Jim Phillips’ story sounds like the invention of a Hollywood screenwriter or a Marvel comic book artist: A mild-mannered school teacher by day, he goes out by night committing crimes to terrorize polluters. As his calling card, he leaves a drawing that says the polluters have been hit by the “Fox.” In cahoots with a government official and the city’s most powerful newspaper columnist, helped by cops who look the other way while a police chief calls for his head, he goes on doing this for some 20 years. He becomes the subject of nationwide news stories yet dies before his identity is revealed to the world.
And did we mention that in the middle of all this he lived the life of a 17th-century French explorer for months, traveling the Midwest in a canoe?
Yet Phillips, a kind of real-life Robin Hood who terrorized polluters first in the Fox Valley and then throughout the Chicago area, really lived. Perhaps the most amazing thing about his larger-than-life life is that his story has not yet been turned into a movie. But a Milwaukee filmmaker named Matt Pniewski is putting the final touches on a documentary film about Phillips called “The Story of the Fox.” And a Chicago writer reportedly is working on the screenplay for a biopic about the man that he will try to sell to some Hollywood producer.
Pniewski is a Chicago native who says he has worked as an assistant director on six unreleased indie films and as a production assistant on such Hollywood films as “Jupiter Ascending” and “Insurgent.” Just 30 years old, he is too young to remember the many news stories in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s about the colorful environmental vigilante. Pniewski said he first heard about the Fox when he read a newspaper story about the “real-life superhero movement” several years ago. A number of eccentric people are dressing up in comic book-style costumes and literally fighting for things like fair housing, worker rights and of course crime-free streets, even though they lack the superhuman powers of Superman, Spider-Man and the like, he said.
Pniewski said he met Tea Krulos, a Milwaukee author whose 2013 book “Heroes in the Night: Inside the Real Life Superhero Movement” stated that besides such fictional characters as Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel and today’s comic books, these new heroes were inspired by a vigilante who attacked polluters who called himself the Fox.
“I grew up in Chicago, but I spent many of my summers on the Fox River,” Pniewski says. So he began interviewing people who knew the Fox, such as former Larkin High School teacher Reid Lewis, who had led Phillips, five other adults and 16 high school students on a re-creation of the 300-years-old Voyageurs expedition in 1976. About three years ago, Pniewski began making the documentary by interviewing those people on video.
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The film project went public recently when Pniewski, having left a job at a Hollywood production company and moved to Milwaukee, ran out of money. He set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 more for the project. As of Friday, 21 people had pledged $1,075, with a deadline of July 22 to raise the remaining $8,925.
“The Story of the Fox” page on http://www.kickstarter.com includes interviews and illustrating graphics shot for the documentary. Pniewski said he needs the $10,000 to buy the licensing rights to use various photos, interviews and music in the movie and to film some re-creations of the Fox’s exploits using actors.
“We probably could have a working print by January,” he said. “We’ll bring it to a lot of indie film festivals that specialize either in documentaries or in environmental films, as a way of advertising its release on DVD and direct video download.”
He said he also will try to book it into a Fox Valley theater such as the Arcada in St. Charles.
Without revealing his identity, the Fox told his own story in a 180-page 1999 autobiography called “Raising Kane: The Fox Chronicles.” Several times the Fox quotes people calling him “Jim.” But 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 Jim Spring says, that came from “reynard,” the French word for “fox.”
Only after the Fox died two years later did his friends and family admit that the Fox had been Jim Phillips, of Montgomery. Born on the North Side of Chicago, at age 10 his family moved to its 26-acre asparagus farm near Montgomery. Never marrying or having children, Phillips would spend the rest of his life there, tending the farm and taking care of his widowed mother.
For some 10 years, he worked as a science teacher at a middle school in Hillside, Ill. Later he was hired as a field inspector for the Kane County Environmental and Water Resources Division, combating pollution on the legal battlefield instead of the vigilante one. Phillips was 70 when he died of complications from diabetes in October 2001.
In the autobiography, the Fox tells how deeply his passion for the environment ran even before he turned vigilante. He recounts that one of his students called him a hypocrite for preaching against air pollution even though he drove a pickup truck to school every day. So the Fox said he encouraged his students to go out to the parking lot and paint his truck with slogans such as “G.M.’s lust for profit kills our air!” and “Profit + greed = air pollution.” Phillips writes that as he drove home, he began thinking that “maybe it was time to start living my life in ways that ignorance and greed could understand.”
