Sun-Times front-pager, dominating it, is about former heavyweight champ Ernie Terrell bailing out of Roseland.

“You can’t live here and be safe anymore,” Terrell said. “Me and my wife, I guess we gotta get outta here.”

Terrell:

Case of black flight succeeding the much more publicized white variety of 40 years ago.  Leave it to the writer, who in his lede says:

Do you know who lives on this block? Ernie Terrell. The heavyweight champion. Right there in that bungalow.

That’s the pitch a Roseland Realtor would give house hunters checking out the 11100 block of Parnell in the early ’70s — back when white people couldn’t flee to the suburbs fast enough. [italics added]

White people fleeing, we know about that, having heard it often enough.  But blacks were moving into Roseland then, en masse. 

The Terrells

were the first black family on the block. In just a few years, the entire neighborhood went from an enclave of Dutch and Italian families to 99 percent black folks.

Whites flee, blacks “move in.”  Whoa.  Blacks were fleeing too, as Terrell is fleeing now.  Thus it has ever been.

Opened my Chi Trib on this Sunday morning, feast of Christ the King, being the last Sunday in October (apparently no more: bishops’s site calls it only “Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time in ordinary time,” making it prosaic as all get-out), and found another sad, sad story about people for whom THINGS ARE NOT WORKING OUT. 

Trib offers such on a regular basis and has been doing so for a long time.  Editors have a penchant for such things.  Their idea of a grabber headline is a sad, sad story.  Why is this?

A safe home. A good job. Stability for their children after years on the run from death threats and the mayhem of war — that is what the Iraqi refugees envisioned when told they were coming to America.

Instead, one family is assigned an apartment on Chicago’s North Side so full of cockroaches and filth they couldn’t stay the night.

A veterinarian from southern Iraq relies on relatives in Karbala to pay his rent in Chicago, upending the traditional immigrant experience.

An Iraqi mother of three, unable to pay her rent with her husband still in the Middle East, finds little help warding off the predatory advances of male acquaintances offering assistance.

Iraqi mother of three:

Stop, stop, enough already!  On to the sports page!  Those who enjoy beating themselves up, keep reading!

Later:

Reader D: Take heart, JB — the Feast of Christ the King will be celebrated Nov. 22, 2009. Apparently something was revised in 1969 and the last Sunday in October is not the feast day any more. Gershwin abides even today: “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.”

Reader B:  the iraqi story leaves me somewhat spechless.  don’t know what to make of it. so many aspects..  am sharing it with others however. –b

Ed.: If the careful reader does not know what to make of it, it’s a busted story (as a play is busted on the f-ball field).  Focus, people!

Colleen Kane has an excellent story in Chi Trib about high school athletes as non-academic.

One number won’t light up the high school scoreboard this school year: 1.0.

That’s the grade-point average on a 4.0 scale that a high school athlete could carry and still score for his or her team this fall, according to state standards.

Some schools require more than that. 

“To put out a team of athletes that are able to have five Ds and three Fs — that’s putting athletics before academics,” Evanston [HS] associate athletic director Dan Vosnos said.

Some do.

“Kids want to be involved in something. And the gangs don’t have a grade-point average,” Proviso East athletic director Andrew Johnson said.

It’s a common problem.

“To be honest, if many of the kids in our schools didn’t have something to look forward to — which in some cases is one or two sports — they wouldn’t come to school,” [nearby] Leyden athletic director Randy Conrad said.

Proviso’s Johnson tried to change things there, where the state’s minimum applies.

Within the last five years, Proviso East had a 2.0 GPA requirement, causing a stir among some parents and coaches. The administration changed back to the IHSA standard when it decided it was losing too many athletes.

“We had a 2.0, but we had no support,” Johnson said.

“Some parents and [some?] coaches” had their way, and so it goes.  Community standards prevail.  The school becomes a sort of anti-delinquency program, slipping back to a common (low) denominator.

A Fenger High neighbor who subs in city schools and whose wife taught there tells “Why they fight at Fenger” in a ChiTrib letter today, explaining at one point:

At Fenger, the Altgeld Gardens area is called “the dirty 130’s.” Altgeld students came to Fenger several years ago when Carver High School in the “Gardens” was changed to a military academy.

The conflict started when Altgeld students were sent to Fenger. This tension has been going on for a very long time. But every year, many of us noticed that the feuding escalated.

There were many times my wife expressed her concern about the tension among the students. There are always fights going on in the building.

He goes on to urge that adults “instill some moral and spiritual values in our children.”

But if they don’t, isn’t it better that kids go to school in their neighborhood, where they don’t run into outlanders?

This is the school and neighborhood where a kid was beaten to death with a board (not shot, as most South Side killings occur).  Wouldn’t it be a matter of common sense not to mix the two neighborhoods? 

But someone downtown — Arne Duncan before he followed Obama to Washington? — had the bright idea of making the Altgeld Gardens area school a selective military academy, and off the Altgeld kids went to Fenger.

If anyone has mentioned this specifically as an important aspect of the Fenger problem, I haven’t read about it.

Later: I better not assume you all know about the killing.  It’s here on videotape, if you can bear to look.

How is David Greising (D.-ChiTrib) like Rep. Danny Davis (D.-IL)? 

Give up? 

Neither considers cost of national health care relevant.

Delegate Greising, who has a column:

There are some who see the problems with programs in Maine and Massachusetts and argue that is the reason the federal government cannot afford to meddle in health care.

But with health care insurance premiums eating up 18 percent of the typical family’s income, en route toward a 24 percent bite in 10 years if nothing is done to “bend” the cost curve downward, it’s not a question of whether the federal government can afford to meddle in health care more than it already does.

We already know where Rep. Davis stands.  “No price is too high for quality health care,” he said in a townhall meeting at Malcolm X College on Aug. 22.

Greising has an explanation: The high-cost Maine and Massachusetts insurance programs “show that government intervention is better than no action at all,” because “[t]he only way to bend the cost curve is to adopt national efforts, while remembering the lessons of Maine.”

Which are that if you provide health insurance, you spend more than you thought and/or run out of money.

In Mass. costs doubled in two years.  In Maine the state ran out of money after enrolling only 10% of the previously not enrolled.

Like Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors,” Maine and Mass. want more.  Which in addition to her sense of civic responsibility may explain why Olympia Snowe voted the way she did.

Rep. Greising is all for “mandates,” as he puts it, in quotes.  Some object, but they merely

want minimal government and . . . apparently, are comfortable living in a country where people can “free ride” the system by not buying insurance, knowing all along that the taxpayers or hospitals will come to the rescue should they get terribly sick.

Apparently.