By Neal Pollack
“Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee!”
“I need to talk to you,” Mario said.
“But I just worked out this payment plan…”
“I don’t think that,” she said, “but I don’t understand why you’d be approaching me with this now.”
“Why?” she said. “Do you think I have anything up there of value? I have nothing up there!”
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RPCAN was caught up in a difficult struggle that summer. The notoriously deteriorated Jewel on Morse Avenue had finally closed, leaving the neighborhood without a full-service grocery store. The Jewel parent corporation planned to install an Osco drugstore in its place, but Morse already had two full-service drugstores within a block of the site, including one that had been open since 1933. RPCAN began pressuring Alderman Moore to help them persuade Jewel to sell the property to another grocery company, but Moore wouldn’t. As RPCAN’s grocery-store campaign accelerated, Tobin found himself getting more and more involved. Finally, he was a member of JOE no longer. He started working for RPCAN part-time.
