Opinion

OUR VIEW

So long, Tap Room

Ultimately it might be as simple as not renewing the privilege of a liquor license. After more than a year trying to bring the owners and customers of the Forest Park Tap Room into compliance with local rules and expectations, after license suspensions and appeals, Mayor Rory Hoskins announced last week that the bar’s license to serve liquor had expired and was not being extended.

Sure, that preordained conclusion came after hours on hours of public hearings. But the village made a compelling case that the Brothers Law, owners of the Forest Park Tap Room and majority owners of the Berwyn Tap Room, are not responsible operators of a local bar.

We hope that Forest Park has learned a few things here. It needs to stick with its long-declared premise that the Madison Street downtown strip will be stronger with fewer straight-up bars. Keep actively reducing the number of tavern licenses.

The vetting process for potential liquor licensees needs to be improved and slowed down. During the recent public hearings, the village attorney presented evidence that the bar owners had a troubling run as owners of a bar in Berwyn. The Review was credited with unearthing details of many police calls and a license suspension at the Berwyn location. All we did was FOIA public records related to the Berwyn Tap Room. Not hard to do.

With the Butter and Brown Bistro moving soon into the space next to the late Tap Room, that corner is about to become more neighborly. Let’s make sure another bar is not allowed in the old Healy’s/Tap Room space.

More time, endless Roosevelt questions

Well that didn’t take long. A week after the weird hurryup dance that saw Forest Park’s village council kill a rushed, unexplained and ill-considered proposal from Mayor Hoskins to bid on the Armed Forces Reserve Center property on Roosevelt Road, comes the unsurprising word that the application deadline has been extended to Nov. 1.

Of course it has.

This allows three months for Hoskins and the village to craft a plan, to explain the plan to taxpayers, to do some lev-

OPINION

Sometimes the glass is three-quarters full

As the men gathered around the table in the back of the Main Café last Saturday morning for the fellowship breakfast, the unofficial agenda seemed to be listing all of the ways the world was going to hell — Ukraine, inflation, the Jan. 6 Commission hearings, apocalyptic climate change, monkeypox, too much rain in Missouri, not enough rain in Arizona. When everyone had assembled, Alice approached the big table with a smile and said, “Good morning, Gentlemen.”

Seven jaws dropped. This was the second Saturday in a row in which their normally irascible server had been pleasant, and that one cheerful greeting seemed to turn the switch on the conversation to topics like having fun with the grandchildren and the nice weather they’d been having all week and how the Senate seemed to be actually passing legislation.

When the conversation got around to the Cubs, the men even talked about how interesting it was to see the young players develop instead of lamenting how the team sucked on the field.

“Today,” thought Pastor Walter Mitty, “the glass seems to be three-quarters full.”

As he walked home along Main Street he noticed that many of the shops had their doors open to let the cooler morning air come in. Bernie Rolvaag was on the phone in his bookstore but waved as Mitty passed by.

What made the pastor of Poplar Park Community Church suspect there was something in the air, even more than Alice’s congeniality, was when he passed Sarge’s army surplus store and through the open door he heard a recording of Louis Armstrong singing, “What a Wonderful World.”

When he got home, he sat down at his desk to open the pile of mail that had accumulated during the last few days. After throwing five fundraising letters from charities into the recycling basket, he came to an envelope from his sister-in-law up in Manitowoc. She wrote,

Dear Walt,

Just wanted you to know that I and the boys often mention how much you mean to us. Especially for that year when Herman was dying and you were there for us.

Love you,

Susan

At the bottom of the pile was last Wednesday’s issue of the Poplar Park Times with a picture of Isabella Garcia on the front page and the headline, “Ten-yearold helps homeless camp mates.” The article described how, when she learned there were homeless kids right in her own summer camp, the fourth-grader got online, asking her friends and neighbors to donate what she called “cool clothes for kids.” In the weekly calendar, he saw that a choir called Sounds Good was giving a concert in a local church. What grabbed his attention was that they did not hold auditions. Anyone over 55 could join no matter how bad your adult children told you your singing was. Through his open window he heard a cardinal chirping away. “Today,” thought Pastor Walt, “even if

