By Scott Holleran
Photo Credit: Author created image courtesy of Perplexity AI
As a proud activist, I’ve marched against domestic abuse, written speeches, letters and op-eds for property rights and rallied for individual rights. Once, in Chicago, police detained me and a band of fellow protesters of a union rally for Vice-President Mondale. I was 14 years old. My lifelong commitment to intellectual activism had begun years earlier in a house on Sheridan Road.
This is where I’d learned to wage my first campaign for justice. The address was 1330 Sheridan Road in Wilmette—where my best friend, Paul, lived with his parents, who both worked for Chicago public schools—and the cause, long before I’d discovered and read Ayn Rand, was property rights. The year was 1973.
One day, while walking to Paul’s house after school, he became quiet and withdrawn. When I asked why, he told me that the government was seizing his home to build a park. Paul explained that his mother and father were fighting the village but that there was a law called “eminent domain” and he might not be able to live there much longer. We were in the third grade.
Once we arrived at the house, I went to Paul’s mother, an artist who would tell tales of living in New York City while making sandwiches for us after school before we bounded out of the house and down the bluff, racing to Lake Michigan’s shore. I asked her how I could help stop the seizure of their lakefront home. Paul’s mother stopped what she was doing in the kitchen, turned to me and gave me a strange, new and earnest look. She asked if I was serious.
I think I was the most serious child in Wilmette. I’d been growing up in the midst of what was being called the counterculture, which I knew I didn’t like, so I’d seen antiwar protests, multiple acts of presumed liberation and assorted hippies doing their thing on TV. I told Paul and his mother that of course they could count on me to help stop the government’s plan to seize what was theirs. I pledged to put my eight-year-old soul into saving their home. Looking back, I can’t be sure, but I remember that she sort of smiled—Paul’s mother had a twinkle in her eye and was constantly curious about the world—and she said, “alright, boys. Let’s get to work.”
Ours was an uphill battle and we knew it. Paul and I made posters and flyers and we fanned out across Wilmette, canvassing along Chestnut near Plaza del Lago to Linden and toward the train tracks, into Lyman Sargent’s and every shop we could find, past downtown toward Edens Plaza and west Wilmette. Paul’s mom or dad drove us to blocks of houses, which we crossed off on maps, and we walked door to door, passing out printed materials pleading for property rights against this wicked eminent domain law, which I’d learned grants the government the power to seize private property at its arbitrary discretion. I was determined to warn everyone in Wilmette that what was happening to my friend Paul was wrong—morally wrong. By what right did Wilmette aim to seize my friend’s home? I wanted to know.
I never did get a satisfactory answer, which led me to canvass for all sorts of other issues, causes and rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. I learned a crucial lesson—that exercising intellectual activism feels good and has the capacity to change the world, a fact which still guides my life—and I’d gained knowledge and experience in applications of law and philosophy.
Watching Paul’s family, especially his mother, tirelessly speak out at meetings and argue against eminent domain, I learned that the one can oppose the many—and take on city hall—and win and that one can do so on principle. All our canvassing, letter writing and speaking out paid off. The village of Wilmette quickly abandoned its plan to seize their home and property. We hadn’t lied, cheated and bribed our way to victory. We’d made arguments and sought to persuade Wilmette residents. Our cause prevailed.
Wilmette’s government built a park there anyway—they had seized others’ properties from those who did not doubt or defy eminent domain, which remains the law of the land—and for decades I watched the park sit empty season after season after season. It’s still there, three and a half acres known as Langdon Park, where someone’s home used to be. Paul and his family continued to live in their home for years—the house and its residents are long gone—and Paul’s mother, Marilyn Malles, moved with her husband James to Arizona, after living an active life in Wilmette theater, arts, civic, church and community affairs. The white house at 1330 Sheridan Road is gone. The fact that its owner owned it, fought Wilmette for her right to own it and won—living happily ever after on their property—can never be taken away. Neither can the truth that the property owner owns what he owns and that a boy, his mom and a best friend can know it and be at liberty to act on what they know in the vital, sacred and joyful pursuit of happiness they own.
Award-winning author, writer and journalist Scott Holleran lived in Chicago for 21 years and writes Industrial Revolutions. Read and subscribe to his non-fiction newsletter, Autonomia, at https://www.scottholleran.substack.com. Listen and subscribe to his fiction podcast at https://www.ShortStoriesByScottHolleran.substack.com. Scott Holleran lives in Southern California.
