Myrtle Martin was single and moved into an apartment in Park Forest in October 1964.
The North Carolina native has never left the town.
Martin said she started out social working in Kankakee and having her fun in Chicago back then. Now, she is two months shy of 90 and has seen it all in the village.
“I’ve lived there single, married, divorced and I felt like I moved into adulthood in Park Forest,” Martin said. “My kids were born there, and I don’t think I could have done as well with my kids as a single parent if I didn’t live in Park Forest.”
Martin is one of several people featured in the documentary “Revisiting Utopia,” which zeroes in on life in the Park Forest community from 1972 to 1986.
That was a time in which social engineering efforts by village officials began to fall into place and built a racial-harmony environment that caught the attention of the nation. It even received its own exhibit in the National Museum of American History section of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
Phil Rockrohr, a Chicago native who is a teacher, editor, writer and was a performer in the rock group Phil Rockrohr and the Lifters, spent six years cobbling the 92-minute documentary together.
It was released and shown in Park Forest in January and in Chicago in April. It was shown Saturday at the Gwendolyn Brooks Library on the campus of Chicago State University and more than 40 people showed up to watch the film and listen to a panel discussion with Rockrohr and five others.
Martin and Park Forest natives Marla Dillard, Don DeMarco and Greg Davis took part in the session. They were joined by Professor Will Cooley of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who authored the academic research paper “We Can’t Afford to Be Democratic: Liberals, Integrationists and the Post-War Suburb of Park Forest.”
Trying to turn Park Forest into “Utopia” started in 1959 with village founder Philip Klutznick but it took a while for it to fully kick in. Dillard remembers growing in the 1960s and she was called some racially insensitive names — the mildest being called “chocolate paint” by a Caucasian neighbor.
“Well, I said ‘you’re vanilla paint,’’’ she said.
Dillard said she was raised to be a confident woman and didn’t take the insults to heart.
“It wasn’t fear, it was disappointment,” she said. “It wasn’t quite anger, but it was very uncomfortable. Extremely uncomfortable.”
But in the early 1970s, things began to change and the various races lived side by side in a time when segregation was in vogue.
“We kind of laid the groundwork,” Dillard said. “We took the hits, if you will. I would definitely say that 1972 or 1973 was the switch. It was the turning point.”
Martin pointed out that it was also a time when Park Forest-Chicago Heights Elementary District 163 schools were integrated.
About 70 people were interviewed for the film, including former NBA player Craig Hodges plus Hiro Yamamoto and Kim Thayil, who are members of the rock group Soundgarden. They all grew up in the community.
For the most part, interviewees had glowing remarks about growing up during what Rockrohr calls the “sweet spot” between 1972-86.
Many in the documentary said it was a time when whites, Blacks and other groups grew up socializing and playing sports with each other.
Some described it as living in a bubble and when they left Park Forest for college or other reasons, they saw racial tension they didn’t know existed.
The sweet spot started to disappear in the late 1980s.
“In 1986, we were kind of like the last year where we were one big happy family,” Davis said.
He said he graduated from Rich East in 1986 stayed in the community until 1993. He said he noticed things change with the class of 1987.
“Kids — whites and blacks — walked together to school and after school,” he said. “But starting right around 1987, I started seeing the white kids on one side of the street and the Black kids on the other side of the street. There was a very big change.
“There always has to be a ‘last’ of something and the ‘last’ of that was ’86.”
Some blame white flight and some blame the fact that people could move to bigger houses than Park Forest offered as a reason for the end of that era.
“I know at least 10 people who wanted to move to a bigger house,” Rockrohr said. “Because they just weren’t there in Park Forest.”
It may not be Utopia anymore, but Martin still loves the community.
“I think Park Forest is still a good place to live,” she said. “We know all about the changes. But one thing it still has that it had from the beginning is volunteerism.
“We still have cultural activities. A lot of good things that started in Park Forest are still going on.”
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
