Can-do Cassin bids Oak Park adieu

By Ken Trainor

Staff writer

It's not easy saying goodbye to someone like Virginia Cassin. Great people produce great towns. Or is it great towns produce great people? Maybe it works both ways. Special towns make it possible for people with great potential to fulfill it. 

That has certainly been true in Ginie Cassin's case.

Her family moved to Oak Park from Beloit, Wisconsin in the 1920s when she was 3. Except for three years in Dallas, Texas where her father was transferred, and three years at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin (psychology major, year-round during WWII), Ginie has been an Oak Park resident. 

That ends this Sunday when she and her daughter, Sheila, who formerly headed Oak Park's Farmers Market and whom Ginie describes as "more like me than me," drive up to her new home in Brainerd, Minnesota.

It isn't easy for her to say goodbye either, even at the age of 94.