People of Mount Prospect

Does MPHS have photographs: No

Address in Mount Prospect: Unknown

Birth Date: Unknown

Death Date: Unknown

Marriage
Date: Unknown

Spouse: Unknown

Children: Diane, Betty and Derwood

Interesting information on life, career, accomplishments:

E. H. Janssen was the first dentist in Mount Prospect. For many years he was the only dentist in Mount Prospect. He had an office in Mount Prospect, as well as offices in Chicago and Lombard. However, as Mount Prospect developed he began to spend most of his time here. His first office in Mount Prospect was at 100 E. Northwest Highway, but he later moved to a larger office at 214 E. Emerson.

Does MPHS have photographs: No

Address in Mount Prospect: Plum Grove Estates

Birth Date: Unknown

Death Date: Unknown

Marriage
Date: Unknown

Spouse: Unknown

Children: Unknown

Interesting information on life, career, accomplishments:

Dr. V. J. Jacey, who had offices in Mount Prospect, is believed to be the first doctor in the Chicago area to use penicillin. In 1944, penicillin was used by the military but was not available to civilian doctors. Dr. V. J. Jacey had a patient who was dying from a rare form of meningitis, so he wired Washington asking for a sample of the drug. It was sent over within hours and saved the life of the patient.

Does MPHS have photographs: Yes

Date of Interview: Unknown

Interviewer: Dolores Haugh

Oral History Text:

DOLORES HAUGH: …interviewer is Dolores Haugh. I’m interviewing Mary Jo Hutchings. I want to thank you, Mary Jo, for consenting to our conversation this morning. Well, there’s a lot of things that you know, Mary Jo, I’m sure, that are of interest to the people. I’ve known you for a long time, and have always felt that you’ve contributed so much, not only through the library but now through the Mount Prospect Women’s Club. We’re just going to kind of reminisce a little bit about when things started rolling, and pick your brain, so to speak.

MARY JO HUTCHINGS: Okay.

HAUGH: I think the one thing I left off at the beginning was your address, so if you just want to give me that, that’s okay.

HUTCHINGS:

HAUGH: And when were you born?

HUTCHINGS: County Cork, Ireland.

HAUGH: Ah! How wonderful. Sure ‘n’ begorra.

HUTCHINGS: Sure ‘n’ begorra.

HAUGH: And it says “when,” but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, I’m getting to the age now where it’s okay. 1919.

HAUGH: And your grandparents were? Why don’t we just skip that one over a little bit. When did you move to Mount Prospect?

HUTCHINGS: I moved to Mount Prospect June 26, 1965-one of the best moves we’ve ever done.

HAUGH: Oh, I love it. That’s what I like to hear. Have you ever lived anywhere else in the village?

HUTCHINGS: No, not in the village. My husband found this house on a rainy night.

HAUGH: Ch, how nice.

HUTCHINGS: He called me in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and said, “I found this house which I think is great. It’s close to the high school. We don’t have to bus them. Would you like to come up and look at it?” And I said, “No. If you like it, that’s fine,” and that’s what happened.

HAUGH: Were your children in high school then, or not yet?

HUTCHINGS: No, they had just finished eighth grade in Tennessee and were preparing for high school here, and so we were

looking for a good high school and we found one.

HAUGH: Right. Prospect, right?

HUTCHINGS: Yes.

HAUGH: Right on. And when you did move in, the downtown is pretty much where it is now, right?

HUTCHINGS: Yes, pretty much the same. I think it was a little different from what it is now. We used to shop at the A&P that was north of Central right there on [Route] 83, and that was very convenient.

HAUGH: Did you know Gusse~ that used to work in there?

HUTCHINGS: No.

HAUGH: Ch. I thought maybe you might. She was an old-timer in that A&P. Some of the other stores that you off-hand remember that you kind of used-how about the drugstore? Which one was there. ..?

HUTCHINGS: Ch, Duretti’s we got to know very well, because Grandpa and Grandma lived with us and so Mr. Duretti and I got to be old friends.

HAUGH: Real buddies. Now, that was in the same place it is now, right?

HUTCHINGS: Yes.

HAUGH: Ch, okay. At that time the village was growing-I mean, there were new stores coming in.

HUTCHINGS: Ch, it certainly was growing at that time.

HAUGH: But I think most of the time that you were here, I wanted to get into some of your earlier recollections of the library, and tell me a little bit about how you got into the Mount Prospect library and when, and a little bit about the background-and I’ll just let you talk.

HUTCHINGS: Well, that was funny because we moved here, as I say, in June and went in to get a card right away-that’s the first thing any normal librarian does is to see where the library is.

HAUGH: Oh, where did you go to school, by the way?

HUTCHINGS: The University of Illinois.

HAUGH: In library science?

HUTCHINGS: Oh, yes. I have a master’s in library science.

HAUGH: Wonderful.

HUTCHINGS: And I worked there-I worked at Northwestern; at the university library for a year after I had gotten my degree, and then I went to Lake Forest and I was there for five years, and then I went on to Northwestern University library. They didn’t know what to do with me up there, so they got me a special job which was their first reader’s adviser at Northwestern University. Of course, we were real pleased about that because my husband’s family is quite involved with Northwestern University, and one of our daughters graduated from Northwestern University.

HAUGH: Which one?

HUTCHINGS: Donna. But anyway, that would be a whole long story in itself. Let’s go back to what you asked me about. When we moved here, we went to the library, and the librarian came out and said, “Gee, you look familiar.” I said, “No, I just moved here two days ago.” And she said, “You’re Mary. ..Mary Jo something,” and I said, “Oh yes, I’m Mary Jo Hutchings.” And she said, “Crystal Lake.” I had been the librarian at Crystal Lake also-it sounds like I couldn’t keep a job, doesn’t it?-before. Mrs. Schlemmer was the [Mount Prospect] librarian at that time. The place was growing so tremendously and she really needed additional help.

HAUGH: You mean Mount Prospect itself.

HUTCHINGS: And the library, and people wanted things. They were moving in. You know, the population in 1960 was 18,000, and in 1966 it was 30,000. So you see, we moved in at a time when the place had literally doubled itself, practically, in population, and that’s always hard on the library or on anything-on the village itself. It was growing so tremendously. So she said, “You know, I just have to have more help.” I said, “Thank you very much, but, no, I’m not going to get involved with the library because I’ve got these two gals I’ve got to get straightened out,” and all of this. She said, “Oh, please. We need it so desperately, and I know you’d be a big help.” So, it didn’t take very much, and I came home and told Roy and he said, “Oh, no. Not again.” So here we were, and I joined the staff on September 15. Then in January Mrs. Schlemmer retired and they were l looking for a new librarian and, of course, I was there. I said, “Oh, I really don’t want to do administration. I love reference. That’s what I like to do.” But the board asked me to, so I stayed and I was still the acting librarian until March of ’81.

