Legacies Part I

Last Sunday, I got hit with enough material for at least six blogs. 

I got a call from a friend of mine to go to Norah Erickson's house to see if there were things that should be saved for the various Hyde Park archives in the Regenstein. I was looking particularly for the Garden Fair items, since that's how I knew her. The others were looking for items for the Hyde Park Historical Society archives. In her honor as one of the founders, here's the Garden Fair from 30 years ago (when it and the Hyde Park Shopping Center looked quite different). I like to think of this as her legacy instead of what we found.

The house was in chaos after a series of public estate sales. The public had been through like a tornado of locusts. Old photos, thousands of slides, books, Life magazines, in stacks--the geological strata of a lifetime of saving too many things in too little space, all overturned and strewn about.

She'd used a walker for years. I was suspicious that it had been at least that long since she'd been up or down her stairs. Among the debris I found posters from the early campaigns of Leon Despres, an ad for the public bonds that financed Harper Court where she and her husband had a store, Art Directions, for 20 years, and hand printed posters from their campaign to save the trees of Burnham Park from the chainsaws, during which famously Bill Erickson was arrested for civil disobedience. Yes, people even chained themselves to the trees. It's hard to imagine that in Hyde Park now.

There's a plan for developing Spruce Park that Bill had sketched out as they fought to create green space in the city during urban renewal. I found posters for the Garden Walks that she had organized as a founding member of the Garden Fair. The Garden Fair itself was an effort to bring beauty to the urban landscape by getting everyone to plant their patch of ground. It's a legacy that should not be lost. But the smell of decaying paper and damp basement left us sneezing. All of us in the house had the same reaction. We were all going to go home and throw something out, anything, to stave off  the chaos.