The Daily Herald from Chicago, Illinois • Page 4

Page 1 CHICAGO DiiilyHeiald Monday, November 1,1999 City naturalizations jump 129 percent The number of immigrants who took the oath of citizenship here increased 129 percent in fiscal 1999, representing the second-largest year for naturalizations in Chicago. The rise was due to increases in the number of applicant interviews, fingerprinting offices and oath ceremonies, according to immigration officials. The number of naturalizations went from 17.635 in fiscal 1998 to 40,358 in fiscal 1999. It is the largest group since 51,200 immigrants were naturalized in 1996. "We are not where we want to be yet, but we are moving very aggressively in the right direction," said Brian Ferryman, district director of Chicago's Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Nationwide, the INS completed more than 1.2 million citizenship applications in fiscal 1999, up 105 percent from the previous year. Chicago increased by 107 percent the number of citizenship applications completed, below the 211 percent rise in Houston. Police defended after prisoner shot himself Detectives involved in the interrogation of murder suspect Reginald Cole, who snatched a handgun and fatally shot himself at Area 1 police headquarters Saturday, used "reasonable and prudent judgment," officials said. Cole, 38, of the 1500 block of West Sherwin Avenue, was serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery, armed violence and unlawful use of a weapon when detectives brought him in for questioning for a 1997 murder. Cole asked that his interview be moved from an interrogation room to an office for privacy from other prisoners.

After implicating himself, Cole attacked a detective with a paper spindle, took the detective's gun and fired a shot. Another detective shot at Cole, who then shot himself in the mouth but kept the gun pointed at the door until the second detective shot him in the left side. Cole's death was ruled a suicide. Area 1 Cmdr. Frank Trigg defended the decision to move the interrogation because Cole was not acting in a threatening manner.

Hines investigating Gulf War syndrome A local Veterans Administration hospital is seeking volunteers for a study of a treatment for mysterious ailments affecting Gulf War veterans. Hines in Maywood is among 30 VA centers across the country participating in the study. The study will test a theory that the Gulf War syndrome is caused by a bacterial infection. Since the war, thousands of veterans have suffered fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and problems with memory. A volunteer must have served in the Gulf between August 1990 and August 1991 and suffer at least two of these three unexplained symptoms: fatigue, muscle or joint pain, and memory and thinking problems.

The symptoms must have been present for at least six months. TO volunteer, call (708) 2028387, ext. 24509. Woman's Club deeds will not be forgotten What remains of it is a whisper of its good works for more than a century. The whisper will be heard again Tuesday at noon in a final luncheon for the Chicago Woman's Club.

After the ladies part ways, the club is history. The Chicago Woman's Club was for 123 years a weekly gathering of women who put their money and work where others only talked about it. They founded the first public kindergarten here and financed it themselves. They pushed laws for better working conditions for women in sweatshop factories and helped elect women to judgeships for the first time. The club gets credit for helping invent the first juvenile court system in the world.

The club pushed for the right to vote, and it carried enough clout to put the city on the cutting edge of the suffragette movement. The club supported arts and letters with lectures, scholarships and purchases of paintings and books. It even set up a program to feed poor kids a school lunch, which for many was their only meal of the day. The Cook County juvenile court system turned a century old July and was largely the work of women in the club though they would be the last to take that credit. The club had made reform of the way we treat kids in trouble its earliest priority.

And it succeeded here in a rough, edge-of-the-frontier town more concerned with money than signs of civilization. The juvenile justice law was shaped and pushed by Woman's Clubbers like Jane Addams, Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop. Before it, bad kids mostly boys arrested on vague "vagrancy" charges for just being on the streets in ragged thrown in jail and left to rot until a short adulthood of a criminal career could take over the rest of their lives. The idea of humane, intelligent juvenile court systems and even reformatories instead of prisons came out of crooked old Chicago, because of the ladies of the Woman's Club, and spread across theworid. In often brutal rushes to make more and take more, the city paused and listened to the ladies.

