D-Day Deux
Plummer was perplexed. Shiller belongs to the human rights committee, whose chairman, Alderman Lorraine Dixon, he’d been briefing. Through that channel alone, not to mention all the others, he’d have expected her to hear about the invasion. “Everybody seems to have known about it, so it’s hard to believe she didn’t,” he said this week.
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Anyway, Plummer apologized and now they’re meeting. “She raised legitimate concerns about parking, congestion. She said, why didn’t I hold it up at Great Lakes? And I said if we did, the only people who would see it would be the people in big homes in Lake Bluff and Lake Forest.”
“She liked that,” Plummer told us. “She said nobody ever mentioned this as a memorial. We said, alderman, it’s in the schedule of events we gave you. It’s the whole purpose of it. She mentioned, couldn’t we do it without weapons? I said, that’s ridiculous. How can you do a reenactment without weapons? But it’ll be very solemn, very dignified, very appropriate.”
Meanwhile, from the Tribune there was hardly a peep. The Tribune had nothing to say about D-Day deux besides an editorial urging Shiller to take “a larger, longer view.” From the Tower, the landing was one of many local “rites” scheduled to take their place among “a nationwide and international series of memorializing events.”
The Sun-Times made hay and was tempted to make more. An editorial writer asked Plummer what the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation was doing underwriting the glorification of violence. “The violence in World War II was for a just and noble cause,” Plummer argued.
The fulminating accuser is the curmudgeonly Ray Coffey of the Sun-Times. The litmus test distinguishing Coffey from Mary Schmich is 219 N. Keystone.
