Cook County Forest Preserves - Our Greatest Natural Asset for Education, Pleasure and Recreation

 

To acquire … and hold lands … containing one or more natural forests or lands connecting such forests or parts thereof, for the purpose of protecting and preserving the flora, fauna and scenic beauties within such district, and to restore, restock, protect, and preserve the natural forests and said lands together with their flora and fauna, as nearly as may be, in their natural state and condition, for the purpose of the education, pleasure, and recreation of the public.  Cook County Commissioners 1905

1904 had been a tough year for Chicagoans, especially south siders -  Chicago lost the Summer Olympics to St. Louis and the Streetcar and Stockyard Strikes. put many people in financial, physical and even mortal jeopardy - scabs opened fire from rail cars used by the packers to safely transport them to and from the yards and killed several strikers.

Orchestra Hall was completed largely through the subscriptions of the Swift, Armour.  Schwarzschild & Sulzberger packinghouse barons. Very few stockyard workers attended the symphony, I would hazard a guess.

What did working people do and where did they go for relaxation?  What was available to them?  Saloons.  Church.  Union Halls.

The Great Conservationist was in the White House. President Teddy had designated vast tracks of land for the edification, enjoyment and education of the American people.

It seems that in 1905, a few like-minded public servants did the same.

Some brilliant people staked out  68,000 acres of field, wood and water around and within the City of Chicago and gave us the Cook County Forest Preserve District.

This soul tonic of a resource is one of the wonders of living where we do - one wonders if a contemporary public official has the heart and brains to match the vision of the 1905 County Commissioners.

Following the lead of Dr. John Rauch's  Public Parks, City of Chicago (Chicago, 1869), the great sanitarian who fought Yellow Fever and cholera here and beyond Chicago,  some clear headed people put the Forest Preserve into being just after the 1904 strikes and the loss of Olympics.

The 1905 document calling for the creation of a Forest Preserve District was weakly written and it was not until 1911 that the dream came to life.

From that time, the common man, as well as the swell, had his own 'green retreats.' Dan Ryan Woods, Maple Lake, Willow Slough, Joe Louis Golf Course, Brookfield Zoo, Arie Crown Botanic Gardens, Busse Woods, Desplaines River Trail and Camp Dan Beard became places where the grey canyon of La Salle Street, or the red dust of Hegewisch might be forgotten for  a couple of restorative hours.

• Chicago kids could take nature hikes, toboggan, sled, swim, play football, softball and jog.
• Old Timers could take their Kerry Blue, or mixed mutt breed out for a chase of a tennis ball.
• Lovers could neck.
• Families could barbecue, picnic, camp and relax.
• Children at the Nature Stations like Little Red Schoolhouse could learn about the flora and fauna of Cook County
• Teens learned to 'drink responsibly

For one hundred and eleven years, the working stiff and the well-heeled have been afforded a pastoral paradise.

Quality people put this into being.  Let's pray that quality people will preserve the Cook County Forest Preserve District.

All photos of Dan Ryan Woods

The People Who Get into Public Service - John Daley Showed the Way and So Did Forrest Claypool!

Conclusion: We can all whine about Stroger and the board and taxes until our skin is wrinkled and we're ready for diapers and the old folks home.

If you don't like the direction of your government, run for office and change it. K. McQueary

Kristen McQueary in today's (click my post title) Southtown Star gives a blunt summary to all the beefing about our political Straw-Persons in public life, be it Blago, Burris, or Todd Stoger.

Doing something for other people, whether you are a nurse, cop, firefighter, teacher, priest, rabbi, soldier, or government official puts a target on your back. Hell, you get the same troubles in the private sector, but public service folks get the infamy of Media second-guessers and stooges with barrels of ink.

There truly is no good deed that goes unpunished. However, the only option is to turn-up the music, drink more, sedate yourself, golf, play X-Box and expect a paycheck.

In public life the majority works hard. In public life cheats, bullies, clowns, thieves, sexual predators, and morons blend in because they too are the public.

