Galen Gockel was a community volunteer and activist who worked to ensure schools in Oak Park were integrated as a District 97 board member in the 1970s and later served on the Oak Park Village Board and as the Oak Park Township assessor.
Gockel volunteered for several other well-known institutions in Oak Park, helping to launch the Wednesday Journal newspaper in 1980 and leading the Oak Park Festival Theatre company.
“Galen Gockel was the ultimate citizen. He embodied every virtue a community would desire in someone willing to step up in all sorts of different ways and lead,” said Wednesday Journal Publisher and President Dan Haley. “He was smart, kind, empathetic, he listened really well, he had a wide variety of interests, and he was always generous with his time.”
Gockel, 91, died of heart disease on Jan. 21, said his partner, Rosemary Gerrans. He had lived in Oak Park since 1969.
Born in the small downstate town of Anna, Gockel received a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1953 and served for four years in the Navy. He began graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1957 and received a doctorate in sociology from the school in 1971.
Early in his graduate work, Gockel took a job on the staff of the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center — now known as NORC — which conducts national studies on topics of public interest. Gockel trained and supervised a staff of interviewers, then oversaw a three-year national study of racially integrated neighborhoods. That led to a book he co-authored, “Side By Side: Racially Integrated Neighborhoods in America,” published in 1970.
Gockel left NORC in 1969 to help run an urban studies program formed by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest that was aimed at meeting college students’ needs better when it came to understanding racism, poverty and the Vietnam War. The Associated Colleges of the Midwest — a consortium of colleges including Knox College, Carleton College, St. Olaf College and Lawrence University — brought 65 students to Chicago each semester for an introduction to urban America.
Gockel taught a seminar on housing, including neighborhood decline and renewal. Among Gockel’s colleagues were journalist Salim Muwakkil and political activist Katy Hogan, who co-founded the now-shuttered Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park.
“He stood out in that group of founders because he was the most soft-spoken of my colleagues. It was a bastion of big thinkers like Hal Baron, John Fish and Jody Kretzmann, but Galen was right there with them at the start of the program because of his history of civil rights activism as well as fair housing,” Hogan said.
Gockel retired from the ACM’s Urban Studies Program in 1995.
Gockel took part in the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, and along the way met several civil rights pioneers. That project helped drive Gockel’s commitment to justice and equality. One of his early acts toward that end was when he and his wife acted as straw buyers for a Black family who wanted to own a house in Oak Park.
Gockel and his wife moved from Chicago’s South Side to Oak Park in 1969. He was elected to the District 97 board in 1971. Gockel had been the first school board candidate to call for a racially integrated school system, his family said, and after being elected, he worked to redraw school boundaries to better balance minority students in the district. That included converting two elementary schools to middle schools.
“People forget how bold Oak Park was in the 1970s,” Haley said. “We all know how protective people are of neighborhood schools. To say we will take two of these schools out and turn them into middle schools, but it was all in the interest of redrawing the boundary lines to avoid having a couple of east side Oak Park schools become predominantly Black — in that moment (it) was like, big-time scary to people. It was just a gargantuan undertaking.”
Gockel was elected township assessor in 1993 and served two terms. He became an advocate for reducing the assessment level of multiunit apartment buildings, arguing that they provided a vital role in Cook County suburbs.
“As messy and arcane as (the assessment) process is when considering single-family homes, it becomes otherworldly when applied to large apartment buildings,” Gockel wrote in a letter to the Tribune in 1993. “(A) Tribune series might investigate the harsh decisions faced by apartment owners who, increasingly, have to decide whether to pay their taxes or repair their buildings.”
“He was a mentor to me and a friend,” said Oak Park Township Assessor Ali ElSaffar, who succeeded Gockel as assessor. “I decided to run for village trustee in 1993 at age 26, and he helped out and it’s like he saw something in me that maybe a lot of other people hadn’t seen. Once I got to the assessor’s office, he taught me all the things I needed to do to be certified. He was an educator (by profession), and he taught me a lot of how the system worked so I could help the taxpayers and the system that I would have to deal with.”
In 2001, Gockel won a seat on the Village Board. He served one term, and then he returned to the board in 2006 for several months to fill out an open term.
In the early 1980s, Gockel chaired two local arts organizations, the Unity Temple Concert Series, held at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed landmark, and the Oak Park Festival Theatre.
In the early 2000s, the Festival Theatre fell on hard times financially, and in 2005, Gockel volunteered to become the professional Equity theater company’s managing director on a volunteer basis. He held that role until 2010, and he remained involved with the Festival Theatre afterward. In 2018, Gockel established a fund to be used to support college students majoring in theater who interned at the company.
Gockel and his wife were honored in 2020 with the Senior Citizens Center of Oak Park’s annual Ulyssean Award.
Gockel’s wife of 63 years, Marjorie, died in 2020. A son, Tim, died in 2012. In addition to Gerrans, he is survived by a son, Andy; a daughter, Rebecca Kutak; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
There were no services.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
