Unearthing the stories we share is a wonderful journey
I’m starting to amass a collection on my cellphone of the voices of those we’ve lost.
Maybe amass is the wrong word, because there’s only two. Usually, I delete the interviews I record for this column shortly after it’s published in order to save precious memory needed to record future interviews.
But occasionally I save the files, after a great conversation, perhaps, or if too much ended up on the cutting room floor and there’s potential to revisit what was said.
One of those conversations was with my friend Mary Compton, who died about a year ago. She’d been fighting cancer for years, but still found the time and energy to write and photograph some amazing stories for the Daily Southtown and other publications.
I’d called her to interview her. Beyond her journalism exploits, she’d long been a force for good in the south suburbs, linking people in need to available resources and never hesitating to help out wherever she could. I’d learned she had entered hospice care and I wanted to write about her.
She wouldn’t have it. The reward was inherent in having done the good things. No credit was due.
“What a wonderful journey we’ve had,” she says from my phone in a recording I wasn’t able to delete then and likely never will, no matter how tight my storage becomes.
Mary died not long after that, and the opportunity to credit at least one of her good deeds arrived from another friend, Homewood historian Elaine Egdorf. She’d vowed to Mary she would keep secret Mary’s efforts to save photo archives from the Southtown and Star newspapers, which were in danger of being lost as the newspapers were hurriedly being evicted from their longtime headquarters at 159th Street and Harlem Avenue in Tinley Park.
That story became my first Landmarks column of 2023, a year that offered lots of ways to continue learning about this region I’ve long called home, while at the same time shining a spotlight on the kindnesses, and sometimes sadness, we share with our neighbors.
There aren’t many events that capture the essence of kindness, joy and, at the same time, a hint of sadness as well as graduations. They happen annually, but are major nonetheless. When Bob McParland, an excellent communicator from High School District 218, sent me a tip in April about graduate-to-be Kentrell Carson, a senior at Shepard
High School in Palos Heights, it opened a window on an event that all of us experience in some way. Not all landmarks are structures, and not all are old. This time, the landmark was a young man who’d left a legacy of kindness and was about to move on to the next adventure.
Sometimes it’s hard to accept when things have moved on. Such was the case with a reader who sent me an angry email after I wrote about the impending closure of longtime Chicago Heights fixture 3 Star Tavern, a one-time bocce ball mecca and center of Italian American culture in a working-class neighborhood abutting the city’s first steel mill.
“That the 3 Star is closing is a true tragedy. Really. It reflects upon the scrambled brains of people today,” my correspondent wrote.
In reality, the conditions that made 3 Star, as it was, a successful establishment for so long no longer exist in the
Hill. Many of the working class Italians who lived nearby became upwardly mobile Italian Americans who lived elsewhere. The working class families who moved in to replace them have different cultural attachments. Such is the ever-changing landscape of our area and another part of what makes it continually fascinating.
The actual landscape holds plenty of stories as well, even as flat as it generally is. In February, federal scientists came to Monee to launch an aerial survey of groundwater systems in an effort to limit pollutants that cause algal blooms and other problems for people downstream. It was cool to learn that we were the focus of an important study, but even better to be reminded that it’s good to live upstream.
Of course, we weren’t always upstream. Changing that took some tremendous effort by the engineers of the past. The reversal of the Chicago River is often cited as one of the engineering wonders of the world, but an often forgotten part of that process involved the Calumet River, one of our main waterways. It was turned into something of an open sewer but its history is being harnessed to engage people with recreation and pride of place.
A recurring example is in Thornton, where an artesian well tapped into the same groundwater being studied on the federal level has been touted for two centuries as the basis for good things to drink. Even now Thornton Distilling is operating out of the “oldest brewery in Illinois” that was established at the well head.
Creating links to the land is a recurring theme in the former prairie land that makes up much of suburbia. Even when the story is ostensibly about native plants, soil and wildlife, it’s ultimately the people who are working with those elements that make the biggest difference. Human occupation of what’s now known as Chicagoland has occurred for thousands of years, and still there are new stories to be told.
Some of those stories were short-lived, such as the ghost towns passed up by railroads that live on in subdivision names and other ethereal traces.
Others have become legendary because of the fortitude of those who participated, such as the freedom seekers who traveled through the area’s portion of the Underground Railroad, and the persistence of chroniclers such as Larry McClellan who help keep them alive.
And in some cases it’s a particular passion that gives landmark status to a place, such as with the longtime lock museum at Elmer & Son Locksmith in Steger.
Sometimes, landmarks are hidden in the landscape, such as the unassuming building in Oak Lawn where seminal rock albums of the 1980s were recorded by bands such as Styx, whose music is still played on the radio.
Some are known and remembered by just a few lucky people, such as those who got to go sledding at the now-gated retention pond at 175th Street and Governors Highway in
Hazel Crest.
But they all contribute to the stories and history of suburbia. It’s our collective folklore, something that can be expressed in song or story or countless other ways.
It’s something I love to explore, and I look forward to spending another year on the hunt for the people and places that resonate with us all.