How sad.

The crowning achievement of my former legislative colleague from both the 1970’s and the 1990’s, Wyvetter Younge, seems to be a Mississippi River front park that could have been riverfront housing.

Having not seen the site, maybe I’m overreacting.

Maybe housing could be built behind the park and still have a view of the river.

But when I saw the area in the late 1970’s, she wasn’t talking about a park.

I went to Wyvetter’s home town of East St. Louis two or three times.

The first time was in the 1970’s. She drove me around.

It brought to mind what I thought Berlin must have been like after the Allies bombed it.

There were bricks from demolished buildings everywhere.

She showed me the railroad yards that took up so much of the riverfront property. Lots of railroad lines crossed the river from there. Each had their separate set of spaghetti-like tracks.

We both remarked on the immense opportunity consolidation of the tracks would provide.

Fast forward to 1993.

I was the Republican Spokesman on the House Committee. Wyvetter wanted me to come down to East St. Louis to hold a hearing on the “rent-to-own” situation.

There were scores, maybe hundreds of homes where her constituents lived, in this arrangement. The arrangement in my part of the state would be a contract sale.

In her part of Illinois, the contracts allowed the landlords to make improvements and add their cost to the amount owed.

The result was that even people with good jobs could never get to the point of owning their home, an essential part of the American dream, I would say.

Wyvetter thought the owner they traced to Boston was using her constituents as a holding action until profitably development would come.

At her request, my wife and I toured a college campus nestled in her district. It wasn’t being used and she thought it should be. I think it was called Park College. It was south of town, near the airport, I think.

She got a casino before I visited in the 1990’s.

Where I had seen crumbling buildings, there were now empty lots.

The bricks were gone.

A light rail line had a station in town on the way to the hill towns.

I noticed no development.

Indeed, more downtown stores seemed to be closed.

The Lee newspaper of the 1970’s was long gone.

Wyvetter was a sincere and gentle woman who had all sorts of ideas of how to help her area. Most were not of high practicality, but she did her best in that part of the economic cycle she was dealt.

Economic revival did not come in her lifetime.

But, when it does, she will have been the prophetess.

And, they may have named this park Malcolm Martin Memorial Park, but it is really Wyvetter Younge Memorial Park.