Like the old-time radio character, The Shadow, Nathaniel Hawthorne knew "what evil lurks in the hearts of men." In one of his stories, he has the devil say, "Evil is the nature of mankind." Hawthorne didn't go that far, but argued time and again for the "evil impulse" in us all. "Oh, take my word for it," his devil taunted reformers, "it will be the old world yet!"

Emerson, another of three discarded Oak Park school namesakes-Hawthorne became Julian, Emerson became Brooks, and long-gone Lowell School became 100 Forest Place. Emerson believed in the divinity within us and preached self-reliance. Hawthorne thought we were close to no damn good and favored social conformity.

His Scarlet Letter heroine, Hester Prynne, starts off Emersonian, defending her adultery with the preacher Dimmesdale by protesting, "We felt it so!" But in the end, she repents, re-attaching the scarlet letter and performing community service as a sort of youth minister, counselling young women against violating community norms.

Emerson found The Scarlet Letter a "ghastly" book, apparently recognizing it as an attack on his feelings-based morality. At issue was Emerson's "antinomianism," a great word for being agin' the government (an old American habit) or more precisely against external controls in general (also quite American).

Ah, but what of that third lost namesake, Lowell School on Lake Street? In the early 1950s, it was the home of Oak Park Playhouse, where one of the actors was Bob Newhart, and an actress, not part of the group, who socialized with them was Marilyn (later Kim) Novak. By 1955, it was "becoming surrounded by the business district," the Chicago Tribune reported, and was slated for closing.

Some 15 years later it was sold to a developer who was stymied in the middle of his project by legal challenges and citizen complaints about building height. In this there was probably some Emersonian antinomianism involved, along with Hawthorne-like dependence on community action to root out evil from the developer's heart.

The result of it all was to leave a half-block-size very deep hole at Forest and Lake for many months, a tribute to what you can achieve as a dedicated citizen if you try hard enough and have judges on your side. Eventually the hole was filled with 100 Forest Place, a monument to commercial perseverance in the face of '70s zeal for short buildings.

As for naming a school after James Russell Lowell, it was a fairly subversive thing, in that Lowell was not much of a student, graduating without distinction from Harvard in 1838. In due time, he became one of America's favorite poets, however, taught at Harvard, served as ambassador to Spain, and was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

What he did best of all for me personally, however, was to praise June weather in his "Vision of Sir Launfal," about a knight in search of the Holy Grail-forget Monty Python for a moment and think "Camelot." Somewhere in my schooling, probably as a Fenwick freshman in 1945, I was made to memorize the passage. It comes to mind every year during this month and makes for one of the rare occurrences when talk of a 19th-century poet becomes time-sensitive:

As a boy, he developed a passion for books, but his character Diedrich Knickerbocker-a Knickerbocker was a New Yorker who could trace his origins to the original Dutch settlers (New York Knicks come to mind)-had little use for books in his fictional research. Instead, he learned by talking to "a genuine Dutch family," snug in "its low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore," studying such a family "with the zeal of a bookworm."

Why not? Irving was making most of it up anyhow. Knickerbocker's work, he wrote, was "now admitted into all historical collections as a book of unquestionable authority." It wasn't, of course, but Irving, a lawyer who worked in the family hardware business in New York and London and held diplomatic posts in London and Madrid, knew how to get his mind off his troubles. These included the abiding grief he felt over the death of his fiancee at 17. "For years," he said, "I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

He had three pen names. Besides Knickerbocker, supposed author of a comic history of New York in 1809, there was Jonathan Oldstyle, whose "letters" he wrote for New York's Morning Chronicle in 1802 and 1803, and Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman, supposed author of The Sketch Book, his 1820 story collection. Sketch Book tore across the Atlantic and fell plop in the lap of the British critic Sydney Smith, who a few months earlier had asked contemptuously, "Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?"

In The Sketch Book, which was praised mightily in the London and Edinburgh journals and went through printing after printing on both sides of the Atlantic, he had his answer. Sir Walter Scott loved it. So did Byron, the two being the most-read authors in the world of English book-reading. A year later, James Fenimore Cooper's revolutionary war novel, The Spy, was published, further strengthening Americans' claim to European attention. In its depiction of events only a generation removed, however, it also spelled out and heightened American-English hostility.

Sydney Smith had warned Americans against the trap of seeing themselves as "the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people on earth," calling them a "self-adulating race." Ours was a windy country in his view, as Chicago was to be a windy city, brash and full of itself.

Self-correction was at work, however. For instance, Fenimore Cooper, who with Irving made inroads into the old world, eventually had a bigger problem, posthumously, with Mark Twain, who in 1895 cited his multiple "literary offenses." Not fair, said Joseph Conrad, the Pole who wrote in English. The problem was that Cooper had written "before the great American language was born," he wrote.

He was America's chief public intellectual, to use a hot phrase of a few years ago, in the first half of the 19th century-"America's greatest idealist thinker, America's most peculiar thinker," said the late James Tuttleton of New York University. He gave speeches and wrote essays, and people paid attention to him. So should we, especially Emerson students, teachers, alumni, parents, and anyone else who lives or ever lived or will live in Oak Park.

For one thing, he was a Unitarian minister (and the son of one) until he resigned after three years to be a full-time poet and philosopher; and Oak Park has the most famous Unitarian church in the world, as we all know. He also floated free as a cloud, embracing no tradition-"an endless seeker, with no past at [his] back," he said of himself, and Oak Park leans sometimes in that direction. "I simply experiment," he said, which seemed apt for a few elementary school board members of the '80s and '90s.

However, in at least six graduations from Emerson in the '80s and '90s, he almost never came up. One student speaker quoted him. Otherwise, he got no more mention or attention than Nietzsche or Zarathustra. We can supply the omission, if we are inclined. Brooks-once-Emerson students can read up on him, not to mention the rest of us.

They can start with his essay on self-reliance, with its call for "good-humored inflexibility" in taking ourselves seriously. "There is a time," he says, "in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction ... that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion." You are what you are, kid. Work with it. Don't expect anyone else to do it for you either: "[T]he ... universe is full of good, [but] no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil." No free lunches, says E. Don't be bothered by that either: "Trust thyself," he says. "Every heart vibrates to that iron string." Go for it.

OK. Some problems, however: he's heavy going. Maybe one kid out of a hundred can make his way through this stuff, maybe one teacher out of 10. A columnist maybe can snip snippets to make a point and then go on to the next thing. So what? We can like him at least for his poems, which like pop lyrics make points in a manner found pleasing to many.

And Emerson? Like Whittier, he wrote a poem about snow, "The Snowstorm" in 1834-which inspired the latter to write "Snowbound." He wanted "Snowstorm" to be "a lecture on God's architecture," he wrote in his journal. Even Unitarians talked that way back then. Of course, the public school teacher who presented it that way might look for parental if not ACLU correction.

Do Whittier students know he crusaded against slavery? John Greenleaf Whittier, that is, namesake of the Oak Park school across from the Dole Branch? He was a friend of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who published him for the first time, in 1826, when Whittier was 19.

Ah yes. The rhyme. Soothing if you're willing to slow down and let it wash over you, and why not? What better have you to do with your leisure time? What better to show Whittier and other pupils with psyches already dented by contemporary cacophony? Slow down, kid. Dig that Whittier.

