Annexation into suburbs historically sound, but more likely to p-o people

Mayoral hopeful Garry McCarthy may have history on his side when he talks about Chicago annexing the suburban communities directly adjacent into the city limits, but I can’t envision an idea that would cause more contempt to be felt all the way around.

Once regarded as a suburb with Chicago far off in distance

There was, once a time when the street now known as Pershing Road was the southernmost boundary of Chicago, with Hyde Park Township stretching south to 138^th Street. It was regarded as a place to escape urban congestion and noise, but it became a full-fledged part of Chicago in 1889 and added the bulk of what we now think of as the South Side.

SO IN THAT sense, McCarthy saying that places like Oak Lawn, Oak Park or Norridge ought to be taken into the city of Chicago proper isn’t outrageous. Although I don’t doubt one bit that the people currently living there will regard it as such.

McCarthy claims this is an easy way for the city to see a population increase, while also adding to the tax base. While officials in these suburban communities are quick to claim they have solid bases of life and aren’t the least bit interested in becoming a part of the city’s ongoing problems.

Personally, I happen to think there are many suburban communities that would benefit from being a part of a larger entity – because the local services they are able to offer on their own are usually miniscule.

I really question if there are 130 distinct municipal identities within Cook County – which is the number of incorporated villages, towns and cities within the county. With Chicago being merely one of them.

THE FACT IS that most of the suburbs’ true identity lies in their proximity to Chicago. Whether their officials want to admit it or not, they’re a part of the area.

There is a sense in which a place like Dolton might as well just be another neighborhood within Chicago; something along the lines of Hegewisch.

I also find it odd that officials in Oak Lawn and Norridge, in particular, are speaking out against McCarthy’s concept. In the case of Norridge, it is an incorporated community surrounded on all sides by Chicago. Once one summer, I lived on the Northwest Side where literally all I had to do was cross the street and I’d be in Norridge.

McCARTHY: Looking to boost city population

Although I suspect anybody driving through the area would have no clue they had departed, then re-entered, the city limits during the few minutes they passed through.

WHILE IN THE case of Oak Lawn, the claim I often hear from people who live there is that their community is different because it’s so close to Chicago. One can actually enjoy an urban lifestyle, unlike the sense some suburbs offer of being so isolated from the rest of the world.

It’s like they want Chicago benefits without being a part of Chicago. Which to my mindset is mere nonsense!

There is one thing I couldn’t help but notice about McCarthy’s plan, which may be the aspect that kills off any chance of it being taken seriously. The communities he rattled off by name – the ones that would boost the city population by about 160,000 people – are ones with predominantly white populations.

It’s as though by taking in those towns, he can bolster the Anglo part of Chicago’s population. Is his real sentiment one that Chicago has too many non-white people living here?

HECK, I GREW up in suburban Calumet City, whose northern boundary bumps up against Chicago’s Far South Side. Yet Calumet City has changed, developing throughout the years a sizable African-American population (about 72 percent, according to the Census Bureau). I don't hear anyone talking of taking in the suburb's roughly 37,000 residents.

Is McCarthy trying to cherry-pick the kind of people he’d want in an expanded Chicago? If he really were serious, he’d talk about annexing all of Cook County – creating a megapolis of some 5 million people. It would bolster the city tax base and would actually fit into the mindset of many downstate Illinois types who tend to think the whole of northeastern Illinois is all Chicago.

Could this someday become a neighborhood, rather than a village, sign?

Do that, and we’d not only crush Houston’s dreams that they’ll someday be bigger than us, while regaining our spot as the “Second City” by topping Los Angeles’ mere 4.03 million.

Instead, we’re destined to be the 2.7 million portion of metro Chicago, which when you add in all the inner and outer suburbs totals out at over 9 million individuals – none of whom want to give up their community name for the sake of progress.

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Baseball ‘kids’ don’t live in Chicago? Why did complaints take so long?

For those people who are spewing accusations that the Jackie Robinson West baseball team that nearly won the Little League World Series this year is tainted because its players don’t all live strictly within the league’s boundaries, I’d have to respond by saying that no one ever tried to keep it a secret.

There were so many people who back in August were eager to let it be known that some of the kids had ties to suburbs such as Dolton, Homewood, Lansing, Lynwood and South Holland (instead of neighborhoods such as Roseland and Morgan Park where the league is based).

SO TO NOW hear complaints from officials with the Evergreen Park Athletic Association that the Jackie Robinson West team that represented the Great Lakes Region at the Little League World Series comes across as little more than whining.

It was a relief to learn that Little League International this week issued a statement saying the league’s team that advanced in the Little League World Series to be U.S. champions (before losing to a team from South Korea) was legitimate when it comes to residency issues.

I don’t doubt that the ball playing kids received so much hype that the reality can’t live up.

But this amounts to petty jealousy from a suburban Little League program that happens to border to Jackie Robinson West program on the city’s Far South Side that was created back in the early 1970s to spur interest in youth baseball in a community whose racial composition had changed radically.

UNTIL RECENTLY, I had a “day job” of sorts in writing stories for one of the daily newspapers in the suburbs that covered the communities where some of these kids lived and went to school.

