Oak Park Stories

Oak Park Stories is a series of experimental, reflexive and digital ethnographies that attempts to explore a forty-year-old social experiment in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.

Three Stories are family portraits and one is an institutional portrait. The family portraits allow reader/viewers the chance to understand aspects of life in the U.S. that are too often ignored by social scientists and journalists - an economically successful intact African American family, a lesbian family living a very traditional middle class life and a WASP family who is at once very traditional and accepting of blacks and gays. The Stories are designed to be used both alone or as a series. They are experimental in that the traditional method of producing a book or a film has not been followed but instead they are interactive and nonlinear works that contain text, still photographs and video life histories. They are reflexive in that the subject of the research is the author's hometown. Rather than hide this fact, Ruby tries to make the reader/viewer aware of how his identity has influenced the study. The Stories utilize a digital technology - on a CD using Quicktime movies and html documents. They are nonlinear, that is, unlike a book or a film, there is no defined beginning, middle or end. Viewers/readers are free to begin anywhere. They can ignore anything that doesn't interest them. Links are provided to materials that will allow anyone interested to pursue a topic in more depth.

Here is a brief description of the four Oak Park Stories. The community is internationally renown for his attempts to promote ethnic diversity and integration. One story is an exploration of how this community devised a way to maintain its desired diversity. The subject of this institutional portrait is the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a non-profit organization designed to prevent resegregation by affirmatively marketing apartments in such a manner as to distribute whites and blacks throughout the community and to avoid having any apartment building contain a predominance of one ethnic group. Approximately half of all residential units are apartments. The Housing Center is part of a complex of village ordinances, other nonprofit and governmental agencies striving to keep the housing market healthy and integrated. The Housing Center is the keystone to a unique and successful social experiment.

In addition the Housing Center portrait, there are three Oak Park Stories which are family portraits designed to take a look at how this experiment works itself out in the lives of its citizens. Through these families some of Oak Park's core values are examined as well as how the transformation of the community impacts on the people who live there is revealed. Each family exemplifies different aspects of the community. The Taylor family portrait is about a solidly middle-class African American family who moved to Oak Park a few years ago because they wanted their children to attend good schools and be in a neighborhood where they could ride their bikes in the streets. In addition, they wanted them exposed to children of different ethnicities from different economic strata. They are able to realize their goals because of decades of work to make Oak Park a welcoming place. Through their lives the historical and contemporary roles of African Americans in Oak Park as well as the values of a middle-class black family are explored.

In addition to Oak Park's reputation for ethnic integration, it is highly regarded as being openly gay friendly. The next Oak Park Story concerns a lesbian family, Rebecca Levin and Sophie Kaluziak and their children Ariel and Ben. Rebecca is a long-term Oak Park resident, community activist, and instrumental in the formation of the local gay and lesbian organization. Their engagement with the schools and other aspects of the community illuminates a number of important issues concerning the integration of gay people in Oak Park - a community with a lesbian village president, a gay village trustee and a gay man on the school board. As the openly gay population ages, the character of the community changes with it. Gays and lesbians are becoming more and more middle class and suburban and less likely to live in a gay-identified neighborhood. Many are home owners with children. Increasingly these gay suburban families are indistinguishable from their heterosexual neighbors. It is this ordinariness that is often overlooked in favor of the more sensational aspects of single gay life. It is the "ordinariness" of this family that is explored and viewed as a consequence of Oak Park's reinvention of itself.

The final Oak Park Story is about Helena and some members of her family. Helena Gervais McCullough is the matriarch of a family who has lived in Oak Park for four generations. She is at once a part of the old WASP aristocracy and an active participant in the New Oak Park. Helena is in her nineties and displays all of the most traditional Oak Park values. And yet she is able to accept a bisexual son-in-law who is a retired public school teacher active in the local politically powerful gay and lesbian organization and local politics, and an African American daughter-in-law. Exploring her world provides us with a guide through this remarkable part of the community's history.

With these three stories, reader/viewers will come to understand how some middle-class Oak Parkers cope with living in the most interesting social experiment in the U.S.