Were they do-gooders? Exactly. Who would have expected them to succeed in a place like Chicago? The Woman's Club was founded five years after the great Chicago fire by women of means who met each Wednesday to trade ideas of art and politics. Caroline Brown founded the club with "a dozen other ladies" who wanted an outlet for their energy and ideas, according to the club's last president, Helen Hightower. If they chafed at their inability to lead in a man's world, they didn't show it. They simply led until the men who ran things found the way.

They met in each other's homes or in public "parlors" in hotels that were set aside for the "fair sex" to socialize. Jane Addams was already becoming famous as the angel of the West Side whose Hull House (still standing as a historic monument in the UIC campus) was the nation's first settlement house for poor families seeking to escape the slums. Addams mixed with wealthy wives and social reformers like Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Charles Henrotin.

The women found equality in their exchange of ideas. They didn't do small things only big things in little ways. Besides buying and displaying artwork in their eventual clubhouse (built at 72 E. llth St. in 1920), they contributed money to scholarships, like the first ever at the Art Institute school.

They managed to get the first woman named to the board of education, something that seems a small feat now. They supported artists, writers and social thinkers with their weekly forums. But the club's signal glory was in pushing approval of a juvenile welfare act, including the courts, in the last year of the 19th century. It consolidated all children's cases out of the city's eleven police courts into a single tribunal to take ward politics out of the tangle. Chicago History magazine recently noted in an article on juvenile courts that the club' was the leading advocate of a system to take, kids out adult courts an idea now seeming to go in reverse hi current legal thinking.

There were 1,200 members at the club's peak, Hightower said, a limit set by club rules. The club whispered about itself and let others take glory. It's still like that, but now is in its final days. Fewer than two dozen women are expected at the farewell luncheon in the restored Louis Sullivan room at the historic Roosevelt University building at Congress and Michigan. Ironically, when the building was finished in 1889 as a hotel and theater, this room was a "ladies' parlor," set aside for women to talk and chat where they wouldn't have been accepted in the bars and tavern halls.

The room is decorated with treasures donated to the university by the club after it voted to disband in June. "We are going to distribute pur money assets through the Chicago Community Trust now to continue scholarships and such," Hightower said. "We've disbanded because we've reached the point where we can't go on." Age and infirmities have limited the actions left to the club, she said. History is a different story. The club didn't write large.

It wrote in a small, woman's precisely and to specific ends. Reforms that it helped put in place have endured. Lives given second chances by scholarships, fairer courts, even by subsidized hot lunches in there's no measuring the legacy of such things. Except that the legacy is real. No politicians are expected to attend the last luncheon Tuesday and no waxy speeches are on the agenda.

The work of the Woman's Club, once one of the most prominent such groups in the nation, becomes its own memorial. Granger writes about Chicago Monday through Thursday. New station with free bus service scores with Metra commuters Those who say transit can't work in the suburbs need look no further than Deerfield to see the other side of the argument. Metra last week dedicated a new indoor train station at 601 Lake Cook Road in Deerfield. And while the station will be a boon to commuters who had grown used to temporary mobile stations at the site, it's the 26-seat buses that travel to and from it each day that drive its use.

The buses take Metra riders from the station to seven office centers in communities including Deerfield, Northbrook and Buffalo Grove, said William J. Baltutis, executive director of the Transportation Management Association of Lake-Cook. The number of people using the shuttle service has increased from 55 to.300 since Baltutis' group spearheaded it in March 1996. Half are so-called reverse commuters who live in Chicago and work at companies including Baxter Health Care, Motorola, Walgreen Co. and Allstate; the others live in suburbs north and west along the rail line, which originates in Fox Lake.

The reason the program has grown, Baltutis said, is that the buses are free to employees who work at the office centers. The companies pay'one-third of the $350,000 annual operating cost, with Metra paying the rest. Pace provides the shuttle buses. "You'd think you were at a CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) station when you-see all these employees get off the train," Baltutis said. "The driving reason people are using the shuttle is the (traffic) congestion.