And you, Teacher, tell the kid what that means, or give her a running start. What's this "mute"? What's this "ominous," this "portent"? Great English words, related to older languages than you and me, yes. And stay with that meter - dah, DAH, dah, DAH, dah, DAH, dah, DAH. There's a beat to that "Snowbound," seductive in its way. And drama:

And did whatever else had to be done. This is good stuff. Does it reflect the experience of Whittier kids or any other in Oak Park? Not very likely. But that's a very good thing. School is for learning what you don't know. Poetry and all literature is for taking you out of your everyday, transporting you, especially if you're a kid and especially if your everyday is something you'd rather forget about now and then.

Egad! Can the kid put that to memory, that "ghostly finger-tips of sleet"? Can he or she be persuaded to put it in his treasury of memorables? You hear about the well-stocked mind. It's what we want for our boys and girls, what fires the imagination, insulates them against the brittle plasticity of popular culture. Call it a firewall of the poetic. None should leave school without one.

FALLING: The road came up to meet me, as the Irish blessing goes, but I did not feel blessed at all. It wasn't a road but a concrete landing at the Oak Park Green Line station, Dec. 11. One slip on somewhat slushy stair, and down I went on both knees, like St. Paul leaving his saddle on the way to Damascus. Nothing so memorable as the world turns, but shocking nonetheless.

In due time, 24 hours later, the tendons had been reattached, and I had acquired two inconvenient friends, ankle-to-thigh casts on each leg. Forty-eight hours after that, I was in our living room, having been gotten out of my hospital bed hours earlier by my doc and having walked a few steps.

The rest is a tale of being patient, not especially in pain, getting in and out of bed, walking around, trying this, trying that with physical and occupational therapists' and visiting nurse's counsel, and in general being pampered by lady of house and five of six kids, one of them being out East with husband and kids of her own.

Then there were books and back issues of magazines and a $15 hand-held radio from R-Shack and TV with its panoply of talk and NFL and bowl and Bulls games and in time chairs-with-arms into which I could lower myself to sit and watch and read and listen. Lot of heavy lifting of self, as while holding triangle hanging over my special bed.

Coming up is cast-off day, six weeks and a day after the tendon reattachment. By the fourth week, I was negotiating two flights - hanging on bannister, going down backwards, like Frankenstein's monster - and backing into car's back seat for the impending short trip to doc's office. Then it will be a matter of getting the darn knees to bend again, I hear, but so far so good.

One: Schools have ability-grouping - actually achievement-grouping--in sports, why not in the classroom? After all, some feel left out because they don't make the team, but we do not for that reason ignore achievement, do we? We'd be backing into a community meat-grinder if we did.

Two: While we're at it, how about rehabilitating the R-word, as in remedial reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic? Remediation, people! Hit that kid early, hit him and her hard, getting him up to snuff and along the way - teachers know how to do this, in fact do it already - administering a bit of teacherly sugar to make the medicine go down. But as for lumping the student temporarily without a clue in with high-flyers, perish the thought.

REVOLUTION: The traditional Catholic Mass has been reinstated by the pope, leading some to wonder at what point did the Mass become the Father Tom, Dick or Harry Show? Such a shift from holy sacrifice to Johnny Carson or Leno or Letterman is not easy to trace. But the moment of moments most likely occurred with the virtual outlawing of the traditional Latin Mass in 1970. That's when it became too late for Paddy to bar the door on blessed innovation.

At that point a new breed of liturgical reformers had their opening. Reform, hell, it was time for revolution. We went from "Dominus vobiscum" to "Good morning" in almost no time, with breeziness the norm, and explain, explain, explain, jabber-jabber-jabber, throughout the Mass from Father Tom, etc. - who has his eye on you, by the way, so watch out.

But if jabber-jabber was to be the norm, bishops should have required that every seminarian learn from the Protestants how to talk. Everyone knows Protestants are the nation's preachers. Seminaries should have required preaching certification by a Protestant seminary, preferably evangelical. As it is, Catholics hear mostly pedestrian stuff - anecdotes from Father's childhood or something he saw on television or the day's headlines.

Father strides to the front of the sanctuary or into the aisle, upstaging the table that now doubles more or less as an altar. He's miked (and we aren't). If the mike is wired, he has to twirl the cord to get around, but that adds to the brio, the devil-may-carelessness of it all. He has a joke, he has a story of driving to work the other day, he has the headlines. He's casual, he's friendly, he's with it.

Or he's pedantic, and not only about things religious, which have been redefined in any case to cover just about anything, but especially politics, which swallows up religion when adopted as a passion - as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said a long time ago. So a church resounds with applause when the preacher spouts a Democrat-liberal line during a hot national election.

LOOKING STRAIGHT AHEAD: The 1970s Mass is a bigger issue. It places Father Tom front and center. He's watching you and you're watching him. He may notice latecomers or the seasoned citizen who looks to her prayers, paying no attention to him, and may take either to task in a sermon. Above all, he talks everything out. We can hear him clearly. Sitting or kneeling there, we have time to meditate on how he accents every darn preposition or changes the prescribed wording to fit his view of the world and God, changing "almighty Father," for instance, to "almighty God."

He can do this. He's in charge and, in the new dispensation, feels free to tweak things. Before the 1970s, the people were far less at the mercy of a priest's talent for embroidering the procedure. The focus was on what was happening, the Big Event. The focus now is on the man up front.

It's not all his fault. He has gone with the flow, learning what he apparently was taught by implication, that it's he the presider who counts. He has to perform. His performance is the difference between a good and a bad Mass. He has to be the great communicator, telling people what's going on. Don't let mystery be implied by ritual, but tell people there's mystery here.

The Mass of mystery is long gone, by edict. Instead, we have an everyday something, easily grasped, a sort of communion breakfast with hugging in the middle of it. "Go, the mass never ends," a deacon improvised some time back, capturing the idea perfectly - that we have here an event that does not so much stand out in our weekly experience as blend in with it seamlessly.

HORSES OF OTHER COLORS: They shoot horse-riders, don't they? No, they put up signs that say "Whoa ... " or "Please do not ... " which discourage if they do not prevent climbers onto one of 19 Oak Park Avenue Horses - which we read are being abused and even vandalized by high-spirited youths, but that's another question. This thing looks like a merry-go-round horse, etc., but it's not a merry-go-round horse, so bug off, kid.

Switch to summer 2006, same Avenue. See fat comfy-looking pig. See fat comfy-looking pig with kid on top. See kid with grin on face. See kid wanting ice cream cone to be purchased at one of several Avenue retail outlets. See Mommy and Daddy and Grandpa and Grandma also choosing ice cream and maybe dropping into one of several real estate storefronts and buying a house.

NAUGHTY RACHEL: A recent letter fondly recalled Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. That would be Junk-Science Rachel, who downplayed DDT as malaria-eraser, among other boo-boos and misrepresentations listed at the time by a U. of Wis. agricultural bacteriologist in a review. Rachel is a saint for many well-meaning, misguided people. The '60s anti-war chant was "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Since then it could have been "Rachel, Rachel, how many pregnant women and children under the age of 5 died today of malaria, especially in no-spray zones in sub-Saharan Africa?" Doesn't exactly sing, but makes the point.

THOU SHALT NOT OTHER: Spotted on a Sunday-night stroll were lads of 14 or so, members of a historically oppressed group, out on a lark, pounding basketball on pavement in vicinity of Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School. One, however, member of a historical oppressor group and known to them, as they were all known to each other, was seen minus his basketball and dealing perforce with a somewhat bigger lad, who was promising to "beat [his] ass" if the other would only square off.

