W E D N E S D A Y
JOURNAL
May 15, 2019 Vol. 39, No. 41 ONE DOLLAR @oakpark
of Oak Park and River Forest
@wednesdayjournal
I N
Wright PLUS Housewalk Page B1
M E M O R I A M
Oak Park’s fierce and feisty advocate Bobbie Raymond worked to make the village ‘all it could be’ By KEN TRAINOR Staff Writer
Inevitably with Bobbie Raymond, the stature thing comes up, so we might as well get that out of the way. She was short but seldom came up short. She was small in stature but left an outsized imprint. She was larger than life. She went by a young-sounding name and had a young-sounding voice, but no one ever looked down on her (not for long, anyway) or took her anything but seriously. And she was always, right up
till the end, Oak Park’s fiercest advocate. For a while though early on, it looked like she might end up on Broadway or in Hollywood instead. Born in 1938 to William and Rosemary Wolin, she was a hard-working child actor in Chicago, 1945-52, and then, using the stage name Roberta Alden, appeared in NBC Radio shows like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy and Cricket on the Hearth. She did commercials, trade shows and teleSee BOBBIE on page PB
Acting out
Teachers revolt over middle schools By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter
Teachers at Oak Park District 97 middle schools have reached a troubling consensus about Julian and Brooks — they’re increasingly unsafe because of the bad behavior of some students, which often goes unchecked. The teachers’ concerns come as the district grapples with the implications of SB 100 — the state law, effective since 2016, that requires school districts to exhaust all of their behavioral interventions before suspending students, among other aspects See MIDDLE SCHOOLS on page 16
Submitted photo
INVOLVED: Bobbie Raymond at a 19th Century Club fundraiser. ‘Wherever things were happening, she was there.’ More tributes on page 21.