Beautiful Wolf Statue at entrance of Kane Area High School
A vision comes to life for Jim Sirianni. "Several months ago I woke up from a sound sleep with a vision in my mind of a wolf monument at Kane High School. The vision was very real and to me seemed so important that I could not get it out of my mind and felt that I had to pursue it,” said Sirianni. I knew of the wolf statue at Forest Lawn Cemetery and contacted Kris Hulings, the superintendent of Forest Lawn to get information on how that wolf statue was purchased. Hulings informed me that an anonymous donor whose husband’s father worked for Dr. Mccleery felt that there should be a wolf monument in Forest Lawn because Dr. Mccleery, the man who brought the last remaining Buffalo Wolves to Kane back in 1921, is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
I asked Hulings to contact the anonymous donor with my intention to somehow purchase or do a fundraiser for a wolf monument at Kane High School. Through Hulings help the donor informed us that there was no need to purchase a wolf because after hearing of the idea the donor decided to purchase and donate a wolf statue for us. Hulings and I tried to pursue getting rocks for the monument in numerous places but finally decided that there were perfect stones on the grounds of the high school that could be used. Al Detsch and Dan Madigan, high school maintenance workers very willingly helped choose stones and the project began to take shape. Detsch and Madigan were the “brains and muscle” behind the choosing of the stones and the arranging of the stones into a shape that looks very much like a wolf den. The life-size wolf statue finally arrived at the end of July and miraculously it is posed in the exact stance that I had envisioned in my mind.
Kane Screens donated four pieces of 10-gauge galvanized steel plates and the bolts for attaching the wolf to the rock monument and Hulings and his son Austin supplied the labor to attach the wolf securely in place. We soon plan to add solar powered spotlights to the monument so that when sports teams travel back to Kane High School after away competition, they will be greeted with our animal totem in full nighttime visual display.
Because of Kris Hulings, Madigan and Detsch we now have a beautiful wolf monument that shows the world who and what we are. In my view there is no more historically significant animal totem that speaks for a school’s legacy as we have in our Kane Wolves name. As I always like to say to former students and athletes, “Live the Dream and be Proud.”
"The monument would never have happened if not for the effort of Kris Hulings and the generosity of the anonymous patron, all credit goes to both of them,” said Sirianni.