The shuttle provides a convenient connection They get door-to-door service." The Transportation Management Association hopes to expand the Chris Fusco service to other office centers in the future, said Baltutis, whose group gets funding from Lake and northern Cook County businesses that want to improve transportation for their employees. The power of one: Last week, West Chicago trucker Bob Guthman went to the driver's license examining station in his hometown to pick up a study guide for his commercial driver's license renewal test. Guthman, whose hazardous-materials certification expires on his 61st birthday Nov. 17, wanted.to be completely prepared for the exam. But the West Chicago office was out of study guides, so Guthman called a secretary of state's office in Springfield.

Guthman couldn't believe his ears when an employee told him the state had com- pletely run out of the study guides and more wouldn't be available until mid-November. Guthman's next call was to the Daily Herald. "My fingers are worn out from pushing telephone buttons," he said. "I get frustrated when people who make the rules can't produce the goods." David Druker, a spokesman for Secretary of State Jesse White, is apologizing to Guthman and other truckers. He admits the state temporarily ran out of CDL study guides in the Chicago area, but Guthman should have been able to get a guide mailed to him by calling Springfield.

As it turns out, Chicago area CDL license examining stations should be restocked with study guides by mid-week. If truckers still can't get one, the telephone number is (217) 7826901. Did you Half of all car crashes occur at night, when only a quarter of the traffic during a 24- hour period is on the road, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The statistic is timely because today marks our first work day on standard time after transitioning from daylight saving time. "The means it will be darker during peak homebound travel," highway Administrator Kenneth R.

Wykle said, "so simple precautions like turning on your headlights and wearing bright-colored clothing can help prevent crashes." Other tips include adjusting rearview mirrors to the night setting to avoid headlight glare, cleaning headlights and making sure headlights are on the low- beam setting as traffic approaches. If blinded by another driver's brights, look down and toward the right edge of the road. Also, deer and other animals are especially active at night. Be extra careful when driving through wooded areas. Chris Fusco's commuting column appears Mondays.

Call him at (847) 427-4556, e-mail him at or fax him at (847) 427-1301. Alfred Hayden Hi from Midway Moving and Storage Inc. takes the bolts out of the "Taurus" cow Sunday in front of the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago. Daily Herald Markiewicz Chicago's cows rounded up for live auction, online sale You won't see cows grazing along Michigan Avenue anymore, but for a little cash, you can re-create Chicago's summer of cows in your own back yard. The city's immensely popular Cows on Parade public art display officially came to a close Sunday, clearing the way for part two of the project: the cattle auction.

Of the 320 painted fiberglass cows that graced the city this summer, 136 will be auctioned off for charity. Sixty-five bovines will go up for bid at a live auction Nov. 9, while the remaining 71 cows will be auctioned online beginning today. Cows are expected to sell for $1,000 and up. Bids will be accepted for the Internet auction today through Nov.

9 at metromix.com. Photos of the cows and guidelines for the auction are posted on the Web site. Tickets for the Nov. 9 live auction are $25 and can be purchased at the Chicago Theater, 175 N. State or through TJcketMaster at (312) 902-1500.

Amy Carr S'iS Do Better This Semester Whether your child is an underachiever or not can best be determined by a professional experienced in the field of underachievement. However, some behaviors to look for are: Yes No 1. Grades have declined noticeably since the start of junior high. Reluctantly does homework while you stand over him, but then fails to hand it in. Is not motivated by punishments, rewards or lectures.

Tends to be noncompetitive with peers. Frequently says "yes," then does not follow through. Spends excessive time with social activities. Often lies about grades and 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. doing homework. As parents you have conflicting viewpoints as to how to discipline him. Often loses interest after initial success. Seems confident and outgoing but lacks direction.

Often misses deadlines yet appears unconcerned. Seems at a loss to explain why he does poorly. 13. Lacks self-discipline. 14.

Often does well on homework, 10. 11. 12. Yes No a a a a a 15. 16.

but poorly on important tasks. Has difficulty "getting started" on new tasks. Unable to spend constructive time alone. 17. Teachers say he's charming, but he just isn't motivated.

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