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Suburban Subversives: Activism in the Suburbs of Chicago

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I'm in DuPage County.  And if you are familiar with Illinois, DuPage County is probably not what comes to mind when you think about progressive activism.

There's a story my father tells.  It might be apocryphal, but he insists it's true.  He moved to DuPage county from Youngstown, Ohio, in 1958.  Originally from a steel town just west of Pittsburgh, he'd gotten a bunch of degrees (thanks to the GI Bill), including one in optometry and a masters in electrical engineering.  Having decided practicing optometry was not how he wanted to spend his days, he got a job with Westinghouse, then located in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago.  At the same time, he'd acquired a wife, a recently widowed woman with two young children, also from the same small town outside of Pittsburgh.  She wanted a yard and was intimidated by city driving and city life, so they found a place 18 miles west of Chicago that had, not too many years before, been a pig farm.  It was now subdivided and ready for building - single family homes, of course.  None of the suburbs were allowing apartment buildings to be constructed.  And we all know why.


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