Policy often dictates that we suffer the useless gladly even when they are stealing, preying on people, screwing up the works, or just collecting a paycheck. They are the reason for Political Action Committees. The stronger the policy the more cover for the dopes.

Getting the job done requires more work these days because of false tickling Policy.

He/She/It are a mandated quota numbers; cousins need work too; the odd clouted prince or princess; and the all too human 'What are going to do? Sure they can not read a spreadsheet or a blueprint or draft a lesson plan but they are dues paying members. We must follow policy and policy requires seven written notices and severance package.'

To stick your neck out and seek the vote to genuinely make things happen takes a special click in the heart.

John Daley sparked this challenge by confronting Todd Stroger! The members of the County Board ( politically ambitious and also drifters) challenged poor Todd to do something. That is the glory of our Republic. People elected by us are doing exactly what we bid them to do.

I can criticize Forrest Claypool but I must admire his courage to take his fight into the public arena. God Bless Him!

Kris McQueary gave us a nice sound byte. Teddy Roosevelt draws blood:

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

Somali Pirates - Be Barry, Barry Quiet! At Wast!

President Obama is quickly revealing the nature of his character in his First 100 Days - dependant on a Teleprompter, pampered by the Media who worked very hard for his election, distracted by a question from a reporter concerning an act of piracy against America -“Guys, we’re talking about housing right now!"

President Obama is not Thomas Jefferson. He is not Teddy Roosevelt. Is he Calvin 'Silent Cal' Coolidge - no, I think not. President Obama bowed to King Abdullah; he might be L'il Bow Wow. President Obama is Vewy, Vewy Quiet ( make that Barry, Barry Quiet!) on the Somali Pirates and deferred action on North Korean bullies to the United Nations.

President Obama may be Elmer Fudd.

President Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt. The young President Roosevelt, a real Rock Star Cowboy, Police Chief, Medal of Honor hero and Vice President, was outraged that a Greek American businessman had been kidnapped by a Barbary Pirate.


Liz Sidoti presents President Obama's loud silence in Real Clear Politics:

The new commander in chief has been kept abreast of negotiations over the captain's release, but advisers say Obama has delegated the heavy lifting to high-level administration officials and his military commanders.

The president himself has yet to speak publicly about the incident near the Horn of Africa. He brushed off a reporter's question Thursday.

Instead he has let his top surrogates do the talking, although their comments have been brief, perhaps mindful that their words could influence the sensitive negotiations with the hostage-taking pirates.

Click my post title for Liz Sidoti's disturbingly quiet account of President Obama's silence on the capture of the first American Flag Vessel seized by pirates since 1804.

In 1904, Barbary pirate Rasuli kidnapped a Greek American business man in Morroco. Here is how President Teddy Rooselvelt responded.

Ion Perdicaris. He was a rich businessman who somehow managed to get himself kidnapped by a Berber bandit, Rasuli, in Tangier. Rasuli demanded a ransom for Perdicaris’s life. All of this was taking place just prior to the 1904 political party Presidential nomination conventions. Roosevelt was a candidate for the Republican Party nomination to run for President ‘in my own right’. You will recall that he had become President on the death of President McKinley. So this would be the first time that he would be a candidate for that office.

When he heard about the kidnapping the President sent the U.S. fleet to Tangier with instructions concerning the Perdicaris kidnapping and ransom demands. His instructions were in these words: ‘Perdicaris alive, or Rasuli dead!’

Those words were related to the Republican convention delegates. They went wild with enthusiasm for their bold President and candidate! Of course, Roosevelt was nominated for another term of office with overwhelming support from his party convention. On top of that Perdicaris was soon released and returned to the U.S. The daring President had again proven his skills and his bravery. Ironically, when Perdicaris arrived back in the U.S. he was exposed as not even being an American citizen! It didn’t matter by that time, the country was wild for Teddy Roosevelt and he easily won a full four-year term of office.

President Theodore Roosevelt brought excitement, enthusiasm, adventure, daring, swagger and great leadership to his country. Unfortunately, he also brought a chauvinistic, narrow-minded view of his nation's and his own personal interests.

http://www.users.bigpond.com/billmastermind/moments92.htm

President Teddy brought Something - Honor! Pwesident Obama?