TOM it lasts only 24 hours, today the glass is three-fourths full here in Poplar Park.” HOLMES Being a single guy with no spouse to share his emotional ups and downs, he dialed up his friend and neighbor Michael Rosenthal. “This is the day the Lord hath made! Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” Mitty exclaimed before Michael could even say hello. “What?!” “Psalm 118, Michael.” “I know that, Walt, but what put this usually melancholy guy from Wisconsin in such a good mood?” Pastor Mitty proceeded to detail to his friend how today, at least, he was able see all of the good and even beautiful that existed in their little suburb of Chicago. “Can you believe it, Michael? Sarge had the door of his store open, and I heard Louis Armstrong singing ‘What A Wonderful World.’” “Did you also smell reefer smoke coming out the door along with the music?” “No Michael, but on top of that Alice at the Main was genuinely pleasant.” After their conversation ended, Pastor Walt got to thinking. “Was today better than other days, or was I just more open to the good around me that’s been there all the time?” Then his mind segued somehow to the Eisenhower Expressway, how in the spring the litter alongside the road was ugly and unsightly but, like magic, the grass grew tall and the bushes leafed out hiding the crap with green. Was everybody doing a better job of faking it today, or were his eyes more open to beauty or was it a random case of grace sometimes just happening? Every once in a while before going to bed, he liked to turn off the lights, light a candle and just sit for 20 minutes in the soft light. He didn’t know for sure if God had anything to do with the gift of a good day, but after blowing out the candle, he said “thank you” anyway.

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Yikes! Too much enthusiasm!

This just in! We’re using too many exclamation points! Seems to be a symptom of modern times. Probably because electronic communication can be so boring, we feel the need to spice it up. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald likened exclamation marks to laughing at your own joke. And the late bestselling author Elmore Leonard said we’re only allowed to use 2-3 per 100,000 words. Yikes!

I was allowed to use that last one because exclamation points are intended for interjections like … Ouch! They can also be used for exclamatory sentences like: It’s a boy! However, when we overuse them, it can sound like we’re yelling all the time. They lose their emphasis when everything is emphasized. The Chicago Manual of Style says they “should be used sparingly to be effective.” Now we’re suffering from exclamation mark inflation, along with every other kind of inflation.

My teachers certainly discouraged me from using exclamation marks. It smacked of false pride and we might get smacked for puffing up our sentences. But when I was teaching, I was guilty of exclamation excess. I tried to come up with a oneword shout for every essay — Wonderful! Moving! Beautiful! I stayed away from

“Amazing!” because my foreign students made fun of Americans for overusing it. If the essay was only so-so, I’d write “Entertaining!” If you don’t believe me about the overuse of exclamation points, try scrolling through your texts. If they are anything like mine, they contain mulJOHN tiple exclamation points from the sender and the receiver. RICE I never use more than one at a time but some people get carried away. The exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm to a symbol for friendliness. It’s become the “selfie” of grammar. Now we’re seeing a huge increase in exclamation marks due to our shorthand forms of communication — emails and texts. It’s estimated that 50% of our emails are misunderstood, so maybe that’s why we add the emphasis. “Unpaid Invoice!” Hopefully the client gets that. Exclamation points are not only a contemporary phenomenon, they were invented relatively recently. They first surfaced in the 1400s. It’s believed they were derived from the Latin word “lo” which meant joy. At some point, the “l” appeared above the “o” and morphed into our favorite mark. Exclamation points weren’t even added to typewriters until the ’70s. They immediately took up the primary position above the 1. Today we use strings of them to spruce up our emails. This is especially true of women, who use exclamation marks at four times the rate of men.

In fact, women are far more likely to use fun punctuation, like smiley faces, ha ha’s and exclamation points. There is a downside to this because they run the risk of not being taken seriously. Some believe women undermine their authority when they get too cutesy. They think businesswomen should only use their emoticons and exclamation points in personal emails.

Who can forget the Seinfeld episode when Elaine sprinkled them too liberally through an advertising catalogue? She was forced to do this because her thenboyfriend failed to use one when he wrote a note about Elaine’s friend having a baby. Punctuation became grounds for termination of their relationship.

So in the future, I’m going to limit my exclamation marks, especially in my emails. I just checked some that I’ve sent and found subject lines like Congratulations! Finished! a nd Hilarious! I’m still limiting myself to one per sentence but, according to a grammar guide, “If you must use more than one exclamation point, always use three!!!”

ROOSEVELT

Questions to answer

from page 13

el of due diligence, particularly related to possible environmental remediation of the 6-acre site the mayor covets.

Here are a few questions to start with: § Why is the best use of this wellplaced, large-by-local-standards commercial property as a municipal center? This town needs tax revenue. The plan for Roosevelt has been for commercial growth, not a public works center. § If it is to become a municipal complex, what are the financial and community upsides of being able to sell off the current village hall/ police department/fire house? We need specifics. § Have talks included inviting the

D91 public schools to relocate? That could make its substandard headquarters on Desplaines Avenue available for resale. § With all the talk about intergovernmental collaboration, has

Forest Park talked to Maywood and

River Forest about sharing a public works facility? Duplication costs money and ties up land. § Just what is the entry price in this bizarre military land swap concept that would require Forest Park to pay for infrastructure work at

Fort Sheridan in order to be gifted the Forest Park site? Give us that number now. § Why not multi family development, retail or commercial development on this site? § Who has talked to the United States

Postal Service about just how long they will keep the huge mail sorting facility just south of the

Reserve Center? What is the best use for that combined parcel? § How will any of this be paid for?