HAUGH: Great. Who was the head of the library board when you came on, do you remember?

HUTCHINGS: It isn’t important. I think it was Mary Berg, perhaps. The board was outgoing and very interested in knowing what was going on. It was very easy to work with the board. In fact, there were two women that are very responsible and whose names should be part of the history of the library, as far as I know it-that is, from the ’60s on. Mrs. Schlemmer did a great job of keeping the library together from the time the women’s club established it in somebody’s house many, many years ago in the ’20s, I believe, and until 1942 [when] the library became tax supported. She stayed with it the entire time until I was there, and worked day and night and night and day and gave it all she could. She deserves a lot of credit. But when the library had grown to such an extent that it needed additional professional help, why, these two women who joined the board-Mary Berg and Mary Clark-went down to A.L.A., found out all about. ..

HAUGH: What’s A.L.A.?

HUTCHINGS: The American Library Association. ..to find out, what does a good board member do, and believe me, they did it. And they deserve a lot of credit. It was marvelous working with those two people and the rest of the members of the board at that time. I don’t know what else you need to know, because it’s been a turbulent sixteen years for me …

HAUGH: But mainly with the village, right.

HUTCHINGS: …but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. All the time, there were differences among the two boards, financially, and misunderstandings concerning the growth of the library and the need for the growth of the library, both financially and professionally. It was to my advantage, and I’m very happy to say, that I was friendly with all members of all the boards throughout, and that was a difficult thing because there were very philosophical differences.

HAUGH: I remember the time somebody tried to put censorship in our library.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, my. That would make a very interesting thing; yes, it would. That came shortly after I was librarian, too. It was not one of the books I had purchased. Mrs. Schlemmer had purchased it, but I felt very strongly that I had to defend her right to have chosen it. As a matter of fact, it eventually ended up on the University of Illinois reading list for sociology. I’m not going to tell you the name of the book.

HAUGH: I know what it was, but I’m not going to say it either. Now tell me a little bit-when you came then, was the library in the place where the senior center is now, or did you moved into there? I can’t remember.

HUTCHINGS: No. The library was where [the senior center] is now. When we got there it was growing so tremendously; in fact, people came from Arlington Heights and all around to use the Mount Prospect library-they really did. We were in a growing situation, but the first thing I realized was that we had to move the children’s room from the downstairs upstairs before we could ever think in terms of expanding or getting a new library. The bad part of it was, there was no basement in that library-only in a very small part of it-so that it was not structurally able to withstand any more remodeling on the second floor, and there wasn’t any space to build around it because then there would be no parking.

HAUGH: Wasn’t there an idea of having a bookmobiles for a while?

HUTCHINGS: Yes. We did think about that, but that’s a very expensive operation, too, because you have to have the bookmobile, you have to have additional staff for that and insurance, and all kinds of problems with the bookmobile. The town is too spread out, really, for that and it was not feasible. The board looked at every alternative, and the only alternative that was really feasible was to expand into a new library. The first thing we did was expand upstairs, and that was very helpful. That enabled us to use the children’s room for a business section because when I first came to the library, the majority of our circulation was children’s books. We were located right next to the Central School, and so the majority of our usage was in the juvenile department. I felt we had to get more adults in there, so I bought heavily for the business community and they were very helpful also. The Rotary and the Kiwanis and the Lions Club; the Jaycees and the Women’s Club all gave us …

HAUGH: Did you get any money from some of the businesses?

HUTCHINGS: I just mentioned that they were very helpful and gave us money or expansion. And so, I think that really was the beginning of the real tremendous growth of circulation due to the business participation.

HAUGH: And there was a big changeover. And, of course, the location was great because you were right in the downtown area.

HUTCHINGS: We were right in the downtown area, which was excellent.

HAUGH: Sure, because people had to pretty much shop there until Randhurst opened, so there was a lot of people that had to go downtown.

HUTCHINGS: My first year in 1966 we had an exhibit at Randhurst and invited the secretary of state who is also the state library-at that time that was Mr. [Paul] Powell-and he came to our library. We had our first series of book reviews at that time and put in a copy machine. We had courtesy cards for teachers, and 2,900 kids enrolled in the summer reading program. We had our very first National Library Week celebration, a poster contest for the grade school children, an open house, and the Friends of the Library had a big book sale which yielded us $1,000 that year. And then right away, of course, because of the demand, the growth of the library, we extended the hours, and in ’67 we started to be open on Sundays. We also had large-type books. We were the first in the system to be open on Sundays, and we were the first in the system to have large-type books. We added a microfilm reader, a pamphlet [file]. We had junior volunteers, even. And then the Mount Prospect Historical Society had an open house for us-an appreciation-for the staff, for the Women’s Club, and we were very happy to have that in our honor. The Junior Women’s Club served Magnus Farm: for the first time we were able to do work for the shut-ins. And, of course, because our collection was so small, we immediately put in an American lending library; that is, where we were able to rent these books or best sellers and other books that we couldn’t buy at the time.

HAUGH: Now, is that the same or different from the interlibrary.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, no. That’s entirely different.

HAUGH: But you had that, too, didn’t you?

HUTCHINGS: When I first came here we did, and the books were processed in Oak Park. That didn’t seem reasonable to me, because if you needed a book and it was being processed in Oak Park, it took forever to get here. I stopped that immediately and did our own, because at that time we did have one professional and myself, and that one professional was Bertha A~~leb~ who was an excellent cataloger from the University of Wisconsin. So she and I cataloged all the books, and we were able to get them out as soon as we received them. If you wanted a book and it had not been processed, that didn’t stop us. We gave it to you anyway. So we did start to build up our circulation. We even had a computer lecturer introduced by Harper faculty. He came over and gave us a lecture on the computer.

HAUGH: Now, what year was that?

HUTCHINGS: That was 1969.

HAUGH: My heavens. Way ahead of the time.

HUTCHINGS: And in 1970 we were also the first library to circulate art prints. We charged $1.00 then-we’re a little but more lucrative now; you can have them for $8.00. And we also had cassettes and we were the first library to lend them. So in spite of the fact that we didn’t have a whole lot of money, we tried to stay up professionally with what was going on.

HAUGH: That was great; see, I was with the paper, if you remember, the Day Publications, in ’66 …

HUTCHINGS: I surely do.

HAUGH: …and one of the first pictures I had on the front page was of your open house. All these things bring other memories back, too.