"Why don't you leave me alone?" the somewhat smaller one asked, apparently othered beyond endurance, as some would say. "No, I don't want to box you." Well, thanks probably to the presence of Elderly Stroller acting as a sort of UN observer, he did not have to. In a few minutes, he departed unmolested, the ball back in his hands, flipped by two who had been with the challenger. Nothing serious here, just boys being nasty, one of them flaunting his penchant for mixing it up. It's the othering that kills me.

JERKING AROUND: Cosi's has a Jamaican jerk sandwich, which if I were a Jamaican I might not order, but the idea has possibilities. The New York jerk could be eaten in a minute. Kansas City jerk would have only up-to-date ingredients. Oak Park jerk would require a long time to eat; you and the other people in the restaurant would have to discuss it first. Chicago jerk would require knowing someone and being sent. Cook County jerk would also be known as Todd. We can let it go at that. I'm off for a short stack at George's.

A letter writer recently asked who walks on the sidewalk for the heck of it. I do, and like Robert Frost making his famous turn in the woods on a snowy evening, it makes all the difference. Nature's grand, but walking on sidewalks has an important place in my life, up there with sleeping in a bed. ...

BOLD FELLOW: 7:20 a.m. Tuesday, black medium-sized sedan driven by first-class scofflaw drives through library mall, where once was Grove Avenue. It passed befuddled PADS clients waiting for library to open. It zoomed through, took a right on Lake and waited at the light heading west, for which we should be grateful, along with other small favors. ...

ELECTION IS COMING! ELECTION IS COMING!... Here's a handy guide to the Oak Park village board election: Keep in mind first that the current board has four elected members, a VMA, an NLP, a VCA, and an independent, and two appointed members, a VMA and a REDCOOP. Once you get that straight, the rest is easy.

For instance, there are nine candidates for three 4-year terms and three for one 2-year term. They are VMA, NLP, and VCA candidates, though one of the VCA four ran two years ago as an NLP. He's back to being a VCA because he and NLC, a combination of VCA and CFC that created NLP two years ago, had a falling-out over a letter he wrote, to which NLC objected publicly, which led to his resignation.

Now that we have that clear, let's look at the parties. First, the VCA, or Vision Community Action, creature of the Village Citizens Alliance. This is the Milstein party, after the sitting trustee/candidate of that name who has probably the highest profile of all the candidates because he's a feisty fellow and a wee bit volatile, which makes for good copy, let me tell you.

He was sitting pretty after the election two years ago, heading a solid majority of like-minded trustees. However, like Percy B. Shelley's Ozymandias in the desert, he can say, unfortunately, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" That's because his majority evaporated with the resignation of two and the defection of a third. There was nothing to do but scuttle back to his VCA beginnings and start over.

VCA! VCA! VCA! ... So we have Vision Community Action, with Milstein as lead candidate plus Balanoff, Schwab, and Abraham, all of whom have first names, omitted here because of space restraints. These are your Labor Party, committed to a fair shake for village hall employees and all working men and women everywhere. Their spokesman is a dedicated Democratic Socialist for whom the real Labor Day is May 1, so let's make them the Socialist Labor Party.

They are deeply suspicious - at least - of large-scale development and are firmly committed to preservation. If God had wanted Oak Park to have a huge tax base and high buildings, they figure, He would have named it Schaumburg. It's reform He has in mind, but some "who once spoke strongly for real reform have retreated from the positions they actively espoused in the last campaign," says Candidate/Trustee Milstein darkly.

NLP! NLP! NLP! ... These would be the NLP (New Leadership) people, his old buddies, now the object of his anguished concern. Chief of the backsliders would be Trustee Marsey, who voted for restreeting Marion Mall, for instance, in a 5-1 defeat of the once-dominant NLP/VCA coalition, about which more in a minute. Marsey is rooting for this year's NLP slate of Dolan, Meyer, Lyon, and Shiffer, who with him have staked out what seems a middle ground.

They will "sacrifice one old building," they say, to "be in a better position to save two others." They like developers--to compete with each other, not to be given subsidies. They blame the Colt Building problem on a long-ago bad contract and in any case seem ready to give it the old wrecking ball. They praise the "transparency" in decision-making they say there's been more of in the last two years.

VMA! VMA! VMA! ... It doesn't matter, says the old warhorse of Oak Park politics, the Village Manager Association (VMA), whose Johnson Pate Slate (I love it) also has Hale and Hedges. Johnson and a supporter have made much of the once-thriving New Leadership coalition with the Milsteiners. These are the people who gave us two years of chaos and disruption, the VMA say. Reject them, they say, failing to note that they have rejected each other. The obstructionist label they would hang indiscriminately on New Leadership and Socialist Labor won't stick on the former. Too much water has gone over the dam.

In any event, stick with the plan, VMA'ers say, meaning what they developed with the help of expensive outsiders and Oak Parkers a few years back, specifically as to how Downtown Oak Park will be done over. It does seem a shame to waste all that time and money by changing course. But hey, stuff happens, and here we are. What to do? New Leadership's Dolan et al. seem to want what the planners want, if in not quite the same way. Voters have a choice this time around, not just to develop or not but whether to do it this way or that. Good for us!

LOOK OUT: I'm tired of this politically correct restriction. Can't say the N-word? Heck with it, I'm going to say it: Negro. There. That felt good. Now the C-word. You don't know what the C-word is? Colored. There. "Color" is OK, used with "of"--people of color, you know--but "colored" is not, even if it's the C-word in N-double-A-C-P, which I bet a lot of people don't know. Like they don't know "Nazi" is short for "national socialism." As opposed to the international kind, run by Moscow in the old days, but still cherished by some.

The times they are a-changing. You can't tell words without a scorecard. Some of us are more sensitive than others. "African American," for instance, approved since Rev. Jesse Jackson declared it approved in 1988 (Gwendolyn Brooks did not approve), is very important for some, especially highly educated white people. Really? That's what In These Times magazine reports. Once socialist, it's now, ahem, progressive. This is what progressive people are saying, that "African American" is most precious to educated white folks, who want so desperately to do the right thing.

REBELLION: Not so the junior-high lad on Oak Park Avenue, coming home from school, rapping about "n----rs," in the bang-bang repetition of hip-hop. He entertained his friends in apparent full awareness of what he was doing. He was neither angry nor defiant nor especially loud. Indeed, he may have tasted delicious pleasure in saying the forbidden word. He and his four or five friends, racially mixed, were having fun. It's fun being naughty. Easy-going black boys of the mid-'60s could watch their buddies running for seats on a school bus and say, one to the other, "Look at them "n-----rs run." A huge subway ad bought by the Urban League could say in big letters, "N----r!" and in smaller letters, "That's what they will call you if you don't get an education and work hard" etc.

Not now. The word is not merely banned as epithet. It's become unpronounceable. Panic grips hearts at the sound. It has totemic significance. It's the evil eye looking at you, Boy (and Girl). It knows where you live. One must apologize, the more abjectly the better, for using it, or even what sounds like it, such as the etymologically unrelated "niggardly" (cheapskate-like). Some have much to gain from these prohibitions and punishments, however. Victimhood must be preserved.

As for the middle-schooler rapping on his way home to the amusement of his fellows? Little man, who or what made thee buck the trend (with apologies to Blake)? Dost thou know who made thee do that? You do not, nor does anyone else, except that you are typically unwilling, being a human being, especially of the western world, to toe the line in an unreasoning and unreasonable climate.

