Back in the 1970s, if someone brought up “The Fox,” there might be some lively discussion about whether his illegal anti-pollution activities were justified.
Although The Fox was an Aurora area figure, he made national headlines with civil disobedience tactics, including industrial sabotage. His strikes slowed after the enactment of state and federal laws to control pollution, but his passion for the environment persists today in a group named for him, Friends of the Fox.
The Aurora Public Library will present The Fox: Aurora’s Environmentalist Superhero in a Saturday, March 24 program at the Richard and Gina Santori Public Library of Aurora. The 3 p.m. program will feature journalist Steve Lord, writer for The Beacon-News, an expert on the life and passion of The Fox. The presentation should last an hour.
The Fox was Jim Phillips, who died in Aurora October 3, 2001 at the age of 70.
The New York Times ran Phillips’ obituary two weeks after his death October 22, 2001 because Phillips’ identity as The Fox wasn’t truly known until after he died.
The Times’ obituary notes that the Fox plugged polluting sewer outlets and left skunks on the doorsteps of the executives that owned them. He collected 50 pounds of sewage that a company had spewed into Lake Michigan and dumped it in the company’s reception room.
In an interview with Time Magazine in October 1970, Phillips said: “I got tired of watching the smoke and the filth and the little streams dying one by one. Finally, I decided to do something. The courts weren’t doing anything to these polluters except granting continuance after continuance.
“’Nobody ever stuck up for that poor, mistreated stream,” he told Newsweek. ”So I decided to do something in its name.”
Much of what The Fox did was against the law, the obituary noted, and a police sergeant interviewed by Newsweek Magazine in 1970 said authorities would charge the Fox with trespassing and criminal damage to property if they could catch him. But they could not.
“It’s kind of hard to lift fingerprints from the inside of a sewer,” the sergeant said.
Phillips, according to the obit, led a dual existence as a middle school science teacher and an ecological saboteur, using techniques later refined by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Phillips was a field inspector for the Kane County Environmental Department, retiring in January 1986 to start the Fox River Conservation Foundation.
Without revealing his identity, The Fox told his own story in a 180-page 1999 autobiography called “Raising Kane: The Fox Chronicles.” The book lists its author only as “Ray Fox.” He took the name the Fox, he notes, because his passion to fight pollution was inflamed by seeing a red fox in Aurora in 1969 and because his first efforts were aimed largely at stopping the pollution of the Fox River.
As for “Ray,” his nephew said, that came from “reynard,” the French word for “fox.”
The March 24 program will be in Room 126 of the Santori Library. Brother Chi and the Alchemists will sing earth songs from 2:30 p.m. to 3 p.m..
For information, call Dan Smolla at 630-264-4100.