HUTCHINGS: While I’m talking about it, I think I should indicate-and not because you’re here, because I’ve said it many, many times-that you, Dolores Haugh, have given so much to the community and we always felt if we were in any kind of problem or needed any kind of publicity, we would just call Dolores. You were an excellent friend of the library, and we appreciated it through the years.

HAUGH: Well. ..I don’t know if you know this, but I worked my way through high school in the library. I love library work anyway, and, of course, I’m like you-I get hooked on this research stuff. I still do.

HUTCHINGS: Right. It’s more fun-more fun than administration. However, we had wonderful people on the staff, wonderful people on board, and I must say I had a wonderful time and would not have traded it for anything. Eighteen happy, happy years. My husband was retiring and he said, “Hey, it’s time.” Thirty-eight years I had spent in libraries. They changed tremendously through the years, and I think I was there during the really, really fun time.

HAUGH: Just before all the computers and all the things-the technology took over, so to speak.

HUTCHINGS: Yes, although we did prepare ourselves. Before we moved to the new library, the women and the men on the staff did get a brief course from the C.L.S.I. people.

HAUGH: What’s C.L.S.I.?

HUTCHINGS: Well, let’s see-Cataloging Library Information System.

HAUGH: That’s okay. That sounds good.

HUTCHINGS: They were the only ones, of course, at that time that had the computerization of libraries, and we knew that this was the wave of the future so we’d better get with it, and we did and we learned about it. Of course, we did have computerization in our new library in ’76. I wrote the building program for that new building in 1976, but in 1975 during National Library Week a former president of the Women’s Club, Millie Heitman and I dug the hole for the new library.

HAUGH: Oh, that’s great.

HUTCHINGS: That was kind of fun.

HAUGH: Sure. The other thing I wanted to mention in regard to the library was not only your increase in circulation but when you first opened the building-the new building-you were criticized for not having enough books.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, absolutely.

HAUGH: Tell me a little bit about that, because the numbers went up.

HUTCHINGS: Ch, yes. The doubled in no time at all, and so our problem then was a lack of books. It’s just like moving from a very small bungalow into a large mansion, and we felt it was a mansion because we did have some room, finally, to spread out. I should have mentioned, too, that for a couple of years we operated out of a mobile unit in the back of the old library.

HAUGH: Because of space?

HUTCHINGS: The processing center was back there.

HAUGH: Ch, I never knew that.

HUTCHINGS: I had almost forgotten about that. You know, I’ve been retired for ten years, and a lot of things have happened and I just don’t recall. It’s kind of a long time ago.

HAUGH: Well, you know, one of the things I’m going to put in my article when I “do” you, is the fact that you came back to serve in the community again as president of the Mount Prospect Women’s Club. I want you to talk a little bit about that because I think that’s an important part of the history, too.

HUTCHINGS: Well, the Mount Prospect Women’s Club is philanthropic and social and educational, too. These women are really very dedicated, and we work hard on our luncheons and our other philanthropies in order to get the money to put back into the community. For instance, for scholarships we gave money to the police department, to the fire department, to the library, of course, and the library is very essential because we just never forget that it was founded by the women. In addition to our yearly contribution to the library, whenever any of our members die we always purchase books in their memory, and that’s a nice thing to do. I was also in the Friends of the Library for a couple of years.

HAUGH: Tell me a little about that. Do you remember when they started?

HUTCHINGS: Well, they had a Friends of the Library when I first came here in 1966. Somewhere along the line it kind of folded-around the ’70s, I think. But it has always been active, covertly. Today it is a very fine adjunct of the library, and has been successful with their book sales. Even when we moved to the new library, the second floor of the new library is now substantial enough to make a remodeling upstairs, and so we thought about that so that we wouldn’t get into that bind again. We brought in a lot of the old shelving from the old library upstairs so that the Friends could have a place to keep their books. That’s a luxury that probably no other library has because most Friends of the Library have to do it in somebody’s garage or basement or whatever.

HAUGH: Right. And it’s hard to sort and keep them in line, and so on.

HUTCHINGS: But as they need additional room, they can move upstairs. In fact, the administrative offices are already up there. I don’t anticipate a tremendous growth because the population had leveled off, if you’ll notice. From ’71 to ’75 it went from 35,000 to 48,000, and in 1976 it was pushing 50,000. Well, today-right this minute, practically-it is hardly more than 53,000.

HAUGH: That’s right.

HUTCHINGS: And so it has leveled off, and there really isn’t anyplace else to go. So, I think one of the nice things, too, about living in Mount Prospect is you know it isn’t going to grow that way too much anymore.

HAUGH: The only way to now is up, really, because your land is gone.

HUTCHINGS: That’s right, and we don’t want to go up as far as they want-a lot of people don’t. We want to keep this nice community the way it is.

HAUGH: That’s right, sure. Getting back a little bit to the downtown area again, do you remember if there were any factories or anything down in there?

HUTCHINGS: No, I don’t remember, but you asked earlier about stores and now it comes back to me. There was a wonderful time store across the. ..

HAUGH: Oh, Ben Franklin, wasn’t it?

HUTCHINGS: Yes.

HAUGH: Now, that was on Main Street.

HUTCHINGS: Out on Prospect Road across the. ..

HAUGH: Oh, okay, near Keefer’s, wasn’t it?

HUTCHINGS: I think on the other side. I think it was close to Keefer’s, perhaps on the other side of Main. I don’t know exactly, but I do remember that that was a wonderful store.

HAUGH: But it was on Prospect Avenue, though, wasn’t it?

HUTCHINGS: Yes, it was on Prospect Avenue.

HAUGH: I thought that they were at one time on Main Street over by the bakery. Now, was the library involved in the Fourth of July parades and things like that?

HUTCHINGS: Yes, and particularly in 1975. I’m glad you asked that-that’s kind of fun. I remember that we had a float in the July 4th parade, and it was called “Ben and Me”-Ben Franklin and me-and the reason we had it that particular time was that. ..do you know that on April 13 Jefferson was born, and in 1943 on that same date-the bicentennial of his birth-the library became tax supported-the first library became tax supported. So, we thought that was very good.

HAUGH: A nice, appropriate thing.

HUTCHINGS: We didn’t have too many through the years. We did have one other one that was quite good, but it was a little bit hard to get the time and the money to participate, and you really do need both.

HAUGH: For sure. We mentioned about having the Historical Society membership drive, but I know that the library has always been a good place to go to for history.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, yes.

HAUGH: You had a history file there, didn’t you?

HUTCHINGS: Well, when I first came to the library I wanted to know the history of the place, and so Mabel Abenheimer who had worked there for years did write down everything, and we do have it as near as we could determine. It should be in the history file.