ELECTION: Meanwhile, the New Leadership Coalition--Dolan, Lyon, Meyer, Shiffer--sounds the bell for fiscal change. Overspending is the Oak Park problem, and spending in the wrong places. They want to "carve up" TIF money, for instance, currently squirrelled away for development, and use it for schools and infrastructure. Development would be for developers to do. They worry that "financial pressures may threaten the things that make Oak Park a fine place to live" (uh-huh) and have a task force in mind to map out cooperation by taxing bodies (huh?).

Above all, though they say "secondly," they want to let the market work. Egad, how do people think we got as far as we have--we human beings, since the 1600s or thereabouts--except by getting out of the way of the market? Do we really think pointy-headed wrinkled-brow economic planners thought it all up? Why do they think we can say international socialism was run by Moscow "in the old days," as above, and no longer? Because clout-heavy Soviet bureaucrats screwed things up, as bureaucrats do all over, all the time.

GOOD EVENING: If you were out "good will hunting" (the name of a movie about a genius) the other night, Jan. 30, you could have done worse than drop in at Percy Julian Middle School, where the topic was Percy Julian (also a genius). He's the African-American man who, with his family, moved into Oak Park in 1950 and stayed through arson and bombing. Many of you heard about it last night on Channel 11, where NOVA ran its "Forgotten Genius" docudrama about Julian, a guy who didn't know when to quit.

His daughter, Faith, talked about him at Julian school as level-headed and even-tempered, a hard worker who did not let the bastards wear him down and got even not mad, made love not war, etc. The docudrama has him loading his shotgun in his East Avenue house to await the bomb-throwers, however-though another docudrama some years back had Father George Clements of Chicago improbably decking a gang member in a pool hall.

The NOVA show also has the young Percy Julian enjoying an Alabama morning in the woods before coming on a horrible sight-a lynch victim hanging from a tree, like the strange fruit of the poem by N.Y. school teacher Abel Meeropol in the '30s which singer Billie Holiday made her theme song, closing performances in a darkened club, her eyes closed as if in prayer:

At the school the other night, Julian's onetime employee in the chemical-engineering trenches, Jim Letton, remembered him as providing a "haven" for black chemists, including himself. Julian was no mean taskmaster. Working a seven-day week as a young man, Letton took Friday afternoons off, "to help [his] wife with the groceries," and be with their children, he recalled. Hearing of Letton's absence, Julian regularly threatened to fire him and regularly did not. At Julian's behest, he kept a change of clothes handy for quick business trips. It was something, Letton said with a chuckle, "to make a wife suspicious."

Longtime Oak Parkers Bobbie Raymond Larson and Sherlynn Reid recalled Julian. He invited Reid's kids to play on the swingset in his East Avenue backyard and got Reid to take her pick of tulips from his garden. It was a warm (emotionally, even spiritually, not climatologically), pleasant evening at the splendid Julian school facility, specifically in its auditorium.

As is common at such affairs, much congratulation and expression of gratitude was voiced to benefactors who made the evening possible-school district, public library, historical society, and others. Indeed, two of those who did the congratulating were themselves congratulated at program's end, making for us a full, perfect circle. Nothing was said, as is also common, for OP taxpayers who voted a referendum some years back that paid for the new building. They can have their reward in part, however (getting not mad but even, as Percy Julian did), by showing up at school dramatic and musical events such as a C.A.S.T. production (or B.R.A.V.O. at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School down the street).DISCIPLINARY NOTE: As for those schools and that district, nine out of 10 of the teachers like the place, and three out of four students, according to a poll taken last fall during strategy-planning, which seems normal. As for discipline, 72 percent of teachers like it and 69 percent of students, which seems odd. Do they like or dislike it for the same reasons? Both want discipline tighter or looser? If tighter, then you have up to 31 percent of kids wanting a more controlled environment, and now you see where I'm heading. Troubled troublemakers and their parents make a lot of noise, but most like to see them neutralized, I think.

A WALK IN THE PARK: I think I was a hate-crime victim. Guy called me a white faggot as I walked through Scoville Park in the gloaming a few weeks ago. I didn't stop. He and his friends were irritated at my NOT stopping. They were desperate for my attention, and I refused it. This was my offense, and so I got victimized. Or was I?

All the guy did was toss out a "white faggot" to an unassuming white fellow trying hard to mind his own business. I had passed them earlier. One was jawing at another, three or four others stood chatting each other up. It's a free country, I thought, go ahead and jaw. I got a few steps past them and heard, "Hi, brother." Who, me? I'm not a brother, I thought -- except to an octogenarian in Gurnee and a septuagenarian in Arlington, VA -- and kept walking.

Again the call: "Brother." I'll bet it's me, I mused. But out of 40-year-old misty memory came a guy yelling, "Hey, you with the collar!" in an open field at 13th and Loomis on a midsummer night in 1966, as helmeted police gathered all down Roosevelt Road. The caller had me cold, I wore the clerical collar. I ignored his cry for attention. Twenty-something and intent on mischief, he had an audience of five or six teen-aged boys, to whom he would have given a lesson in how to deal with the likes of me. No, thanks, I muttered, continuing my way towards the Baptist church at the other end of the project, where do-gooders were gathering ineffectually.

Ignoring this Scoville Park greeting came easy, therefore. But my response rankled, and when I returned 15 minutes later heading the other way, I was accused incontinently of being "a snob" who "wouldn't talk" to them. I was "Sherlock Holmes" in my floppy hat (heh). I was told to commit an indecent if not impossible act. These were truly disgruntled youth. Later on Lake Street, I ran into them again. This time they tossed the N-word at a fellow African American, who was also told to commit an indecent if not impossible act. Now I ask you, were we all victims of hate crimes?.

JUMPING TO CONCLUSION: You hear a lot about the school achievement gap, but what about the basketball gap? White kids can't jump, but so what? So they don't suit up or if they do, they warm the bench. That's what happens to the American dream in a dog-eat-dog society. Look, white kids are grossly underrepresented on basketball teams not just in Oak Park and River Forest but nationally. I say enough. Let's train our sights on this gap too. And nuts to this can't-jump stuff, which is transparently racist. It's environment, folks. How many white fathers shoot hoops with their sons?

THROUGH A PRISM DARKLY: The Oak Park District 97 strategic plan draft calls schools "the educational prism through which students realize meaning and purpose in their lives." It says they are "to guarantee that each student achieves optimal intellectual growth while developing socially, emotionally and physically." That's all?

How about the prism through which students realize how to read, write, and do long division, not to mention shut up when teacher is talking and otherwise cooperate for the more or less common good? And who says schools are a prism in the first place? In what respect are they "a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light, the exact angles between whose surfaces depend on the application"? Beats me.

As for "realizing" -- learning? achieving? both, splitting the difference? -- the meaning and purpose in life, oh my. Are these schools or houses of worship? And there's a guarantee of optimal growth? Listen to that carnival barker. Maybe we would all pay more attention to a plan that made more sense. Or did not belabor the obvious, favoring "a culture of inclusion that respects and promotes diversity." This deftly undercuts the powerful exclusion and uniformity lobby, but it's also grand language impossible to disagree with, reeking of groupthink and lack of imagination, cobbled together in meetings. The good news is, it's a draft. So hello Baby, give us rewrite.

