The people who know about these things will tell you that in a random group of 23 people, there is about a 50% chance at least two in the group will have the same birthday.
Some say it is merely a coincidence and is not surprising. They shrug and will tell you something like this is bound to happen in any large crows of numberless people.
When I was in college (M-I-Z Z-O-U) I needed to take a course in statistics and was told that when you have enough people, anything considered strange is likely to happen.
How many of us have been caught thinking about someone and, within a day or so, we hear something about that person? What a coincidence, we think. How strange we reflect. How eerie, we wonder.
So, on the cusp of Park Forest’s 75th birthday coming up less than a month from now, this is one person’s story of the randomness of life.
In March 1963, our young family drove some 1,000 miles from Albuquerque to Chicago, on the way from one newspaper job to another one in Hammond, Indiana. We arrived on a Saturday and for a couple of days stayed in the Sandburg Village apartment of Penny’s mother.
Since I was hired as a sports writer, I was interested in the televised game on Channel 11 of the Indiana state basketball tournament. So this is how to play the game, I thought.
At that time, Madame’s mother, Mignon, was working in real estate and, like every other person in the business, did not know much about south suburban housing. She was told to check out the still young community of Park Forest and was able to secure a two-bedroom unit for us on Hemlock Street.
We moved in, settled down and quickly became part of the weave of community life.
We now fast forward to a chance meeting of Mignon and Tom McDade, who, as we later learned, knew a lot about Park Forest as he once was the sales agent for rental units in the community and a confidant of Philip Klutznick, the lead developer of the village.
A series of small coincidences soon began to take place.
When Klutznick developed Water Tower Place and moved from the village to a high-rise apartment on one of the top floors of the Michigan Avenue building, Tom came with him, working as an adviser and troubleshooter for his boss.
Tom and Mignon were married and settled down in a comfy apartment on Lake Shore Drive overlooking the lake, the rooftop of which was a prime spot to watch the Air and Water Show. Yet Tom still cared about the village he helped create and decided to move back to Park Forest when he retired. He first bought a house on Westwood Avenue and later moved to Lakewood Boulevard to a house owned by former Park Forest President (as it was called back then) Mayer Singerman.
The same house is now the home of our son and his wife.
By that time, we were ensconced on our “shack on Shabbona” as we worked for some 30 years for the Chicago Tribune
After retiring from the daily grind, the village became my stomping ground working as the village’s public relations person for some nine years, and for a brief time was president of the Park Forest Historical Society and the music archivist for the public library during the years the Friends of the Public Library held an annual sale of records and books donated by the public.
It was at the latter job that I opened a box of old 78 rpm, 10-inch records, each of which was wrapped around the now yellowed and crinkly pages of the Chicago Sun-Times of March 1963. There, on one of the pages, was the story of the basketball game I watched that night in 1963 in Mignon’s apartment.
Those who are smarter than smart may tell you that in a large enough population something like this is merely a random event. We roll the dice of life and sooner or later we get a surprising number.
We’ve been here for more than 60 years. We’re not going anywhere.
Happy (almost) anniversary, Park Forest.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
