Evanston

Since he was Calvin Coolidge’s vice president — an insignificant office under an insignificant boss — few people remember Charles Gates Dawes. However, he won a Nobel Peace Prize and wrote the melody to “It’s All in the Game,” which was a No. 1 hit for Tommy Edwards in 1958, making him the only vice president to top the pop charts.

Morton Grove

Morton Grove got a little less loud when Jeff Garlin’s family moved to Florida when he was in sixth grade. Garlin returned to Chicago after college to perform with Second City. I’m sure you heard him.

Wilmette

Like everyone else on the North Shore, Charlton Heston claimed to be from the wrong side of the Metra tracks. “Because I grew up in small, rural St. Helen, Mich., Wilmette was a strange land for me,” Heston wrote in his autobiography, In the Arena. “It was an affluent suburb. I don’t think many of the men who lived there had the desperate worries about feeding their families that Chet Heston, my stepfather, faced during those Depression years. Here, where we settled as Chet finally found work, there were country clubs and beach clubs and wide, shaded streets.”

Harwood Heights

No one famous has ever lived in Harwood Heights — or ever would.

Oak Park

Ernest Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, but there is no evidence he ever called it a town of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” That is an accurate description, though.

Berwyn

“Eye of the Tiger” composer Jim Peterik rose up back on the streets of Berwyn. Our distant descendants will still be playing air guitar to that song after Berwyn has crumbled to dust.

Hinsdale

The original Morris the Cat was adopted from the Hinsdale Humane Society in 1968. According to the society, “HHS staff members noticed the cat’s charming personality and contacted Bob Martwick, a professional animal trainer who worked for the Leo Burnett advertising agency. Martwick recognized a certain charisma and star quality.” At his audition, Morris bumped heads with the art director, who declared, “This is the Clark Gable of cats.”

Evergreen Park

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, learned to hate the world at Evergreen Park High School.

Elk Grove Village

Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan grew up in Elk Grove Village. He had a full head of red hair then. Corgan once told Mancow Muller the media “no longer gets” the salt of the earth folks from his home suburb.

Burnham 

You’ve probably never heard of Burnham, which lies across the city limits from Hegewisch. You may have heard of Republican political strategist Mary Matalin, who married Democratic political strategist James Carville, and has made it work for 30 years.

Elmhurst

Carl Sandburg lived at 331 S. York St. in this village of small shoulders from 1919 to 1930. He never wrote a poem about Elmhurst, though.

Wheaton

Muckraker Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal, grew up in Wheaton and never lost his Midwestern accent. The family of fellow Wheatonite John Belushi enlisted Woodward to write a book about the comic’s final days. They hated Wired, and they hated the movie even more.

Northbrook

John Hughes’s family moved from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to Northbrook when he was 12. Glenbrook North High School would become the inspiration for The Breakfast Club’s Shermer High (named after Shermer Road, which runs through the northern suburbs). Hughes’s movies defined suburbia for film audiences in the 1980s. According to his National Lampoon colleague P.J. O’Rourke, Hughes was eager to rescue his native grounds from the notion that “America’s suburbs were a living hell almost beyond the power of John Cheever’s words to describe.”

Lake Bluff

Richard Marx once drove his Jaguar an hour from his lakefront mansion to the Lighthouse Tavern in Rogers Park to confront me about calling him “shameless” in a blog post. 

Dolton

When the Illinois Tourism Bureau needed a celebrity spokeswoman for its “Middle of Everything” campaign, it chose south suburban gal Jane Lynch, who got her start at Steppenwolf, The Second City, and the Annoyance Theater before starring on Glee.

Palos Heights

Paul Vallas, unsuccessful candidate for governor, lieutenant governor, and mayor, lives in Palos Heights when he’s not renting an apartment in Bridgeport to meet Chicago’s residency requirements.

Libertyville

Adlai Stevenson, who lost two presidential elections to Dwight D. Eisenhower, was originally from Bloomington, but built an estate here in 1938, becoming so associated with the village that newspapers called him “The Man From Libertyville.”

Lake Forest

In 1986, Mr. T spent $1.6 million on an English Tudor mansion — then cut down 100 trees on the property. The Lake Forest Chainsaw Massacre inspired a preservation ordinance to prevent residents from chopping down the trees that give the village half its name.

Bannockburn

Chance the Rapper is a South Side native, but he now lives in a $2.3 million mansion in this northern suburb, with a four-car garage, library, sauna, movie theater, and an outdoor swimming pool.

Maywood

Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, graduated from Proviso East High School. Cernan is also the only Illinoisan to walk on the moon, since Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 mission had a little problem.