She gets my vote the first time she admits to being a Latin School alum. I was also in the somewhat smaller number who voted for Jesse White's opponent. Can't stand tumblers, you see. However, I was not in the 46.8 percent who voted for Mr. Corruption for county board president. Can't stand corruption, you see. Was not pleased to know that this many can. Shrug.

LANGUAGE MATTERS: The Sun-Times truck has a message for the felonious: "Driver carries no cash." It's there in Spanish too: "El choffer no carga dinero." Pay attention and you will learn something, as to cuss out el choffer when he cuts you off or to fend off the panhandler by pointing at yourself and telling him, "No carga dinero."

NO TRIFLING: Friendly man with friendly dog waits for me to pet him-the dog, that is. Thanks but no thanks, I say, flashing a tight-lipped smile. Thing is, my heart belongs to Django, #1 Son's Rottweiler mix, whom I have learned to like and, in a way, love. He's gotten past nervous puppyhood-jumping and licking and all that-and demonstrates all in all a pleasing maturity. So I do not have time for every Fido, Rover, and Rocky (currently a top-20 name for dogs) who comes loping down the block.

WRONG NUMBER: Caller threw me a curve ball the other day. He was one digit removed from township services, where the issue is usually the senior-citizen bus-when is it coming, can I get on it? The callers are almost all grandmother-sounding women, for whom I have a special affection, having had a grandmother whom I knew and being married to one. I like passing on the right number in these cases. But this caller was looking for a lunch program, which I at first denied having, then realized it too is a township program and gave him the number.

This is all on the second line, which we got a few years back. Bell-Tel, or whatever it is now, gave us one that had recently belonged to a family that dropped off many others' radar. I feel I know them by now. Once our answering device picked up a long message from an eager young footballer

RUNNERS: The woman runs past the bread kitchen on Marion heading south at 8 a.m. She had passed me 45 minutes or so earlier heading north on Oak Park Ave., a half mile east, really hoofing it. This was no mere jogger, bouncing up and down for more rapid blood flow, but hardcore runner, long-strided and speed-oriented, sleek and pony-tailed. Minutes later, a long-legged man, also pony-tailed, passed going the same way. Athletes in the morning.

CONDOS: Walking by the Opera Club condo construction on Marion a few weeks back, I spotted a very suspicious character with an electronic box hanging from his neck. Ever the responsible citizen, I stopped and watched him and saw something amazing: He was guiding a long chute attached to a pump that pulled cement out of a cement mixer across the street.

He used dials, looking up at the moving chute and the workers leaning out from a fourth-floor patio. When the chute got to the fourth floor, one of them motioned with his hand and or even fingers this way or that, the man turned the dials just so much, until the chute stopped, and guided manually by the men above, poured forth its contents. "Makes it easier," said the man below when asked. Not your father's sidewalk superintendent.

PICKING A WINNER: I voted early this year but only twice-early at Village Hall two weeks ago, twice when the touch-feel machine wouldn't save my paper. It recorded my vote, I was assured, and believed it did. But my paper trail was broken, so I did it again, then signed a statement to that effect.

But who cares about the darn paper? It's for peace of mind, I assume. Not mine, however. I save things electronically all the time, and so do banks and police departments. It's the digital revolution we have here, which has more to do with our rocketing prosperity even than Bush's tax cuts.

I even save my own deathless prose electronically. You may save yours in a box under your bed or in a safety deposit box. Fine. But what if there's a conflagration, then what? Your deathless prose goes the way of Isaac Newton's notes, gone missing for 70 years for want of being catalogued. If Newton had blogged them, there would have been no problem.

SIGNS OF TIME: Meanwhile, the Peraica signs seem to be growing on front lawns. It can't be easy, I have said, for the true-blue Dem to go red-blooded Republican, even if he's a supposed reformer. Keep in mind, of course, that your man Claypool, not endorsing Todd the favored son, is catching severe implied public threats from Mayordaley II, which is enough in some circles to make a man consider another line of work. Look at it this way: If your man Claypool can risk political execution, can't you vote Republican?

SIGNS MISPLACED: The Stroger signs, on the other hand, came and went like thieves in the night, for instance on the narrow grassy strip on South Boulevard across from the Oak Park Avenue el platform. Somebody must have decided this land is your land, this land is my land, from Harlem Avenue to Austin Boulevard, from North Avenue to Roosevelt Road, this land was made for you and me ... Not for some campaign worker to plant his signs on.

RAISING MY HAND: Was happy to contribute my two cents to the OP elementary schools recommendation fund the other day. Did it online, but don't you even think about that, because the deadline has passed. Had a few questions left over, however, such as what's meant by "adequate support" for kids moving from elementary to middle school or middle to high? It would take a heart of stone not to rate that as very important, and I don't have one, even if I am a Republican.

Another was about teaching cultural and other differences, which I rated not important because I smelled a rat. If I could be sure this was a low-key urging toward tolerance of quirks and blemishes, I'd say fine. But this multiculturalism comes across at times as a blurring of distinction between right and wrong and of universal standards.

Stoning the rape victim comes to mind, or dealing harshly with girls and women in ways that do not pass the family-newspaper taste test. Is this ever so slightly to be condoned or glossed over out of respect for local custom? You can find a defense of such harsh dealing on the web without much trouble. I'd like to know more about what District 97 has in mind here.

Finally, there was the question about preferring "school control" over staffing etc., apparently as opposed to district office control. I can see that as a good idea, recognizing parental rights, or a prescription for chaos. Is it code? One possibility is intriguing, namely some sort of open enrollment by which parents choose their kids' school, or at least put in for it once the neighborhood gets its pick. It would be a way for schools to get a vote of confidence from their customers. There. Two cents more.

MY NAME IS JAMES, AND I'M YOUR WAITER: And have some questions. How many Oak Park trustees does it take to pass an ordinance? Four. How many meetings? Don't ask. How can we speed up meetings? Hire "flappers" to slap a trustee when he or she talks too long, as they slapped the people of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels when they got lost in thought. They used a sort of beanbag amd hit them gently on the mouth when it was time to speak, on the ear when it was time to listen. We could do that, slapping on the mouth when it's time to shut up. We would pay the market rate for this service.

Meanwhile, some trustees seem unimpressed with money problems as regards the $5 million fixer-upper on Lake Street and the $6-$9 million needed to fix it up. We'll make it up with tourism, says one. Don't push "numbers" at me, says another. Is she equally dismissive of financial data in running her own affairs?

As for tourism, here's an idea: Empty out the Colt building, breaking leases if need be, close it up and charge admission to look inside. Put a man out front-"Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, come one, come all, see the famous Colt building!" Again, make it the market rate for tickets, but only after a series of meetings with plenty of citizen input.

FERVENT PRAYER: Give us developers to match our feisty Oak Park trustees. News flash: Prayer answered, they're here! One drives a hard bargain on property, village fathers and mothers call his bluff or slouch toward calling it, he shows a straight flush, and down the TIF toilet goes $5 million. He knew what he was doing. Did village fathers and mothers know what they were doing?

Another, recently fined for using unsightly bricks, says he may sell his holding at a major corner. Has too much to do, he says. The village fathers and mothers, having devoted many hours to thwarting a third much less ambitious developer because neighbors objected, must sit and watch.