"Perdicaris alive or Rasuli dead!" was the slogan when Theodore Roosevelt went after the Barbary bandit and won Perdicaris's freedom and prestige for our Nation.

Eric 'A Nation of Cowards' Holder is talking.

MSNBC and the Media propaganda Ministry is Talking.

The whole world is talking.

President Obama is distractedly quiet. Barry, Barry Quiet.

Happy Fourth of July - American Courage

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt

Courage is that rare moment of unity between conscience, fear, and action, when something deep within us strikes the flint of love, of honor, of duty, to make the spark that fires our resolve. Courage is the highest quality of life attainable by human beings. It's the moment -- however brief or singular -- when we are our complete, best self, when we know with an almost metaphysical certainty that we are right.One thing we can claim with complete confidence is that fear is indispensable to courage, that it must always be present for courage to exist. You must be afraid to have courage. Suffering is not, by itself, courage; choosing to suffer what we fear is. And yet, too great a distinction is made between moral courage and physical courage. They are in many instances the same. For either to be authentic, it must encounter fear and prove itself superior to that fear. By fear, I mean the kind that entails serious harm to ourselves, physical or otherwise, the kind that wars with our need to take action but which we overcome because we value something or someone more than our own well-being. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.In the past, I've been able to overcome my own fears because of an acute sense of an even greater fear -- that of feeling remorse. You can live with pain. You can live with embarrassment. Remorse is an awful companion. And whatever the unwelcome consequences of courage, they are unlikely to be worse than the discovery that you are less than you pretend to be. I can recall all too well those times I've avoided the risk of injury or disappointment by overruling the demands of my conscience.

John McCain


"You can live with pain. You can live with embarrassment. Remorse is an awful companion." John McCain

John McCain: Teddy Roosevelt/McCain v. Imperialism/Marxism in Venezuela

I had several great history teachers ( Tom Fanning and Fr. John Gavin O.S.A. in high school and Fr. Ronan, S.J and Dr. Larry McCaffery at Loyola University. Of all the American Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt was mu favorite. The Big Stick Policy ( adapted from a West African aphorism and applied to American Foreign Policy) gave rise to the Roosevelt Corollary to The Monroe Doctrine: America would intervene anywhere in the Western Hemisphere to insure protection of American interests. Lefties like to call this Imperialism or, if they feel generous, Paternalism.

Dismissing with a wave of my two-by-four any added Ward Churchillian litanies of American bully atrocities, let's just agree that America played played fair in its own backyard.

In 1902, the Leader of Venezuela was a tin-pot cattle rustler with a private army by the name of Cipriano Castro - a real piece of work. When not looting his country six ways to Sunday, he was borrowing oodles of boodle from bankers in Great Britain, Germany and Italy. Like most deadbeats the foreign powers sent the fleets to make Cipriano buck up.

Kaiser Bill's Fleet in a display of uproarious German humor bombarded a few harbors.

Teddy dispatched Admiral Dewey and the Great White Fleet out of Caribbean and tipped off Kaiser Bill that the guy who sent Spain's Navy to the bottom of Briny deep was more than temperamentally inclined to toss some ordinance over the bow of Kriegsmarine- Carib. Theme Squareheads were along way from a friendly coal station and the Panama Canal was Teddy's Pet Project.

The Germans, The Brits, the Italians and later the Dutch were served up the payoff by The Hague.

Teddy controlled Imperialism and walked it out of the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere - Kaiser Bill did not learn and his Zimmerman Note helped bring America into WWI and himself into Dutch retirement.

Teddy Roosevelt had only to contend with foreign Imperial powers. Back then, the losing Party were loyal opposition. They had Teddy's back. Not so today.

Today, the opposition talks about a President with whom they disagree and violently disrespect, like an obnoxious drunk talks about the woman he married like she was a pathetic and miserable as himself. Suckers beef. The loudmouth does little to make a happy home for his kids and the poor girl who married him, for better or worse, but likes the sound of his own voice.