HAUGH: That’s the history of the library, but what I’m talking about is the history of the village, because you had a lot of things in there, too, didn’t you, in your file?

HUTCHINGS: Well, as near as we could determine what had happened, and she was instrumental in helping us with that. So, we do have a history file; at least I’m quite sure we still do.

HAUGH: Sure, and I know you’ve always been supportive of the Historical Society, too.

HUTCHINGS: Oh, absolutely. Well, that’s very important because the Historical Society is the root of your town. I mean, you have to have a historical society, and I’m so happy that you are the president of it because if anybody really loves and radiates Mount Prospect, it’s you.

HAUGH: Well, thank you. You don’t have to put that in the script, by the way.

HUTCHINGS: It goes in the script. It better be in the script. It should be in the script-it is now. I mean, we’re talking objectively. We know that once we’re gone, we’re gone. We’re not worried about that either, but while you’re here there’s nothing wrong at all in accepting what is true, and it is true.

HAUGH: Thank you.

HUTCHINGS: There are many, many people. I’m not just saying that.

HAUGH: Well, I’ve always loved this town.

HUTCHINGS: And it shows.

HAUGH: It’s been my hometown for a long time. There’s so many times where there are things that are needed and nobody takes up the windmill fighting. You’ve got to have somebody that picks up the lance once in a while and goes for it.

HUTCHINGS: Yes, and you have dedicated yourself to that.

HAUGH: Well, one of the other questions I have here is, what is one of the fondest memories you have of the early Mount Prospect when you first came?

HUTCHINGS: That’s a hard one.

HAUGH: I know it is. What are some of the best memories you had of, say, the work that you did with the village? HUTCHINGS: Well, it was wonderful to see the library grow, and people really, really liking the library and wanted it to grow. It was a little bit unfortunate that we didn’t have a referendum, in retrospect, because I think the time was right and I think people would have voted yes. I really do, because a survey was made at the library and sixty-three percent of the population did want it and wanted it on referendum. However, I’ve never been involved in politics-I don’t understand politics; it’s one of the necessary evils-and the way it turned out it’s been a real blessing for the town because the senior center is a thriving club and a wonderful asset to the community. Also, the library itself-of course, in my estimation, the best thing that ever happened was the new library because we now had a wonderful space in which to grow, and we had a beautiful facility; modern, computerized. As I entioned earlier, I am of the old school, and I enjoyed being a librarian very, very much all my years. Now it’s time for the computer age, and I’m glad that we are a part of it.

HAUGH: I suppose going back again to the comparison of the downtown as it is today, you see as all of us do a tremendous change in the downtown. I don’t know if it’s for the better or not, but. ..

HUTCHINGS: Well, it certainly looks lovely, and I think the Garden Club and other clubs are taking care of the downtown area by the station-it looks so pretty.

HAUGH: I think it’s the village that’s doing that.

HUTCHINGS: The village is doing it.

HAUGH: Yes, I think so.

HUTCHINGS: Well, our village-I would like to say something for our village, because I think our public works has done a fantastic job. Our snow removal is just great. They have always been very, very helpful, and it’s just a wonderful place to live, in Mount Prospect. You can call the village hall and ask for help, and you get it. Harold Fields has done a marvelous job down there, too, and I think we really should be happy to be able to call up and know these people, and that’s what’s wonderful about the town. We still can call people by name, and that means a lot to me.

HAUGH: It keeps the hometown feeling, even though we are 53,000, right?

HUTCHINGS: That’s right.

HAUGH: Now, the last question I have is, is there anyone thing that you would want the children to remember about the history of their hometown?

HUTCHINGS: Well, I believe, the big library.

HAUGH: I think the library, of course. What else? HUTCHINGS: Well, we have wonderful churches in Mount Prospect. ..to read and they have intercommunication with their peers, and also learn something about discipline in the children’s room and, of course, they are exposed to so many wonderful things that a lot of people in a lot of communities still don’t have. Mount Prospect has everything; we really do. It’s fine, and I don’t know what special thing they would remember. They just should remember that they are born and love Mount Prospect, and when they get married they should come back and live here again. HAUGH: There you’ve got it. We’ll keep this town agoin’ here. You know, I had one more question that popped in my head. Weren’t you there when they started the zebra stripes [bar coding on library materials]?

HUTCHINGS: Oh, absolutely. We did all that in the old library before we ever came into the new library.

HAUGH: I couldn’t remember when that started.

HUTCHINGS: Oh yes, sure. That was part of the learning process for the computer, and the books all had the zebras put on because otherwise, you see, when we opened we were computerized so we had to have it for the light pen. Everything was ready to go when we went into the new library.

HAUGH: That’s great. Well, I know, because I use the library myself so much, when these different things kind of happened, but I couldn’t remember that. But I remember now, it was in the old library when we had the zebra stripes.

HUTCHINGS: There is only one regret, and that is that we have dispensed with the card catalog. I think that there are many,many, many people who still don’t know how to use the terminals. The card catalog, of course, is almost out of date now and people are starting to do that, but it still is a very wonderful-maybe historic-thing that we should hang on to, because a lot of libraries have not dispensed with their card catalogs. It makes it a lot easier for the person because when you’re using the computer you have to know the exact title. When you’re flipping through the cards, you might stumble on it. I know that many, many people say they wish they still had the card catalog, but I guess that’s progress.

HAUGH: I guess it is, whether we want it or not sometimes. Well listen, thanks again, Mary Jo, for your time and also for all the things that you have given to the community over and above the professionalism which you have always extended to everybody, but also I feel that the work that you’ve done on a volunteer basis with the Women’s Club has brought that up to a new height. Last year you won how many. ..?

HUTCHINGS: We won seventeen.

HAUGH: Seventeen awards, and that’s in your different departments.

HUTCHINGS: And two on the state level.

HAUGH: And then this year you had another large number.

HUTCHINGS: We had another two at the state this year.

HAUGH: And eleven, was it, besides that?

HUTCHINGS: Fourteen.

HAUGH: Boy, when you look back on your two years as president, you know that there was a lot of good works done. HUTCHINGS: Well, it’s because people in Mount Prospect are wonderfully gracious and they’re willing to work. I like people that will work. Ask any of myoId staff.

HAUGH: Yes, right. Well, listen, thanks ever so much again.

HUTCHINGS: Well, it was wonderful. I enjoyed it in a way, and yet I feel very unprepared because having been retired for ten years I hope some of these things I’ve said were correct.

HAUGH: They will be fine. Don’t worry about that.

HUTCHINGS: But at any rate, it’s been fun.