ELECTION ISSUES: Some may be tempted to solve their Dimmycrats for Corruption problem by casting no vote in the Cook County presidency race. Neither the Democrat Stroger nor the Republican Peraica gets a vote, so poignant is the problem facing Ds as explained in this space-vote for corruption and Democrat, staying in the comfort zone, or for supposed reform and Republican, leaving it.

However, it's not a new problem. Star-gazers and job-seekers go all the way with LBJ or up the pike with I-like-Ike. Others go without enthusiasm for whoever's left after slating and primary. It's a terrible way to run a country but the best we have found so far. This is not to endorse the holier-than-thouness of voters who "hold [their] noses" while voting. They are elitists or flirt with elitism. But at least they choose.

SCHOOL MONEY: Expect no "longer-term solutions" to school budget problems, said the District 97 finance man at a recent meeting, splashing cold water on the hope expressed by a board member. Cut costs and prepare for a referendum "every 5-10 years," he advised. Indeed, school board financial planning is "enormously complex," a onetime board member told me. You don't know until September at the earliest what taxes and state aid will get you, and this for a fiscal year that starts July 1.

Neither do you know your costs because September's enrollment determines staffing levels. Nor teacher salaries, affected as they are by graduate credits earned in the summer, not to mention contract-negotiating uncertainties when that applies. So a district makes its best guess and calls it a budget. As for some sort of community effort at school finances, that's asking for trouble. What school board, for instance, wants help from someone who dismisses financial data as mere numbers?

Columnist Jack Crowe says let's talk about school [Viewpoints, Dec. 14]. OK, don't blame me. It was his idea. He has middle schools in mind-public, or government, schools. The latter is preferred by ex-UIC Prof. Herbert J. Walberg in his and Joseph L. Bast's Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America's Schools because they are funded and run by government agencies. That's a cruel and heartless way to refer to our beloved school staffs and leadership, but let's do it this once.

Competition happens, however. Ask any real estate broker selling a neighborhood. This is school-to-school competition, aided and abetted by published test scores. It happens within schools, too, in the choice parents have about middle-school subjects-typing? chorus? art? French? Spanish?-and even about teachers. There could be more of this: you could have homework classes and non-homework classes. Parents could choose. This would be a pro-choice program that even conservatives would approve.

Or teachers could declare for phonics or not, and parents could choose. Or for drilling in fundamentals vs. enrichment. For memorizing poetry or not. As freshmen at Fenwick in 1945, we memorized poetry-"The stag at eve had drunk its fill, where danced the moon on Monan's rill," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "`Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

Some do it already, big time. They say no to government schools, paying their money and taking their choice at schools called Grace or Ascension or Calvary [Oak Park Christian Academy is day school at Calvary church: better here wld be Alcuin or Waldorf, to name two]. Others skip school buildings completely, like Cindy Miller, on Wesley Avenue. She and her husband Jay and other couples do it themselves. Jay, an engineering consultant, teaches physics. Cindy's friend Pat Larson teaches Latin and history. Cindy teaches literature. As many as 15 kids might be in a session, from five families. These are mini-schools, or as one observer put it, "private schools on the cheap."

The kids get out, as to see "Nutcracker Suite" at Morton East High School. The Millers' oldest is an Eagle Scout. Their oldest daughter has taken acting classes at Village Players; she's in her second season as a Lyric Opera supernumerary. Another son is pitcher and shortstop with a local traveling team. Another daughter takes violin, another guitar.

Home-schoolers' reasons run a gamut. For the Millers, members of Calvary Memorial Church, where home-schooler parents meet regularly, "the Christian element" is the big thing. Cindy Miller has found it's "good to cater to" each child's progress. The experience has also been good for "family dynamics," which in their case are super-dynamics-the Millers have nine children, from two to age 19.

The nine have been home-schooled since birth. She and her husband, unsure at first, were willing to try it. If it didn't work, they were willing to pack their first-born off to kindergarten. So it went with the other eight: schooling began when they were born. It progressed seamlessly. As for truancy issues and the long arm of the state, which in some places can be quite intrusive, Illinois law is liberal in the matter. Home-schooled kids are to be taught core subjects in English for a required number of days, but no reporting is required. It's a fairly pro-choice environment.www.jimbowman.com

DEFENSE . . . Crime rate is down in Oak Park, except for assaults, thanks in part to increased locking of doors. Is there an equivalent for anti-head-knocking? Probably not, but wouldn't it be cool? There could be village-sponsored classes in use of the blackjack, for instance, widely publicized for deterrence' sake.

Classes would teach how to pick the right size and heft, where to conceal it, how to wield it: A quick swipe here (think credit card at Dominick's), a roundhouse swing there (think Paul Konerko), or a mere brandishing, showing it to the head-knocker (think tank parade in Red Square).

TWO GAPS THERE ARE . . . The Gap I like is the one where I get dashing $8 pullover shirts that are warm and cozy, long-lasting, and in my view stylish. The one I don't like is the one between black and white kids in schools, which by the way is being approached the wrong way, as if white's all right and blacks are stepping back.

The black parent with a 6th-grader reading at 1st-grade level has a problem whether whites have the same problem or not, is my point. Better to concentrate on the thing to be done, whatever it takes. It's not a race but a quest, to be pursued in even if it's you by yourself on a desert island.

Comparisons are odious, as Sir John Fortescue said so well 600-plus years ago, and as did many after him, including Marlowe, Donne, Cervantes in translation, Goldsmith, Burke, and Shakespeare, who played with the expression, having Dogberry in "Much Ado about Nothing" observe that comparisons are "odorous."

GO TEAM GO . . . My lucrative Wednesday Journal contract forbids me to name the Other Paper in this column, much less to praise it. But it recently offered a gem which I cannot ignore, in an article about That Building on Lake Street. Said building got its name when it changed hands some time back and went to the owner of the Baltimore (now Indianapolis) Colts, who called it the Colt Building!

I am amazed that this hasn't come up in debate about restoring or destroying it. Preservationists should consider jettisoning that name in favor of Charger or Forty-Niner or -- that's it, Bear! Would developers be so cavalier about the matter if it were the Bear building they were condemning to the wrecking ball? I don't think so.

One family has to be glad of the name change, however. It was once the Goldberg Building, for leaseholder Sol H. Goldberg, whose descendants are spared the indignity of the present discussion, not least of them "The Goldbergs," of radio and television fame. And don't tell me they are fictional. I heard them on radio when I was home sick from school, with my own two ears.

Viewpoints columnist Jim Bowman alluded to the $8 shirts he buys at The Gap (as in the clothing store) last week in his column as an intro to comments on The Gap (as in the minority student achievement gap). Worked very nicely only [he remembered] (post-deadline) that he buys his $8 shirts next door at Old Navy, which may be more accurate, but doesn't work nearly so well in a column. "I swear I didn't fudge for the sake of phrasing," Bowman said in an e-mail last week, blowing the whistle on himself. He even signed off "Abashed on Ontario." Well, we believe him, mostly because we've been victimized by a Gap (as in the "senior moment" variety) or two ourselves lately.

Watching the Oak Park village board on TV, you see people walking on eggs with each other, except when Martha Brock has to take a breather, and then there's nothing to do but watch Robert Milstein's hair grow. Isn't it time to translate for them and help them tell it straight?

Take the Board Majority (please) in the matter of buying the Baltimore Colt building for us at the low, low price of $5 million, plus maybe another building for $2.5 mill. Wouldn't it be a relief for all concerned to let it all hang out, as they say in therapy? Let's do it, citing nay-sayers and then reporting what the Board Majority-Milstein, Elizabeth Brady, Brock, and Geoff Baker-can't say.

