One of them is named Roger Beltrami, an Oak Park resident who worked as a college English professor and then an IT manager before retiring. Beltrami said he became a radical in the 1960s after witnessing three events. First, he was wandering across the Berkeley campus in 1964 when he saw a football player push a 98-pound graduate student named Carol Spindler down the steps of Wheeler Hall. The young women, who had been protesting the Vietnam War, broke her leg and hip.

A few months later, while he was walking by the W.E.B. DuBois House on campus, somebody set off a bomb inside, and Beltrami got hit with flying glass. The third experience involved a visit he made to a rally in support of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.

"Ronald Reagan [then governor of California] sent the National Guard over in helicopters," he recalled, "and tear-gassed us. I was standing next to a woman holding her baby who was choking. Those three things turned me permanently radical, and I've been doing it ever since."

Beltrami belongs to a small Oak Park-based group that calls themselves the Progressive Action League.

Their literature states: "Oak Park PAL is a progressive activist organization that sponsors educational events, participates in rallies and demonstrations in support of progressive goals, and works with other progressive groups in conferences, marches and activities that pursue a progressive agenda."

Besides their weekly demonstration at "The Peace Corner," as they refer to Harlem and Lake, they hand out informational literature just outside the Oak Park Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings and participate in ongoing silent peace vigils in front of the Federal Building and the Art Institute in the Loop.

On Memorial Day, several PALs attended the Vietnam and Iraq Veterans Against the War event in Chicago.

PAL membership embraces a diversity of ideologies and viewpoints. "In our group we have two agnostics, two atheists, three Roman Catholics, one Quaker and a number of other Christians," said Beltrami. "We don't have a theological position."

Bob George, for example, who lives in Forest Park and is vice president of a mid-sized education company, thinks of himself as a pacifist and did alternative service during the Vietnam War era as a conscientious objector.

"I do not believe in killing others," he said, "and advocate for non-violent ways of solving our challenges and problems."

Beltrami classifies himself as a "pragmatic pacifist."

"Bob is more of a pacifist than I am," he said, "and Stephanie is more than Bob." That would be Stephanie Bilenko, a sales assistant for a manufacturer's rep group and a resident of LaGrange Park.

"I am a pacifist," she acknowledged. "In my lifetime there have been no just wars. Maybe there have never been any."

When some suggest that being a pacifist means she's naive about human nature, Bilenko replies, "There have been periods of peace long ago. I believe our nature is to be good. One does not have to go along with violence and war which is always about power and not humanity."

What Beltrami means when he refers to himself as a pragmatic pacifist is illustrated by his answer to the question that has become the litmus test for determining a true pacifist: "How would you have responded to Hitler?"

"If Hitler had just invaded Czechoslovakia," Beltrami declared, "I'd send in an army." Then he grinned and added, "If I could have gotten to him when he was a teenager, I would have introduced him to marijuana."

The diversity of viewpoints in PAL is also illustrated by the way the membership voted in last fall's presidential election. One voted for Dennis Kucinich. Some cast their ballots for the socialist candidate. "I voted for Obama," said Beltrami, "because he can walk and chew gum at the same time."

PAL meets in an upper room at the Buzz Cafe on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month from 7 to 9 p.m. On the second Wednesday the gathering focuses on the business of planning events and discussing activities. Two weeks later, the meeting focuses on a speaker, movie or other informative event.

On May 27, the group watched a video expose of the Blackwater Group which alleges the private security firm made $593 million in 2006 alone, states that private consultants account for half of the personnel in Iraq right now and predictes that in the near future police forces in the U.S. will become privatized.

The group, of course, has no data to prove that protesting or providing information has changed hearts and minds. But they believe that making people more aware will lead to change. In his typically candid and outspoken manner, Beltrami said, "Why do we think that getting rich people in River Forest to honk at us is going to cause world peace? If we get enough people thinking about it, they will come to certain questions."

PAL often cooperates with other progressive groups in the area like Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the Near West Coalition for Peace and Justice, Amnesty International, the Oak Park Coalition for Truth and Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Can't Wait and the ACLU. The issues PAL is focusing on right now are the war in Iraq, accountability for the Bush administration's use of torture, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

"I hate to sound like Obama here," Beltrami said, "but the more divergent ideas we bring in, the better off we will be." For more information call 708-692-5818.