A reader notes this column in the Chicago Daily Herald by Chuck Goudie, pointing out that Hillary Clinton’s tales of spending time in her childhood on nearby farms with migrant workers just doesn’t add up…
“When I was growing up, the neighborhoods I lived in were surrounded by farm fields, and every harvest season we had a lot of the migrants who come up from Mexico, through Texas, following the harvest, all the way up through Illinois and Michigan,” Mrs. Rodham Clinton has told the spellbound.
Of course millions of people across the country have no idea where Park Ridge is located. They don’t realize it is, was and forever will be an appendage of O’Hare International Airport, attached to Chicago like your nose is to your face.
Mrs. Rodham Clinton has been telling the Big Woods of Park Ridge story since 1996 when she told an audience: “Those of you who did not grow up around Chicago in the 1950s and can only imagine flying into O’Hare where everything looks developed, might find it hard to believe how many farm workers we would have.” …
According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, Hillary’s recollections of her Park Ridge neighborhood being “surrounded by farm fields” are as fictional as Uncle Jed’s black gold and Texas tea.
“Many of the farms on Chicago’s Far Northwest and Southwest Sides disappeared in the face of the speculative building boom of the 1920s. Industrial and residential developers began to work on suburban farmland convenient to bus, truck, and automobile traffic.”
Even Park Ridge’s official history states “The agrarian society was changed by the Industrial Revolution, and by the time of our incorporation in 1873, Park Ridge had been transformed from an agricultural community to an affluent business town.”
This was probably after she was named for Edmund Hillary, and before she tried to join the Marines…