Which local school and government officials were more than eager to reveal. I personally remember one suburban mayor saying he wanted some credit for the player who lived in his community, saying, “We’re not going to let Rahm Emanuel steal everything.”

Although I personally think Gov. Pat Quinn and the Cook County Board did more to latch their names onto the Jackie Robinson kids for his own self-promotion than Emanuel ever did.

But back to the residency issue. It was known that the kids didn’t strictly live within the city neighborhoods. But the fact that there were split residency facts merely reflect our modern-day reality in society.

I remember specifically one ballplayer had a father who lived in Dolton, but a mother who lived in the Morgan Park neighborhood. Does anybody think that means the kid is supposed to never stay with his father just because he plays baseball?

THAT WOULD BE stupid.

In other cases, there were players whose families used to live in Chicago proper, but in recent years had moved to the nearby south suburbs. It appears that Little League rules permit such players to continue to play in their old home communities if they wish, rather than being forced to shift to Little League programs in their new homes.

The reality is that many of those suburban Little League programs are run by people who are interested in protecting their own little fiefdoms and aren’t exactly accepting of newcomers.

So the idea that these kids would prefer to keep playing ball in the Jackie Robinson West league – which is unique in the fact that it is composed entirely of African-American people – seems to be an obvious choice.

PERHAPS THE SOUTH suburban Little League programs ought to be giving more thought to how to make themselves more welcoming, rather than being among the forces trying (but failing) to keep the population in their home communities the same as it was four decades ago.

Reading the Chicago Sun-Times, I see that the head of the Evergreen Park program is complaining about people who are calling him an “idiot” and are saying he is a bigot.

I’m willing to give his racial attitudes a break and say what really bothers him is the fact that when a team from his Little League program played a Jackie Robinson West team this year, the end result was a 42-3 loss.

That still has to smart, something fierce!

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Restroom break ban for high schoolers?

It has been some three decades since I navigated the halls of a high school on a regular basis, yet I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read the reports in the Tinley Park-based Southtown Star newspaper that are making southwest suburban Evergreen Park High School a place worthy of national news attention.

For officials there are implementing a new policy that they say will increase the amount of time that students spend in the classroom. They’re putting restrictions on restroom breaks.

UNDER THE NEW policy, teachers are to keep track of how many times their students ask for permission to go to the restroom during class. Any student who takes more than three breaks per semester from any one class will be required to stay after school to make up the time they used to release potentially-deadly toxins from their bodies.

It’s not quite detention for using the potty. But it has the same feel.

Now I will be the first to admit that I fully believe some students are abusing the idea of restroom breaks – using them as an excuse to leave classes they find particularly dull (or teachers whom they find to be particularly obnoxious in personality).

I’m sure there are some students who would spend as much of their time as possible in the restroom – when they couldn’t be in the cafeteria (particularly since schools these days seem to be watching those lunchrooms much more closely than they did when I was a high school student).

YET THE IDEA makes me laugh a lot because I can remember back to when I was a high school student and I used to go out of my way to avoid using the restrooms at school.

I also remember that I was not alone among the student body. There were many of us who weren’t enthused about the school restrooms.

Now I’m not about to share horror stories of aging facilities that stank from decades of urine and other foul odors. I actually attended a high school that was less than a decade old when I was there. Everything about the building reeked of cleanliness and sterility.

It was a cleanliness freak’s dream.

BUT NOW WE can cue in our minds that old song by Brownsville Station. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” There were those students (probably the parents of the current restroom malcontents) who tried to spend their time in the “facilities” rather than try to learn something in class.

Which means that one of the unofficial things that a student tried to keep in mind was which of the restrooms was going to stink not of human waste, but of cigarette smoke. Which ones were likely to be filled with students who might not be too concerned about breaking rules, and might try harassment just for kicks.

Then again, they may want to harass, but might have been so stoned that they wouldn’t have been physically capable of doing too much.

With that in mind, it just became more practical to think of restroom functions as something to be avoided unless necessary.

HOW STRONG WAS this sentiment in my mind?

I recently had to go back to my old high school as a reporter-type person to cover a news event. During the event, I felt that urge that couldn’t be withheld.

So I went and found a “boy’s room” and did my business – when it suddenly occurred to me that I was in one of the restrooms that I would have tried to avoid as a student.

So some 28 years after graduation, I finally “did my business” in one of those rooms (which I must admit stunk from decades of tobacco fumes – even though the whole building now is officially a “no smoking” zone).

I AS A student would have fought to avoid the restroom, while it seems officials at Evergreen Park High School are determined to spend their academic careers in “the loo.”

Have teenagers really changed that much in three decades’ time? I doubt it. Somehow, it seems to me that school administrators have come up with an over-reaction to a problem – one that will do nothing to resolve the situation.

For I don’t see how “after school” sessions will do anything to truly make up for class time lost due to a restroom break. Is someone clocking students to see how long they were on “the potty?”

Does this mean teachers will have to stay after school to try to re-teach what was already taught? Or will students merely sit pointlessly in a quiet room after school?

WHAT A WASTE of time!

But it does show that at least one thing hasn’t changed about high school throughout the years – there are always bound to be some school administrators whose reaction to a situation will be a layer of bureaucratic nonsense.

It’s no wonder that, for me, high school was something to be endured before I could go off to college – which is where life truly became enjoyable.

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