The turning point, he writes, came in February and March 1969 after he had a long talk with a friend he calls Brick, whose nephew, Spring says, was really Kane County Environmental Director Dick Young. Brick talked about how several local companies and the Aurora Sanitary District were polluting the Fox River. Phillips saw globs of greasy waste illegally flowing into a Fox River tributary, Mill Creek, through a 4-foot-diameter cooling-water discharge pipe from the Dial Soap factory in Montgomery. He says he collected roadside litter such as a tree stump, old rugs, furniture and appliances, sneaked onto the company’s property after dark and threw the trash, plus a bag of cement, down a manhole until the drain pipe had been blocked. Then he left a note signed “Fox” with the letter “O” containing a grinning fox face.
Phillips writes that he was so afraid what he was doing might injure someone inside the plant or that he might be arrested that he vomited. Then a Kane County sheriff’s deputy drove up and parked just yards away. But as Phillips froze, hoping he was invisible in the darkness among the weeds, the officer merely urinated against a tree and drove off again. ” ‘Mama Nature, don’t ever do that again when I’m trying to help you,’ I whispered, and I went back to work,” Phillips writes.
As he went back three more times to block up the soap company’s waste pipe, he threw up each time. A sheriff’s spokesman said that if caught, the Fox would be charged with trespassing and criminal damage.
His campaign would continue through the ’70s and ’80s. He plugged a sewer outlet at an Aurora aluminum foundry and then dumped five gallons of its foul-smelling sewage, mixed with several rotting dead animals, onto the floor of the company’s Midwest office. He left rotting skunk carcasses (“Road kill is a very valuable, underused resource,” he notes in the autobiography) on the doorsteps of executives whose companies polluted. During a lengthy campaign against the U.S. Steel Co.’s plants in Indiana and Chicago, he left a box full of dead animals on the desk of the boss’ secretary.
He became friends with Chicago’s most influential journalist, Mike Royko of the Daily News, and became the topic of several admiring Royko columns.
Pniewski and Spring said more and more people began to know the Fox’s identity, but he never was arrested. Unlike most of those new “real-life superheroes” Krulos writes about, the Fox never wore a mask or a costume, perhaps realizing those would just make him even more conspicuous. When Phillips delivered his stink to the U.S. Steel office, Pniewski said, Phillips had his two nieces wait outside. When he was done, he joined them, changed his coat and walked down the street with them, camouflaging themselves as just an innocent family out for a walk.
Pniewski said many people speculated the Fox was Young, the county environmental control boss and Iwo Jima veteran who had inspired the vigilante campaign. And “Ray Fox” writes in his memoir that he was sometimes accompanied on his missions by the man he calls Brick. It was Young who finally hired Phillips to be a county inspector.
Several times the former educator agreed to be interviewed by school children — over a telephone line. Pniewski said the White School Museum in Oswego has the recording of one such interview, and he will use part of that in the documentary.
Spring said that’s how he found out about his uncle’s shenanigans.
“I was in eighth grade at Franklin Junior High in Aurora, and our social studies teacher arranged a conversation with the Fox,” Spring recalls. “I recognized his voice right away, but I didn’t say anything to the other kids or the teacher. That night Uncle Jim came to our house and said, ‘I understand you had a phone conversation today. I was wondering when you would figure this out.’ “
At least once, Pniewski said, a sympathetic police officer warned Phillips that “if you know who the Fox is, tell him not to go near Dial Soap on such and such a date because we’re doubling our patrols.”
“My cousin Lynn did the eulogy at his funeral,” Spring said. “Lynn said that there was a secret part of Jim’s life, too. ‘No, not that,’ Lynn said. ‘It was that Jim’s bedroom was always a mess.’ “
But the family later admitted to reporters that the mild-mannered teacher had been the Fox. The New York Times reported his death and identity to the nation three weeks after his death.
“Jim didn’t want anyone to know who he was because he wanted the Fox to be a legend,” Pniewski said. “He wanted his campaign to be a movement, not an individual.”
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Spring said laws have toughened and the waters and air have improved since 1969, but if his uncle were starting out today, the Fox might be crusading against global warming. “Global warming is like pollution in the 1960s. It’s not in anybody’s mind until it hits you right in the face,” said Spring.