Momentous work
Artist who created veterans memorial was Homewood’s first female police officer
Anna Carroll was driving from one part-time job to another when she said a prayer.
Just off her overnight shift at the Tolentine Center in Olympia Fields, where shehelmedthe front desk, Anna Carrollwas on herway to a deliver a portrait drawing to a granite company in Lynwood so a family could approve it for etching on a burial monument.
“On my way there I was just praying in the car, please help me get some type of job where I wouldn’t have to have 15 different part-time jobs,” she said.
More than just a full-time job, that October 1992 morning brought Carroll, who now lives in Batavia, an opportunity to participate in a project that she hopes will last forever.
The images ofU.S. military men and women she created and etched onto the Lansing Veterans Memorial at the Lansing Municipal Airport are, after all, carved in hard stone, the same black granite used in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial inWashington, D.C.
Her boss had been working with the group of veterans trying to establish the monument on the corner of Burnham Avenue and Glenwood-Lansing Road, handed her a pen doodle of stick figures and told her she was the right person to create the granite mural.
“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Carroll said. “Talk about having your prayers answered!”
It wasn’t Carroll’s first experience doing something monumental. Almost 20 years before that, in 1976, shebecamethe village of Homewood’s first female police officer. Like with the memorial in Lansing, the opportunity came as something of a surprise.
“Itwasn’tmydreamtobea police officer,” Carroll said. A single mother who was working in downtown Chicago as a clerk at the state’s attorney’s office, she was at St. Joseph’s Church in Homewood when she thought, “I need a job close to home.”
SoafterMass shewalked across the street to the police station to “see if they needed secretarial help— that’s the kind ofwork I’d been doing,” she said. The sergeant she talked to told her to apply instead to be an officer.
“He told me they’re going to be hiring their first policewoman,” she said. “There was a young policeman standing behind him listening, and he laughed. As he was laughing, he unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pantsandtuckedin his shirt. This was going on while he was laughing and saying, ‘ what’s she going to do, wear a bulletproof bra?’
“I thought tomyself, I’ll showyou. I’ll get the job.”
She took the agility tests when they eventuallywere offered.
“I passed everything,” she said. “I was in good condition. I’d been doing chin-ups on my son’s swing set just so I could showthat guy.”
Still, shewasn’t in it to break barriers, she said, or to advance any cause.
“I needed to have a job to support my family,” Carroll said. “And I got the job.”
But she couldn’t escape being different fromthe rest of the force.
“Therewere a handful of peoplewhohad a hard time accepting there was a woman working there,” Carroll said. One officer in particular, she said, would “key their microphone” every time she called in from her squad car, cutting her messages off.
“Fortunately I never was cut off the air when Iwas calling for help or anything like that,” she said. “But I was let in on the fact that Iwasn’t liked just because Iwas a girl.… Therewere a couple of peoplewho couldn’t accept reality.
“I try not to remember things like that although every nowand again I do.” Carroll said, adding there also were some on the force “that I remain friends with that were just regular people and good people.”
It seemed like her career pathwas settled until she was involved in a car crash and fractured vertebrae in her neck. Afterward, in 1985, “I was forced to leave the
Homewood Police Department and take disability,” Carroll said. “I didn’t want to leave.”
She was back to square one, and because of nerve damage suffered in the car collision, shewas having a hard time finding another job. She’d always enjoyed artwork, and her parents bought her lessons with Glenwood portrait artistMohommad Drisi, who once painted a commissioned portrait of Princess Grace ofMonaco. She kept at it, drawing Christmas and Easter cards for her church to send to parishioners.
A few years later, she was picking out a headstone for hermotherwhohadjust died.
“There was a black monument with a rose etched on it and itwas so beautiful and intriguing,” she said. “I had to find out how to do that.”
Carroll tooksomeof her churchdrawings to the monument company, and “ended up coming home with a tiny headstone and etching tool, and they told me to draw a cherub on there,” she said. “I had no idea how to even start. So I just started scratching the surface. Once I got started, I liked it. I liked whatwas happening.”
A few years later, she was spending most nights for six months in a hangar at the Lansing airport, sitting on giant slabs of
granite and scratching images of American warriors into them.
Her friend Elaine Egdorf, a Homewood historian who had met Carroll years earlier as a police officer, would come and visit her sometimes when sheworked.
“She did the drawings at home then transferred the drawings onto the granite with white chalk,” Egdorf said. “She sat on the granite and etched in the drawings, then she would erase the chalk with the pink socks on her feet.
“It was a mammoth job, doing this etching that was larger than life, and at the same time, shewas raising her son too.”
She also was taking care of her elderly father, and after he and Carroll’s son, Ben, went to bed, she’d head to the hangar to continueworking on the memorial.
Carroll’s two brothers had served in Vietnam — “they both came back safely, thank goodness,” she said — so it was a project with personal significance for her.
And when it was dedicated, a veterans group in Washington, D.C. that had requested Carroll’s pink socks — “she didn’t know why at the time,” Egdorf said — presented them back to her in a framed shadowbox.
In the years since, she etched the police
memorial outside the Hammond Police Station in Indiana, as well as a series of 22 monuments at cemeteries where the remains of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are buried.
The Lansing Veterans Memorial has continued to grow over the years, with the addition of a Vietnam-era Huey helicopter, sculpture and other elements, but at its heart remainsthe etchedimageof participants from all U.S. wars gathering around a fallen comrade, one that’s universal to every fight in every era.
And even though Carroll never fought in war, she said shewas glad to have had a role in the creation of the monument.
“I was lucky to be asked to be involved with that, because it’s meaningful to me,” said Carroll, who no longer draws or etches because of hand tremors.
“I just appreciate the fact that I was able to do all the artwork I did, especially the monuments that are there forever, those great memorials.”