Answer Book 2018
Your guide to Oak Park and River Forest
W E D N E S D A Y
JOURNAL
Answer Book 2018
Special Directory inside
W E D N E S D A Y
JOURNAL of Oak Park and River Forest
July 11, 2018 Vol. 38, No. 51 ONE DOLLAR
@oakpark @wednesdayjournal
Local hospital launches new opioid treatment Opioid-addicted mothers now remain with infants at West Suburban Medical Center By MICHAEL ROMAIN
Photo courtesy of Debby Preiser
Editor
Across the country and in Illinois, in particular, the number of newborn babies who experience withdrawal from drugs used by their expectant mothers, particularly opioids, is skyrocketing. A recent analysis of Illinois Department of Public Health data by Crain’s Chicago Business showed that in 2016 “nearly 3 of every 1,000 babies born in Illinois went through withdrawal, known as neonatal abstinence syndrome.” And that rate has “increased 53 percent over six years.” Typically, when babies show signs of withdrawal, they’re immediately separated from their mothers and given methadone or morphine to help gradually wean them off of the drugs inside of their systems. See OPIOID on page 14
MOVING DAY: Ginie Cassin presided over many a Memorial Day ceremony in Scoville Park. The longtime village clerk and Hemingway board chair leaves Sunday for a new life with family in Minnesota.
Can-do Cassin bids Oak Park adieu
She’s moving north after 9 very active decades By KEN TRAINOR Staff Writer
It’s not easy saying goodbye to someone like Virginia Cassin. Great people produce great towns. Or is it great towns produce great people? Maybe it works both ways. Special towns make it possible for people
with great potential to fulfill it. That has certainly been true in Ginie Cassin’s case. Her family moved to Oak Park from Beloit, Wisconsin in the 1920s when she was 3. Except for three years in Dallas, Texas where her father was transferred, and three years at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin (psychology major, yearround during WWII), Ginie has been an Oak Park resident. That ends this Sunday when she and her daughter, Sheila, who formerly headed
Oak Park’s Farmers Market and whom Ginie describes as “more like me than me,” drive up to her new home in Brainard, Minnesota. It isn’t easy for her to say goodbye either, even at the age of 94. But we gave it a shot, sitting in her kitchen on Grove Avenue for a couple of hours a few weeks ago, talking about neighbors, past and present, whose lives intersected theirs since 1952 when she and her husSee CASSIN on page 12