heavyweight political support from county commissioner and Elmwood Park mayor Peter Sylvestri.  River Forest village administrator Chuck Biondo says RF is aboard.  It’s all in the wake of extensive protesting by OP resident Victor Guarino and others who argued last March that the land belongs to the Forest Preserve: “There hasn’t been a thorough enough study of this.” Characterizing the current turn of events as “very complicated,” Guarino insisted that the Cook County Board of Commissioners, which administers the Forest Preserve district, has never told the university that it owns the property.

“[Board president John] Stroger said [last] Wednesday that he never told Dominican University that they owned that land,” said Guarino. “We’re calling for an independent legal counsel to review this.”

Stroger doesn’t turn up in the latest story, being perhaps busy with other things such as allegations of corruption on the board he heads.

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Elsewhere we read that “Planning is socialism,” a point of view that runs against the Oak Park and maybe River Forest grain these days.  It’s at http://www.mises.org/story/1910, which Calif. Assemblyman Ray Haynes [raysahay@aol.com], representing parts of Western Riverside County and Northern San Diego County, says in part:

Anyone who thinks that planning for "growth" is anything other than a exercise in futility is still experiencing the mind-altering visions that their college chemicals visited upon him or her so many years ago. Today's planners meet in little rooms, draw pretty pictures on paper maps, use the prettiest crayons they can find, and — whamo — the city has a plan. Wonder and utopia are supposed to follow, and never again will the city experience traffic congestion or cosmic disharmony.

Ouch and double ouch from OP, where plans proliferate.  Haynes gives chapter and verse on how plans don’t work in California, concluding:

We know that socialism is a failed experiment, as demonstrated by the failure of the Soviet Union, socialism's most devoted practitioner. My socialist colleagues in the Legislature, however, think that they are smarter than the Russians and that socialism will work here in California if we just have the right plan. The most recent polls tell us that the public is not satisfied with how we are doing our job. Maybe we should try something different, like freedom and free enterprise, the principles that made this country great.

As they said in the (mostly imagined) 60s barricades, right on!

Peace fair, Sept. 6 Wed. Jnl column

"What does peace look like?" ask Peace Fair promoters. 

Try a nation run by German Nazis or Russian Communists or Sadaam the Sadistic and his Wretched Sons. 

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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Trapani wastes no time getting out of town, on board
JIM BOWMAN
Tuesday, September 06, 2005

TRAPANI TRANSPLANTED Elmwood Park must be pleased as punch to have former Oak Park village president and trustee Joanne Trapani, a new resident, on its Plan, Zoning and Development Commission (PZD). She was introduced at the Aug. 1 meeting of the Elmwood Park trustees, its minutes say. She bought a house in Elmwood Park 10 days after the April 5 Oak Park election. Her first PZD meeting was to be Aug. 8. The next is set for Sept. 9.

END OF OP AS WE KNOW IT? Ex-Oak Park trustee Barbara Ebner wrote both newspapers saying the village-manager concept is jeopardized by New Leadership trustees’ suggesting a hiring commission and regionalization of trustee accountability. She says the first takes from the manager what belongs to him, the second makes aldermen out of at-large trustees responsible to the whole village, not just part of it. This is sniping of a high order. It gets to mindset, even philosophy.

HOMER NODS (SAID HORACE), BUT CONCORDIA? The Concordia U. motto "Empowering the mind, Enriching the spirit" should be the other way around, "Enriching the mind, Empowering the spirit." The mind is well stocked or isn’t, the spirit is willing or isn’t, or so Matthew (26:41) and Mark (14:38) tell us.

WHATEVER DID IT WANT? The Village of Oak Park called Aug. 18 at 9:43 a.m. asking how I was doing that day. It had a young female voice: "This is the Village of Oak Park." When I suggested in slightly raised volume—nothing like when I tell the dog across the street to shut up—that it not ask me that and get on with its business, it hung up.

DIG THAT NUTTY EMERSON Here in Oak Park, there was once a Hawthorne School and once an Emerson. We know that, but do we know that Hawthorne considered Emerson and his friends "queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved [seeing themselves as] important agents of the world’s destiny, yet [were] simply bores of a very intense water?" We didn’t, but now we do, thanks to an essay by Christopher Benfey in the Times Literary Supplement last December.

WHO’S IN CHARGE? Lines formed to the right and the left (not sure who’s right, who’s left) at a District 97 board meeting last June in the matter of teacher and principal evaluations. Peter Barber (yay Beye!) and Julie Blankemeier, both newly elected, stood for getting in on the process early and often. Marcia Frank, not newly elected, demurred: "We at the board are not conducting the evaluation. ... [W]e’re micromanaging if we decide what needs to be evaluated."

That’s about as old a school conundrum as there is: Do parents trust the professionals or would they rather count the cards? Do parents think only of their own kids, not of all kids, and don’t know how to take care of all, as only the pros do? Or are teachers their surrogates, responsible to them whatever their training? When Dist. 97 solves this conundrum, it should issue an all-points bulletin to school districts coast to coast.

JAVA JIVE Caribou on Lake Street, late fall, 7 a.m. Handsome couple behind counter. Very personable guy. Customer says a cup of regular for here, man asks if he wants award-winning Colombian, brandishing announcement of Caribou’s award. Customer says yes, man gives him a cup, says he gets three refills. He says he would never drink that much, but it’s nice to know.

ROMANTIC SPOKEN HERE In his novel Waverley, Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel as we know it, depicts his hero as romantic by upbringing, thanks to his seat-of-pants, highly literate but unsupervised and largely unstructured schooling. The lad’s tutor, with other fish to fry, let him have his head. It’s like most Oak Park kids these days. One of the best of Oak Park elementary-school teachers some years back encouraged students to "create" (not discover) knowledge, she told me.

YOUR SOURCE FOR EVERYTHING Bowman’s blogs—Chicago Newspapers; Blithely, Blithely; and Oak Park, Home of Edgar Rice Burroughs—are linked at www.jimbowman.com.

Parish notes: St. Giles

Northwest Oak Park’s Catholics flock to and generously support St. Giles, which is a monument not only to Catholic faith and culture but to the rise (mostly) of the Irish from proles to bourgeois, and I don’t mean petit.  It’s a grand structure, a “plant” to warm cockles of pastors’ hearts for these 70 or so years.  But what of St. Giles the man?

It’s his day today.  Those in the know and on the go read Saint of the Day for their information, which is “shrouded in mystery,” but so what?  I love a mystery, and so do lots of people. 

Giles died in or around 710 (we think).  One thing is for sure.  He was “one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.”  He hosted pilgrims on their way to Compostella in Spain and the Holy Land in a monastery he built.  After he died, he was listed among the 14 Holy Helpers, who were good to pray to when sick or dying — when a fellow needs a friend, to be sure.  St. Christopher, who came a-cropper due to historians’ shooting down his existence, was one of the 14.

In any case, Giles was very big in Sweden, Hungary, and parts of Germany and eventually got a reputation for helping the poor and disabled.  He couldn’t save his monastery hostel, however.  It fell apart some centuries after he died.  It was a sort of sic transit experience (there goes glory), which shows saints have them too.  St. Giles, pray for us.