Ten years ago Phil Kadner gave a young colleague a piece of advice. Linda Lutton, then a reporter for the Daily Southtown, had the goods on a suburban school official who’d been stealing thousands of dollars from his district. Lutton was feeling triumphant—maybe even a little too excited for her own good. Kadner, the Southtown’s veteran news columnist, set her straight.
A shelter for battered women in Palos Hills wanted to expand, but the neighbors wouldn’t have it. “People feared the husbands would come looking for their wives and endanger the community,” Kadner remembers. Besides, he said, the feeling was the battered women must have been asking for it. Kadner wrote some columns championing the shelter and the women in it. “As a result, Tinley Park stepped up,” he remembers. A lot of money was raised, and land for a bigger, better shelter was rented for a dollar.
Because her story was so bizarre, it took Kadner about as long to get anyone in law enforcement to take Green seriously as it had taken Green to get him to. But eventually three park officials went to prison. Earlier this year one of the three, former park board president Bobby Jackson, was hired by Blue Island to run its rec center. “I believe in second chances,” said the mayor of Blue Island. If it did nothing else, this gallant act of redemption gave Kadner an opportunity to write a new column retelling the tale of the Dixmoor park district.