HAUGH: Well again, thanks. We’ll be working together, I’m sure, in the future.

HUTCHINGS: I will look forward to that.

Does MPHS have photographs: Yes

Date of Interview: September 25, 1991

Interviewer: Jim Jirak

Oral History Text:

JIM JIRAK: I’m working on behalf of the oral history project for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the village of Mount Prospect. This evening I’m talking to Norbert C. Huecker at his home at 518 Noyes Street in Arlington Heights. Today is September 25-this is a Wednesday-1991. The time is about 7:00 in the evening. Norb, I want to thank you for agreeing to be interviewed and for signing the release forms. We appreciate your help in this project. Let me start out by asking you something simple, we hope-what is your full name?

NORBERT HUECKER: Norbert Heucker-H-U-E-C-K-E-R.

JIRAK: When were you born, and where?

HUECKER: 110 Northwest Highway; July 10, 1922. That’s right next to where the fire station and the police station was.

JIRAK: In Mount Prospect.

HUECKER: Yes.

JIRAK: And your parents were whom?

HUECKER: My dad’s name was Richard Huecker, and Amanda Huecker.

JIRAK: When did you move to Mount Prospect?

HUECKER: I was born there.

JIRAK: And so you have lived there all your life.

HUECKER: Yes.

JIRAK: What is your address now?

HUECKER: 518 East Noyes, Arlington Heights.

JIRAK: Have you ever lived at any other address in the village?

HUECKER: Ch, yes. In 1932 or something like that-or ’34-we moved over on 1 West Central Road in a home that my dad owned over there. That’s where the gas station is now. There was a home there before we torn that down and made a gas station there. When he moved there he had the garage next door, and we sold Plymouth and-first he sold Fords in 1932 there, and then he picked up a Ford in Detroit that time and it took nine quarts of oil to get back to Chicago. He said, “I’m not selling that car,” so then he sold Plymouth and DeSoto. But prior to that-this goes back to 110 North Northwest Highway-that’s where I was born-in the back there my dad had repair shops-a couple of repair bays back there; a pit to work on cars, too-and had the gas pump right out on Northwest Highway there where he sold gas. And then in the front of this building that they just tore down about three or four weeks go, he had one window in there and he would open up that window and he would put a car in there-because he was selling open pontiacs and stuff like that there-and he would put a car in there, and on the other side of the store he sold some of these radios. These were the first radios that came into Mount Prospect. They ran on a storage battery like they’ve got in a car, and that’s the only battery they really had. You know, you have to charge these batteries up. But he sold those, and then he fixed shoes and all that stuff in the same building there. Then it was in 1932 or something that he had moved over on Central Road and Main Street-there’s a home there-and he bought the garage and that stuff in the back. That’s when he went into Ford for ’32 and then he stopped on account of the oil burning and then went into Plymouth and DeSoto for two years, and then he sold Fords again until 1937. Then in 1937 we dug all the dirt out by that corner there where the house is at and started making a gas station out of that. But prior to that, you figure from that building on-where I was born-you had Busse’s Grocery Store and you had Burda’s.

JIRAK: Where were they located?

HUECKER: They were right on the corner of Northwest Highway and Emerson. Burda’s had the drugstore there. And then there were doctors-Dr. Jensen had offices in that same building upstairs, and Dr. [William] Granzig. And if you go down the street a little north, there was nothing but homes, like the Busses-there was Castrina Busse, Edwin Busse and all of them just had homes all along there. That was really the only business that was there. I can remember right there at 110 Northwest Highway-that building that they just tore down-that was a cornfield. Right after the cornfield they had a baseball diamond there. I remember all the guys in town used to play baseball there. Anyway, they made a baseball diamond. We lived in the lower apartment there, and I remember they would be breaking windows all the time. They were playing with a sixteen-inch ball. But they fixed all the windows. Nothing’s been said here around town; well, I remember the creamery over there where Schimming used to be, but I don’t remember anything about it. And then, like I say, there was Crofoot Co. that had factory over there, right next to where the old village hall was.

JIRAK: Do you remember what they made?

HUECKER: Well, Crofoot made staples-staples for stapling paper together. And then there was a cash register place in there, too. They made old cash registers-well, they weren’t old then; they were new cash registers-but they made those there. The man was Crofoot, and I think he made the Crofoot staples. But as you go down Busse, the florist over there was my uncle. When he got married my grandfather gave him a lot and a house right over there as a wedding present, and then he started the greenhouse over there. As you come along past the stores and you get down to the corner, [John C.] Moehling had that building on the corner over there. I think there is a chiropractor in there now.

JIRAK: Corner of …?

HUECKER: Of Main and Northwest Highway. There was a tavern in there, and I remember as a kid going in there with my dad. And then there were stores there-Meeske’s and some of those. They had a dry goods store. I remember the one fellow had a dry goods store-a nice man-and he would go downtown if people needed a spool of thread or something like that- the next day he would go downtown and pick up these ladies spools of thread. I can remember being in a gas station, pretty near a block away; he had a laugh like you wouldn’t believe. You could hear it a block away. But anyway, I don’t know how long he stayed there. Then right across the street, the First Bank building was on the corner of Busse and Main Street, and I remember when the bank moved out of there and they moved into the other quarters that was a little restaurant. I remember eating in that restaurant. Other than that, there was nothing but farms all around. Central Road and Northwest Highway and Rand Road and Foundry Road-nothing but farms just allover. I can remember, too, the farmers used to come into town with sugar beets. Sugar beets was a big thing in those days, and they would bring the sugar beets over by the railroad tracks. They had a method of lifting the trucks up and pouring the sugar beets in there, and then they would haul them away. But I can remember as a kid, playing on Northwest Highway, the first cement they had on it. They were adding lanes, but I can remember playing on Northwest Highway, sitting on the bales of straw. There are so many things [we did] as kids that I remember-I’m 69 years old-that kids [today] will never see, like seeing an ice man come, carry ice on his back and carry it up and put it in the icebox [after] they called you. I remember the mil~man, too, and how they would come down the street, and how in the wintertime that little cream would push out of the bottle and we’d try to get it. But so many things that kids would never realize or just can’t imagine. Just the same as I remember my dad when he sold cars, people would trade in bicycles, pianos, gold and everything else. When they bought a car they would trade all this stuff in. I can remember the gypsies that would come into town would buy old gold and that stuff, too. My dad would get a watch in trade on a car and I thought that one time that I could fix it. I tore it all apart. Well, I never got it together, but when the gypsies came to town I think I sold it, and maybe I got a dollar and a half for it. Like I say, Kruse’s on the other side of the railroad tracks-they were there. He was a beer distributor, plus he had the tavern and a restaurant there. People really liked it. In those days you would go in a tavern-well, I don’t visit them anyway-but they would have cheese and crackers there to eat and nibble on. But they put out wonderful meals. Prior to that, Herman Meyn was on the corner of Busse and Northwest Highway where the Carriage House is now. That’s where he started with his blacksmith shop. Then he moved over there on Emerson Street in back of P & Me, and that’s where he had his tractor place. I can remember horses in there, and I can remember shoeing the horses and how the horses would go to the bathroom. What a messy job-the horses going to the bathroom, and all that stuff, too. But he shoed horses in there, too. He was a hard-working guy. I remember on Pine Street the pickle factory they had there. I think it was Budlong pickle factory [Schillo Brothers Pickel Factory], and I remember the vats they had there. We got a kick as kids-and I know we’d throw things in the vats. And the birds, they’d be in there-Lord knows what they were putting in there-but I can remember we’d take pickles out of there and eat some of the pickles. They were good, but the sanitation wasn’t too good. They had onion houses there, too, where he would have onions all the time. Come Halloween, the biggest thing somebody would do on Halloween would be to tip over somebody’s outhouse. That was a big thing. Even like on the corner where I’m at-Central and Main, where I have my gas station now-across the street from that there was greenhouse there by the name of Homeyer-I think his name was Homeyer; Charlie Homeyer. He had that greenhouse there, and then later on in years a guy by the name of Bill McReynolds-they called it Hook’s Nursery-he was there. But I can remember as a kid, working across the street over there for 35 cents an hour, and there was no such thing as sticking your head up and looking around. You worked for that 35 cents an hour. Even for Heine Kruse-I worked for Heine Kruse; he was an uncle of mine-I worked on the beer truck from 5:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night for two dollars a day, and he said, “Don’t get hurt. I haven’t got any insurance on you.” But it was fun years. All along Central Road, it really was nothing but farms.