America ( which includes our loudmouth opinion Alkies)has to contend with Marxists in power in South America and Cuba and their fan club comprised of elite American Progressives - who happen to control Moveon.org, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, MSNBC, the DNC and Senator Barack Obama.

I read an interesting take on the sharp differences between Obama and McCain by a young guy from Georgia named Jeff O'Bryant. Here's what Jeff writes:

Fidel Castro recently praised Obama for his “great intelligence,” “debating skills” and “work ethic” and wrote that Obama is “the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency.” So Obama is the favorite choice of Castro, a Communist dictator that has been responsible for thousands of human rights abuses.

Castro realizes he has nothing to fear from Obama.

Hugo Chavez didn’t exactly endorse Obama when he recently claimed that Venezuela’s relations with Washington would worsen if McCain were elected. “Sometimes one says, ‘worse than Bush is impossible,’ but we don’t know,” Chavez said, according to Reuters. “McCain also seems to be a man of war.” Still, even lacking an outright statement of support, Chavez, the authoritarian communist who has trampled basic rights, severely weakened both Venezuela’s economy and democracy, and helped to destabilize global oil prices, would rather see Obama than McCain in the White House.

Chavez realizes he has nothing to fear from Obama.

Obviously, we do not want the whole world to fear us. But the fate of Saddam as an example of the good U.S. power can do in the world is not lost on those of a like kind, an example Obama clearly isn’t prepared and indeed has no inclination to make of others. He has offered to talk with no preconditions. Like Neville Chamberlain meeting with Hitler, Obama has no idea what he is doing.

I fully agree Jeff; Senator Obama and Neville are both snappy dressers and given to chatting up bounders. I believe that John McCain would take a busted beer bottle to Hugo - Que Hombre!


Way back last Spring the Tinhorn Later-day Cipriano Castro, Hugo Chavez, who is bankrupting his country in way that would make the loutish Castro envious, stated his fear and hatred of John McCain.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and fierce U.S. critic, warned on Tuesday that relations with Washington could worsen if Republican candidate John McCain wins this year's presidential election.

Chavez said he hopes the United States and Venezuela can work better together when his ideological foe, U.S. President George W. Bush, leaves the White House next year, but he said McCain seemed "warlike."

"Sometimes one says, 'worse than Bush is impossible,' but we don't know," Chavez told foreign correspondents. "McCain also seems to be a man of war."

Chavez -- who has called Bush "the devil", "a donkey" and 'Mr Danger" -- accuses the United States of having imperial designs in Latin America and says the White House has plotted his overthrow.

McCain calls Chavez a dictator who wants to emulate retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Although Venezuela remains a key supplier of oil to the United States, relations have steadily deteriorated since Bush took office in 2001.

Chavez is an outspoken critic of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has accused Washington of stirring unrest in Tibet to destabilize China.

Obama would sit down for coffee with Caudillo Chavez. John McCain would let Chavez and any other tyrant - in the Americas, Asia or the Middle East - learn American History - The Roosevelt Corollary and the McCain Principles: Straight Talk and Matching Methods for Good Folks and the Occasional Louses.

Thanks Mr. Fanning, Fr. Gavin, Fr. Ronan, and Dr.McCaffrey

Click my post title for Jeff O'Bryant's fine essay.

John McCain: One of Us!

For months, I have been posting about John McCain in his bid to become Our President. I identify John McCain with two Great American Presidents, Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. Like Jackson, McCain is welded to personal Honor and devotion to Country.

My Illinois Blogging Pal John Rubery the Marathon Pundit has a coda

"One man with courage makes a majority." President Andrew Jackson

That about sums up John McCain, but there is more. Teddy Roosevelt who more than any one person made the 20th Century, truly the America Century once chided an Irish Jesse Jackson-type:

"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. ... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

My family came from County Kerry and they all consider themselves to be Americans.

Family, Country and Honor = John McCain.

Click on my post title for a Washington Post article on John McCain and the American family/