By Michael Miner
Last week Coffey struck gold mining the discontent in Schiller’s ward. He began his August 12 column: “State law prohibits convicted felony sex offenders from loitering within 500 feet of a school or school property. But that law is consistently ignored and unenforced in the case of two schools in the Uptown neighborhood of Ald. Helen Shiller’s 46th Ward, which is home to an uncommonly high proportion of paroled sex offenders…”
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Coffey went on, “For a start, Watson has ordered Truman president Phoebe Helm to evict two organizations affiliated with Shiller’s political machine that have been occupying space at the college with no lease and no board approval.”
Watson admires Coffey. He says Coffey’s been “right on target” writing about Truman, and he praises him for figuring out “what everybody’s missing,” which is that “just as we have raised our academic standards, we have raised our capital standards and safety standards and security standards.”
The center asked for a couple more months to relocate when the lease expired, but last week it moved to a second-floor space on Broadway. Odell would have told Coffey all this if he’d asked. “Our voice mail has been functioning, and there was absolutely no call from Ray Coffey.”
I called Coffey and asked him why he didn’t call Shiller. “What does she have to do with Truman College?” he replied. “Why would I talk to her?”
Montoni’s, of course, is Funky’s joint. Batiuk converged his two strips this month so both chronicled the same game. Leading lights from each strip showed up in the other. “Hey, I just thought of something,” Batiuk told me. “I had some Funky Winkerbean characters back in the Sun-Times. I had Lisa back in the Sun-Times.”