JIRAK: Norb, let me ask just for the record, can you tell us within an outline what considered the downtown area-what were the boundaries.

HUECKER: Well, the Busses on Emerson and Northwest Highway. That was about it. Later on in years it ran over where Main Street is over there-that was really about the biggest extent of it. Nobody realizes it, but that Elmhurst Road, as you see, it is an S-curve. But we had a commissioner in town, there, that was related-William Busse, the commissioner. I think he was mayor at the same time. His son had that garage there. It was Albert. When they made that road, Commissioner Busse said, “You’re going to bend that road, and you’re going to put that in front of my son’s garage,” and they did it. They bent it and put it in front of his son’s garage. In those days, they could have run it right straight through. There’s nothing there. But he said, “I want that road to go in front of my son’s garage,” and they put it in front of his son’s garage. But to me, it raised the value of my property, too, so I can’t complain. I can’t remember-on the other side of the railroad tracks-when those stores really started over there. That was later on. But the way I see and from what I hear, it’s just a shame that I don’t have my dad or I don’t have somebody really to inquire of why my dad even had the garage there. That was over there on Central Road. He sold gas, and that’s where he sold Fords until 1937. This was in ’34, and there was a lot of bootlegging. I can remember cars in there that they had confiscated or picked up. They had guns in them or liquor, and the police department was holding them. People don’t realize-I was driving through Arlington Heights the other day and I was telling a fellow right along Northwest Highway here in Arlington Heights-I think it was a gravel road or a two-lane road-I can remember they had a cigar store, Gander Cigars. Do you remember that?

JIRAK: Yes.

HUECKER: I can remember it was named after the guy’s geese, and the geese would be walking around there by the road. We went to church in Arlington Heights then, and I can remember my one uncle Mr. Deering, why, we’d be driving along, and he chewed tobacco. He spit out the front window and it would come in the back. We kids would dive on the floor. But between the sugar beets and things like that, there were peonies. Peonies were a big thing. Everybody was growing peonies. On Miller Road there were nothing but peonies. I remember my uncle across the street, Mr. Deering, had a lot there-a 50- or lOa-foot lot-they grew nothing but peonies. Between the peonies and the sugar beets, I think that was one of their biggest things. And as far as the automobiles, the only dealers at that time, really, was Busse and my dad.

JIRAK: Which Busse was that?

HUECKER: That was Albert.

JIRAK: Son of the commissioner, right?

HUECKER: His dad and his brother was the commissioner. But there was another fellow, Gilbert Busse, who was a wonderful man; the hardest working guy. You ought to see him working. He’d be there seven days a week working in that garage there for his brother Albert. Gilbert, he’s the grandfather to Wayne Busse. I can remember horses and buggies coming into town. On the corner of Central and Main, there, you’d see them. I can remember the one time, even Dr. Jensen had his horse, and he took the horse in co-Hopper’s Bowling Alley, and [in time] they got it thrown out. But he had the horse in the bowling alley. He was my dentist, but he was a nice guy.

JIRAK: Let me ask you, just to cover some of these point, where did your family shop for groceries?

HUECKER: Mainly right in town there.

JIRAK: Okay, with whom?

HUECKER: Busse’s store, and over at Meeske’s-you know, Meeskes had that place there. That would be the main ones.

JIRAK: Where were they located?

HUECKER: Busse’s was right on the highway-lOB Northwest Highway, or something like that; right next to where I was born.

JIRAK: And Meeske’s?

HUECKER: Meeske’s, they were on the corner of Busse by Elmhurst Road-right on the corner there.

JIRAK: That would be across from your station now.

HUECKER: Down on the next corner, right where the bakery is.

JIRAK: The Continental.

HUECKER: The Continental, yes-right there. That was Meeske’s building. The father had it, and then the sons. They ran it, but I don’t think they liked the business, or something.

JIRAK: Okay. How about clothes and shoes?

HUECKER: Well, this fellow right next to where the bakery is now, they had a dry goods place there, and they would sell stuff there, but I think the big thing in those days was Sears & Roebuck, you know-the catalog-because the catalogs were big and people would just order stuff from catalogs.

JIRAK: Was it pretty popular to go to Des Plaines, as far as youcan recall?

HUECKER: Oh, I’d say yes. Later on people would go to Des Plaines, because I can remember going to Des Plaines and you would-how many years ago was that? Forty-five years ago. They would have a five and dime there, too. My wife really came from Des Plaines, but I can remember you would drive around the block maybe four, five, six times before you could find a parking place up in Des Plaines to go into these stores up in Des Plaines there.It’s hard to believe, but the story years ago as to why Mount Prospect never really had anything as far as stores, but they said if the Busses didn’t own the land, they just didn’t go into business, and it’s seemed kind of a proven fact. As far as even on the other side of Central Road where the drugstore is now-Duretti’s-that was Hook’s Nursery and prior to that it was Homeyer, but I remember my dad bought a lot on the opposite corner, which was a parking lot. He bought that as a business in 1922, and that was taken out of business in 1934 because they just didn’t want any business down in that thing. They just wanted it as far as Hook’s Nursery was and the drugstore is now.

