The Eye

The Eye

Who said Bill Gooch is all wet? He will be on July 24 when the Community Bank of Elmhurst celebrates its 15th anniversary with a steak fry. Bank chairman and founder Gooch will be stationed in a dunk tank to help raise money for the Elmhurst Children’s Assistance Foundation (ECAF). Five bucks gets you two throws with all proceeds going to ECAF. Ever been turned down for a loan by a bank? This is your chance to get even. Kudos to Bill for his efforts to help charity and have some fun doing it.

We will miss our buddy G.E. “Gerry” Murray, 62, a resident of River Forest and a friend of The Business Ledger. Gerry died June 23, three years after having a liver transplant and suffering from diabetes. He was a poet, literary critic and public relations man who worked at Burston-Marsteller, GolinHarris and Porter Novelli before starting his own firm in 1994. Notables who attended his wake were DuPage County Board Chairman Bob Schillerstrom, and actor John Mahoney, a resident of the western suburbs.

Did you know that the Doubletree Hotel Oak Brook serves more than 200,000 chocolate chip cookies to its guests every year? According to GM John Wagner the Doubletree serves 4 to 5 million of its “famous” cookies nationally. The hotel, formerly the Hyatt, underwent a $20 million renovation and has announced the reopening of Anthony’s Italian Chop House, always a great dining secret in Oak Brook on a Saturday night.

Round and round we go...presenters at the Choose DuPage campaign kick-off event June 26 at the Doubletree worked from a “theater in the round” setup. Many jokes came from the presenters who couldn’t figure out which way to look. Isn’t it all about the room setup and the quality of lunchtime chicken? The aforementioned chocolate chip cookies helped keep everyone’s sense of humor intact.

What happened to The Legends golf course in Bensenville? The 9-hole executive course, each hole inspired by a famous golf hole, is closed. Weeds have overtaken the unique layout built on a former construction dump site. Calls to the Bensenville Park District by The Business Ledger have gone unanswered. We guess that The Legends was a victim of the woes suffered by the golf industry. The course was fun to play but hard, difficult to walk and priced at a premium.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the golfing spectrum, members of the Butterfield Country Club in Oak Brook, tell us their course will be closed at the end of the year to undergo a massive rebuild to be paid for by a special member assessment in the neighborhood of $40,000 each. That’s the cost of country club living.

Our sympathies to Skip Strittmatter, executive director of the DuPage Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. Her mother, Pauline K. Johnson, passed away on June 22 in rural Iowa.

You had to wonder when the other shoe would drop with the plethora of restaurants along the Butterfield Road corridor from Meyers Road to Finley Road in Oak Brook, Lombard and Downers Grove. In a story last year, The Business Ledger counted nearly 50 in that stretch. Doors are now closed at long-time steakhouse Magnum’s as well as at next-door neighbors Baker’s Square and Joe’s Crab Shack. But new restaurant ideas always abound, with the Grotto (restaurant and banquets) having opened in the Oak Brook Promenade, Topo Gigio’s (remember Ed Sullivan’s mouse?) set to open on the Magnum’s site and Miller’s Lombard Ale House already doing big business with its bar/restaurant, and about a million TVs tuned to all sports all the time, right next to the Carlisle.

Congrats and a tip of the hat to staff members of the Management Association of Illinois for achieving their goal of 500 personal member visits in the past year. That represents about half of their total membership. Mary Lynn Fayoumi, President & CEO, of the Downers Grove-based trade association, reported that this was one of the most satisfying efforts in her management career. “What did we learn?” she said. “First, that our members value us immensely. They welcomed us with open arms and were more than happy to share their current challenges and provide feedback about our services.” Issues that are foremost on members’ minds are recruitment, retention, compensation, benefits, mergers and acquisitions as well as globalization.

The work of Charley Krebs, former Business Ledger cartoonist and editor for Suburban Life Newspapers, is being featured during July at the Freeark Gallery of the Riverside Art Center. The exhibit is called “Black and White and Read All Over”—highlights from his career.

Janet Froetscher, president of United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, is leaving to take the top post at the Itasca-based National Safety Council. This came as a surprise to many United Way staffers. Froetscher led one of the nation’s major United Ways through a major consolidation and increased community investment programs. She has been one of the higher profile women executives in the Chicago area.

Rasmussen College will soon become another educational campus in the western suburbs. The 108-year-old business college has campuses in Minnesota, Florida and Rockford as well as an extensive on-line offering. Classes will be offered this fall at an Aurora site near Orchard Road and I-88.

Gassed over gas prices? With prices jumping sometimes a dime a day it’s hard to know whether you should buy in the morning or evening. But our friends at the IRS are as sympathetic as government ever gets, increasing the national per-mile business driving rate to 58.5 cents for the final six months of this year. With research for the feds done by Wisconsin-based Runzheimer International, the agency will review vehicle costs for 2009 and reevaluate the mileage rate again. With some experts saying that $10/gallon gas is on the horizon, will we soon be talking a buck a mile for the rate?

When something good happens, you can bet the pols will all gather round, forget party differences and sing “Roll Out The (Pork) Barrel” together. Such was the case recently at FermiLab when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Republican U.S. Rep. Judy Biggert (13th) and new Democratic Rep. Bill Foster (14th) joined FermiLab Director Pier Oddone and U.S. Energy Sec. Jeff Kupfer to announce the suspension of involuntary layoffs there and at Argonne. The Illinois congressional delegation, which despite partisan rancor usually works well together on matters benefiting the state, pushed for President Bush to sign a $62.5 million addition for the DOE’s Office of Science in an emergency appropriations bill.

If you have oodles of cash and don’t know what to do with it, there’s a new high-end magazine debuting for you in the four states surrounding Lake Michigan. Called “Shore, The Art of Midwest Living,” the new mag will give charities a chance to plug their events, and seek funds from, publisher Candace Kuenen says, “affluent families that support good causes in the area.” It will also have features on those wealthy families as well as on attractions around Lake Michigan that, the publisher notes, “fit into the lifestyle of those who are in a position to support these charities.”

Not fitting into that lifestyle may be the rest of us, who may welcome SONIC Drive-Ins and its famed carhops to the Chicago area. The Oklahoma-based company started as a hamburger and root beer stand in 1953 and is well known in the western United States. The first of its stores here, scheduled to open this year and next, are in Country Club Hills, Lockport, Aurora, Bartlett and Algonquin, with more planned in the south, west, north and northwest suburbs.

Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008 (Archive on Monday, July 21, 2008)
Posted by jstoltz Contributed by jstoltz

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