Meanwhile, the BM has a trick or two up its sleeve in the contest being enacted before our very eyes on TV sets and at village hall. Consider recent public remarks and letter to the editor by BM member Milstein-and, if you don't mind, piquant responses by my friend Jake (not his real name), who has been pestering for recognition.

What the heck was Oak Park village board President David Pope doing boosting a Democratic candidate by telephone, as reported in this newspaper? What the heck was he doing at the Dem candidates' beauty contest at the library Feb. 11, where he was sighted from the podium and given a big hand? Doesn't he know about the rise of the VMA (Village Manager Association) in the `50s as antidote to political-party shenanigans (hiring), in that case Republican?

The VMA floated and won adoption of village-manager government, taking government employment out of the hands of elected officials. These latter turn politicians when running for election. Otherwise, they are citizens with better things to do who decide to do this anyway, namely set policy for the village with nothing in it for themselves. Elected, they hire one person, the manager, who hires everyone else. Political-party candidates, on the other hand, get to hire lots of people if they win. It's the nature of the beast.

A friend of mine some years back moved here from Northlake, where he'd been mayor. Came election time, he rang doorbells for Democrats, his chosen party. Chatting with the Oak Park Dem chairman at a post-election party, he was asked where he worked and named the major ad agency where he was office manager. End of conversation. The Dem chairman expected to hear a government agency, not an ad agency, as the man's place of employment. Implication clear to my friend? As a campaign worker not dependent on victory for his job or promotion therein, he didn't matter. Or he could show up on amateur night.

No skullduggery is suspected of Pope here. Rather, naivete. Oak Park is full of true-believing Democrats and (less full of) Republicans, who give their all as volunteers. That's the kind of Democrat Pope is, I trust, but what of the appearance? Yes, his candidate, the presumed reformer Forrest Claypool, seemed untainted. But behind every reformer who wins is an army of people who depend on him for their jobs. Not in Oak Park. Here it's the manager who hires and fires. Trustees should butt out of such matters, and that includes the feisty, provocative, uncivil Robert Milstein, recent subject of a barrage of commentary about him and unionized village hall employees and his offensive references to the manager and others.

As for Milstein and the unions, his critics hasten to say he has the right to join their protest, meaning legal right, I assume. What other kind I cannot imagine. Put it this way: If after joining the protest, he wants membership in the League of Wise Men in Village Government, he has no right to claim it. To call him imprudent and wrong-headed for doing it is to say nothing about his right to do it, which is a very red herring. Same for Pope and his phone calls for Claypool: He had the right to do it, but that's beside the point. Not every right is to be claimed all the time. I mean, when husband or wife doesn't feel like it now and then, it's unwise, even unfair, to insist. Right?

MEANWHILE, IN CHURCH ... Did you hear about the worshiper who came late to Mass and got trampled at Kiss of Peace time? He was tackled by the deacon in full regalia and woke up some minutes later being sprinkled with holy water hoarded in anticipation of the upcoming Easter Vigil. He has learned since then to get with the program or else. A word to the wise is sufficient, he's been told.

As for trampling and being trampled, astute observer Bob O. notes the differences of opinion about kissing (or shaking) for peace among Catholics and suggests a solution: Have the ushers greet people and ask, "Kissing or Non-kissing?" They could then direct people to one side or other of the aisle. Good idea!

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS: Is it kosher for the village not to reveal development proposals (RFPs), as it did when Wednesday Journal asked for them in the matter of Colt building renovation? These are secret proposals? What about the soon-to-be-approved protocols of participation? Would the proposals be revealed to participants? One good thing: this refusal spares our village board any second-guessing by citizens with their own ideas. This is only right. Who are these citizens anyway? What trees do they plant?

PAYOFF: What about Whiteco paying off the village for honoring its agreement? It's coughing up $400G for unnamed and so far nonexistent village housing programs, to say nothing of another $200G in environment-friendly additions to the already agreed-on building. That would be your cost of doing business in Oak Park, insofar as this village board is a very sensitive creature, and kid gloves are in order. It's not under the table, anyhow.

TAKING OFFENSE: And hey, since when is it not kosher to ask about conflict of interest, as board President Pope asked a few weeks ago about who would plan the Baltimore Colt redo? You can't even ask? Trustee Milstein was "offended ... deeply offended ... angered," as if he'd been told his mother wore army boots. Trustee Baker found it "repugnant." But what have board members got better to do than ask about conflict of interest? It's what legislators do.

NAME GAME: These two are of the board majority, but that's too tame a phrase for the poets among us. "Milstein majority," in honor of its stormy-petrel spokesman, does have a ring to it, though editor-columnist Trainor has the fetching "fearsome foursome of Bob [Milstein], Baker, Brock and Brady (the killer Bs)." The poets love it. But Milstein's the man, poetic or not, so we should go with the other one, MM.

Two months ago Milstein burst forth with 1,145 words in defense of his majority, taxing developer Taxman with putting out an "unprofessional, scorched-earth press release that debases the integrity of the board." His sole VMA opposition on the board, Ray Johnson, he said "will milk every ounce of this [Colt controversy] for his re-election campaign." Johnson, moreover, wants to be "the knight in shining armor."

HOUSECLEANING: Meanwhile, on the school scene, District 97 Supt. Constance C. apparently was not born yesterday. When she hit the ground running last fall, fresh from Zion, she called for an audit of business and personnel operations and found dirt under the rug. Better to find it now than later, when she herself would have some explaining to do. Is this standard for a new super? I don't think so. But what a good idea in this case, when she succeeded a super of many years tenure, under whom matters got sloppy.

DIFFICULT MEETING: Oak Park Trustee Martha Brock saved the day, or night, at the village board meeting a month ago when she and Trustee Elizabeth Brady changed their minds about who should lead the Colt building redo. Brady had explained herself reasonably enough: matters of substance had combined with matters of politics. There was nothing substantive to add when Brock's turn came.

But speaking after Trustees Bob Milstein and Geoff Brady, she saved the situation. The other two had called out an editor, a political opponent who had addressed the board, and fellow trustees in a remarkable display of pique, disappointment, and veiled or unveiled animosity, chilling the room, or at the least the one where I sat watching on TV.

Brock rambled a bit but did not hesitate. She got personal but not maudlin and not angrily defensive. Like an earlier speaker, she spoke of resigning. But she accused no one. It was not a masterpiece of argument but a candid, apparently guileless display that cooled things down. She finished, the meeting proceeded, business was completed, everybody went home.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: The affair was all about backing into a meat grinder. The butcher's wife did that. The result was predictable: Disaster. So did our bold if misguided Board Majority back into a public opinion meat grinder. The result? Temporary setback apparently viewed as disaster. Two defected, leaving two others disturbing the ether with ineffectual haymakers.

But all four may take grim consolation from Oak Park political history. Officeholders and staff have had to swallow some bitter medicine over the years. At a hot District 97 board meeting a long time ago, a disgruntled parent asked a board member to step outside. (He didn't.)

When the library board tried to close a branch, people demanded otherwise. The Village Manager Association, still chewing dust from the last election, lost a much earlier one over the firing of a garbage man. A lawsuit did the same for a hard-charging school board. Former officeholders have left town. You need insulation from the slings and arrows.