JIRAK: Where did you shop for hardware?

HUECKER: Wille’s and Busse-Biermann. They were there then. Busse-Biermann-I can remember, too, [you needed] coal in those days; we had coal. I can remember on Central and Main Street, my gas station-now we live there. My mother, she had chickens-raised chickens there, too. On Saturday she maybe baked thirty, forty loaves of bread. I’m telling you, there’s nothing better than that homemade bread with butter and jelly. I remember Dr. Granzig would come over every Saturday morning and we would have bread. But she would make thirty, forty loaves of bread and I think sell them for 20 cents or something like that. But then raise chickens; I remember she had guinea hens there. It was a fun time. I remember no sidewalks. There were no sidewalks by the gas station there. Nothing. Just nothing but fields.

JIRAK: How about your drugstore; medicines and so forth?

HUECKER: Burda-they were there. See, Burda’s, they were on the corner of Northwest Highway and Emerson. I remember they had some kind of contest there I won, too, one time. I won the first balloon-tired bicycle that came into Mount Prospect-the first balloon-tired bicycle-and I had it a long time. You talk of going to school there-across the street from me over there; the gas station there-the public school there, and prior to that they had a little school-a regular church, like-and they used that as a school first. I can remember going eight years to that one over there-that public school over there.

JIRAK: Is that the one in the rear of St. John’s?

HUECKER: No, that’s the one where the library is now. I can remember even as a kid going to grammar school. I hung around with a kid on the south side, down by the creek there. I can remember on rainy days the water was over the handlebars of a bicycle in a real bad storm. I remember in the creek-hunting along the creek; a lot of pheasants, too-but there was a lot of things floating in the creek there that you don’t see floating in there anymore. They’ve got it cleaned up. But even on Emerson Street, there was a farm. The Krohn brothers or something-they ran it. It’s just hard to visualize. The place was nothing but farms, all around Mount Prospect, which I imagine was allover.

JIRAK: How did the stores advertise?

HUECKER: Mainly by the sign in the front of the building, that’s all. They had a sign in the front of the building like “Busse’s Groceries,” or things like that.

JIRAK: How about newspaper advertisements?

HUECKER: Well, I think there was somewhat, but you didn’t see much of it. I don’t remember seeing much of it.

JIRAK: Nothing like today.

HUECKER: No, nothing like today. Because I don’t even know, really, way back when whether they really had anything as far as printing locally. I can’t remember about papers and that stuff.

JIRAK: Do you remember what some of the earliest factories in Mount Prospect were?

HUECKER: Well, the earliest one I can remember is the creamery and Crofoot’s, and then later on you had Illinois Range that started up down there

JIRAK: On Central Road.

HUECKER: And there was Milburn Brothers; they were in the excavator-contractor business.

JIRAK: Well, you had the pickle factory.

HUECKER: They had the pickle factory, yes, and the onion factory over there.

JIRAK: Did they actually can pickles?

HUECKER: No, they didn’t do it. They just had th:m there, and they were just like-pickling there. They put them in vats and let them lay there, then they were taken some other place and they were canned.

JIRAK: Oh, okay, they didn’t can them there.

HUECKER: No. They had no facilities for canning. I can even remember as a kid, when my dad was over there I used to raise pigeons. In those days, kids would come around and let my pigeons out. I remember digging big holes by the pigeon coops, then laying dirt and cardboard on top. Then they’d fall into it-you know, to keep them away from my pigeons. But there was no such thing as anybody suing one another in those days.

JIRAK: Right. Do you remember any particular interesting stories? You’ve told a little bit about some of the places-particularly the pickle factory-but do you remember anything special about the creamery or the other places?

HUECKER: No, I really can’t remember; just that it was a creamery and then it went into an oil company-Schimming Oil, or something, was in later years. I remember, too, even with the fire department, in those days-this is right where the police station and the fire station is right now-they used to have water fights with the hose and that stuff. The fire department used to fight against other towns. They would have barrels up on a wire and they would have water fights to see who could drive the barrel down to the other end.

JIRAK: There is mention here of the night the power plant burned down. Do you remember anything about that?

HUECKER: I don’t remember that. I don’t know a thing about it. I don’t know what year that was.

JIRAK: Other than the stores and businesses, which buildings were downtown? You’ve got the library, the hospital. ..

HUECKER: the hospital-like Busse’s store and then Busse-Biermann and Wille’s-that was about the extent of the businesses that I can remember, and the dry goods stores and some of the grocery stores.

JIRAK: Did they have a library at that time, in the early ’30s?

HUECKER: I don’t remember a library, no.

JIRAK: How about the hospital?

HUECKER: Hospital, yes. They had that one on the south side of the tracks. Woolfarth-he was the fellow that ran that.

JIRAK: I presume that was for people that had to be temporarily

HUECKER: Either that or I think for people that wanted to have babies or things like that. My daughter was born at home, but she turned out to be a good gal.

JIRAK: Wille Hall-do you remember anything about Wille Hall?

HUECKER: I remember the name, but I just can’t place it. I remember talk of it. It’s like where the water tower is there, too-that was the main business in town; police station, fire station. They had the jail there, you know. They had everything there. At that time a fellow by the name of William Mawsaw, I think he was the chief and he was the deputy and a judge and everything else in town-William Mawsaw.

JIRAK: Where did children hang out, and was there a lovers’ lane worthy of the name?

HUECKER: No, I don’t remember a lovers’ lane. I just remember years ago that I would see cars going down Emerson Street and parking down there because there were dead-end roads that didn’t go anywhere. That’s where a lot of cars would sit. I don’t’ know-they must have been doing some hugging and kissing or something in there.

JIRAK: Okay. Was there anyplace special that businessmen got together to talk?

HUECKER: Not really.

JIRAK: Perhaps the taverns?

HUECKER: I imagine, to sit in the tavern. You see, in those days, too a big thing was like I can remember him and Mr. Kleinswick and my dad, too-most guys, too-a shot and a beer. That was a big thing. Or Wille’s Tavern-that was a big meeting place for businessmen and for guys that hunted and fished and that stuff, too. They would meet in there and talk about fishing and hunting and all that stuff. But they had like a regular hunting club that originated out of Wille’s Tavern.

JIRAK: Do you remember anything about parades downtown, or other special events like picnics or fairs or town events?