That's what Trustee Greg Marsey learned at the May 15 board meeting, where the 400 North Maple block condo development was discussed. Marsey asked and got it verified by Village Attorney Ray Heise, who admitted the coercion written into village ordinance-no, the owner cannot decline landmark status-only after noting that the owner is invited to participate in landmark discussions.

Marsey appeared stunned. President David Pope, trying to wrap up discussion, said he did not want to get into "nuance" at that point. But one man's nuance is another's heart of the matter. Someone can start the process for you the owner? And in the end you have to go along with commission and board decision, with drastic implications as to what you can do with your own property? You have in mind neither whorehouse nor shooting gallery nor saloon, but a spanking new building with toilets that work, but it doesn't matter, or might not matter.

There was more. So clearly was the board moving to stop the Maple Avenue development that Trustee Baker volunteered on the spot to mediate in the matter of developer vs. NIMBY neighbors. He would recuse himself from voting when its landmark status came before the board, he offered, presenting himself as a neutral third party who would bring developers and neighbor to agreement.

But elected officials normally recuse themselves only when past activity indicates conflict, and they do it regretfully. They don't do it ahead of time so as to adopt a new role that an official considers more important than the one he was elected to fill. Milstein dissuaded Baker from his bad idea, though without saying how bad it was.

TRYING HARDER: Oak Park trustees pluckily try to grasp various business-development matters in study sessions. "How does this work?" they ask, about a marketing strategy. "Pardon if I sound untutored in this matter, but ..." "Can you guarantee this if we spend the money?" One feels their pain. But they are doing their duty as they see it, being our elected business planners and investment bankers.

They warm to the task: "I think we can make history," one of them told Chi Trib, referring to impending discussions about how to develop Roosevelt Road. "Imagine Berwyn, Oak Park and hopefully Cicero getting together and actually setting a model for other communities across the state." A model for getting grants and making TIF (tax increment financing) zones, that is. What's a government-sponsored development program without grants and TIFs anyhow? Like Oak Park's two-one for Madison Street, one for Lake Street-which in 2003 ate 5.3 percent of the tax pie while village government ate not quite 12 percent.

A TIF looks "hopefully" ahead to glorious days when tax pies are bigger than ever. Everybody's doing it. So what if it's a pie in the sky, as some say? A major attraction to getting elected, second only to the chance to perform one's civic duty, is to play investor with other people's money, is it not? Vote me in, and I will spend your money, says your average candidate, though not in so many words-"hopefully" with beaucoups de return on the investment.

If not, so what? Did a slumping downtown stop this board's predecessors over those years of closing and opening Lake Street, to name one embarrassing Oak Park episode? Will a decades-old history of dubious intervention stop the current board? Will it succeed? "And what if I don't and what if I do?" asked Dorothy Parker, summing up her cynical-realistic view. No problem. For the elected ones, it's a win-win situation.

PLAYING FAIR: In any case, consider an alternative to our guided-missile approach to development, namely lower taxes. Not for selected investors but across the board, with the devil taking hindmost of those who do not flock to our precincts. The advantage would be not for those who argue best at hearings, dancing attendance on this year's gang of seven, but for anyone with money to spend to set up shop.

The heck with trustees giving their blessings to this or that project. They know what sells and what doesn't? They know what a thousand buyers and sellers don't know, even as their uncoordinated buying and selling make or break markets and businesses? Who do they think they are, Alan Greenspan?

TALKING SENSE: Meanwhile, in another arena, we may recall "traffic calming," which had its day in Oak Park a few years back, promoted by at least one trustee. It was a lost cause from the start, partly because too many drivers refuse as a matter of principle to make a right turn. (Joke)

When the library brings a speaker to Unity Temple, for instance, he's an embracer of root causes for terrorism, meaning it's our fault if we would only admit it. But how about a root-causes debate? Somebody from the New York Times, like the one who got booed off the commencement stage in Rockford for pot-shooting at the current war, vs. anyone of Ann Coulter's choosing? People would pay to see it. The money could go for saving the Colt Building.

Or bring in someone like the late Norman Cousins, longtime editor of the long-gone Saturday Review, who wowed an OPRF High School auditorium audience 20 years ago with tales of brushes with death and how laughter proved his best medicine. He's the only speaker I have heard say "F-k you" from an Oak Park podium-what he told the doctor who told him he had six months to live. He died in 1990, more than six months after that lecture.

Baby Stroger: Don't you just love him? And how are all you Oak Park and River Forest Democrats doing today, as you face the Ides of November, when Todd Stroger turns up on your ballot? You went big for supposed reformer Claypool in April. What now? There's this guy from Riverside, a supposed reformer, which Todd ain't. You went for supposed reform in April, now you face a stark choice: non-reform or, God save us, a Republican.

It's not easy. Counselling may be in order. "How could you?" a former Democrat was asked by someone near and dear when he said he had become a Republican. If he had said he'd become a Methodist, she would have understood, because we are all ecumenical these days. The best people are.

But ladies and gentlemen of all religious persuasions, can we ignore what God hath wrought among Cook County Democrats? Oak Park's head Democrat, Senator Don, clearly a comer, got tough about it in the slating meeting. Voters feel "disenfranchised and outraged," he said. They consider this process "a sham" and think "we ... committeemen lack the independence to think for ourselves and vote in their interests." (They would never think that.)

Senator Don was for Rep. Danny Davis, years ago sent to us by central casting as our safely seated congressman-for-life. His appearance at OP village hall a few months back took place in the glow of heavy-duty pork-$400,000 to study capping the Ike-of which he was clearly, if not justifiably, proud. But Rep. Danny never stood a chance in this county meeting.

You all must look in your hearts and vote your conscience. That's a no-brainer. But one among us has to look especially deep, and that's OP village board president Pope. He was in for a dime on the reformer Claypool side in the primary, working the phone. Will he be in for a dollar for reformer Peraica in November?

Saving Maple Avenue: I swear, some OP trustees feel exaggerated responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry. Take R. Milstein, proud wearer of the (village hall staff) union label, and his determination to devise a "win-win" situation for the 400 N. Maple-dwellers and their unwelcome developer. "We need to bring this to closure, and we're the ones capable of doing it," he told his fellow trustees.

Hearing words of caution in the matter, such as whether a developer is likely to drop his profitable, legal plans or exchange them for another, he conceded nothing. He seemed fully prepared to spend other people's money to pay this developer not to develop, so as to rescue a block-load of residents from entrepreneurship.

Late-breaking comment: My friend Mack "Mackie" O'Velly sends his compliments to whoever engineered tear-down ordinance maneuvers week before last, delivering the draft 15 minutes before the village board meeting and scheduling the final vote for four days later, ruling out public comment. Nice going!

TAXES, WE GOT TAXES: Discussing taxes in this newspaper a few weeks ago, OP Trustee Robert Milstein encouraged coordination by taxing bodies. First up for discussion would be how soon the village returns its TIF money to the schools. Is there a more poignant example of non-cooperation among taxing bodies than Tax Increment Financing, which school boards consider taking food (money) out of their children's mouths (budgets)-a point already made by a crusading editor but worth repeating?

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US: As for punishing taxation, it's our own fault. In the recent town meeting, our township assessor of taxpayers' ire, if not of property, said this year's ire is the worst he's seen. He fingered referendums as a major source. That's us at work. "It's partly our own fault. We've never seen a referendum in Oak Park that we've said no to," said one taxpayer, addin