HUECKER: I don’t remember too much about parades, but I remember years ago they did have some. A Mr. Schuette, who was a German man in town-he came from Germany and he had a son Frank and they lost him in the service. But I can remember they got some kind of a race together like they have now. That really is big time, you know-a bicycle race-and I remember he was entered in it. I don’t think that lasted-only a year or two and that was the end of that. It kind of fell away.

JIRAK: Were the special Fourth of July or Memorial Day celebrations? Can you recall some of those?

HUECKER: I think just later on. Not the early years-they didn’t have anything. They didn’t have, really, any business to do anything or participate in it.

JIRAK: One of the questions, did the town decorate for holidays? If so, how?

HUECKER: I don’t think in the early years they did, but later on I think they did. But another thing that people don’t know, where the Fanny May candy is now, right on the corner there, they had what they called a sunken garden. It was really pretty. They had a little pond in there with water running all the time, and then they had little benches in there where you could sit. It was really beautiful. What happened to it, I really don’t know. They just took it out of there. But it really was nice. You’d think something like that would be interesting to see, even in this day. You can’t now. All you do it sit over there and eat candy at Fanny May.

JIRAK: How did people come downtown when you first came to Mount Prospect, as you were growing up there?

HUECKER: Well, they had automobiles, but you would see horse and buggies coming to town and tie up there.

JIRAK: The trains then were steam trains, I take it.

HUECKER: Steam trains then, yes. Young guys liked gals, too, and sometimes they’d give a little toot on the old steam when they passed the gals, not that it would get a , you see, but just to scare them a little bit.

JIRAK: Do you remember riding on the train yourself?

HUECKER: Yes, I did a few times. Until this day I don’t think I’ve been on a train fifteen times.

JIRAK: Where did you go? Did you go downtown?

HUECKER: Yes.

JIRAK: We’ve talked about the sugar beets being shipped to and from Mount Prospect. Do you recall at all the milk pails and that sort of thing?

HUECKER: Ch, I remember milk pails standing all around, even on farms. If you went to farms, you would see milk cans sitting around to be picked up. Another thing about the Haberkamps-I don’t know if their name was mentioned yet or not-but you know they had the florist over there on Emerson Street on the other side. They were old-timers in town.

JIRAK: Yes. They were the other florist in town, weren’t they.

HUECKER: Yes.

JIRAK: The Busses and the Haberkamps.

HUECKER: In those days, though, it wasn’t like now. They had greenhouses-where my uncle, he was Fred Busse-but they had greenhouses where they would raise all their flowers and that stuff. Most of them would raise that stuff to sell, but now I think it’s pretty near all shipped in due to airplanes.

JIRAK: We can probably sum it up, Norb, but what would you say is your fondest memory of early downtown Mount Prospect?

HUECKER: Oh, I think just the way it was. You figure with the horses coming into town and, like I say, where I’m at now look across the street and there was nothing but horses and cows. You’d see the cars on Rand Road over there, see. It was just nice, you know, seeing that stuff. It was a nice, little town. It’s a shame that even all these young kids just couldn’t start off in a little, old town like that and then grow up. I remember when the population was about 900 in Mount Prospect. Even with Mr. [George] Whittenberg, the chief, I remember he came into town. He was an unemployed carpenter. At that time my dad was on the Chamber of Commerce, or something they had there like that, you see, and they were having a meeting over there by the water tower in the village hall. My dad said [to George], “Get over there. They’re having a meeting tonight, and they’re looking for a policeman.” And George said, “God, I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle or anything else like that.” But anyway, he went over and he got the job. I remember one time he was chasing somebody, or what, and a dog flew out in front of the motorcycle. He hit that dog, and the only thing that saved him was he slid on his side along the gun, you know-slid on the holster and wore that all through. That’s the only thing that saved him, otherwise it would have skinned him all to pieces.

JIRAK: Maybe this seems like an obvious question, but how has downtown Mount Prospect changed over the years? Do you like the changes, or was it better the way it was?

HUECKER: Well, I don’t think there was ever enough changes, see. Nothing was just done. It isn’t like Des Plaines or Arlington Heights where they had more stores, more things to shop. Mount Prospect was limited to the amount of stores they had, so you’re going to lose people by not having everything so handy. Des Plaines was only three miles away; Arlington Heights three miles away-people could go there and have a better selection of shopping and getting stuff

JIRAK: That should about wind it up, Norb. You’ve talked about if there was anyone thing that you would want the children to remember about the history of their hometown, what would it be? Can you sum that up?

HUECKER: Like I say, you go places now and it’s nothing but a little town with farmers around it. That’s all I can say, you know.

JIRAK: You liked that rural atmosphere.

HUECKER: I think so. If you’ve lived in it and you’ve seen it, you really kind of miss it. Not that I’d go to Wisconsin or places like that-you see these places, and I know I couldn’t stand to live there now, when you’ve seen all the excitement that goes on in Mount Prospect.

JIRAK: Well, that should do it. We thank you very much for consenting to be interviewed. You now will have a place in history.

 

Does MPHS have photographs: No

Date of Interview: June 27, 1988

Interviewer: Helen Becker

Oral History Text:

HELEN BECKER: This is Helen Becker recording for the Mt. Prospect Historical Society on June 27, 1988. I would like to introduce at this time Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hodges. Mrs. Hodges is related to some of the early, early settlers in Mt. Prospect, and I’d like to have her tell you –tell us –just who those ancient relatives are. Christine…

CHRISTINE MEYN HODGES: Well, my father was the late John Meyn, a blacksmith –the first blacksmith in the neighborhood. He was a blacksmith and a wagon maker. I remember Mt. Prospect as just a small, little, few streets, and there was probably a dozen children in all of the group. We enjoyed it very much.

BECKER: Where did you grow up?

CHRISTINE HODGES: We grew up –I was born and raised in this house that is still there on the highway.

BECKER: Northwest Highway?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Northwest Highway.

BECKER: Northwest Highway and what cross street?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Busse Avenue and the highway. It’s right at the point.

BECKER: Yes, where that triangle is there. That is where Bob Moore has his lawyers’ office right now, correct?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Right.

BECKER: That was the home and the blacksmith shop?

CHRISTINE HODGES: The blacksmith shop was at the point, and the home was next to it. We had a large house and a big orchard –every kind of fruit tree you want to mention — with a white picket fence around it. I remember that as a beautiful spot.

BECKER: The house is still there, though, you say.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes. The house is still there now.

BECKER: How many were in your family?

CHRISTINE HODGES: In all there were eight.

BECKER: What has happened to all of them?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, my oldest sister, she was married and moved to Chicago. The next in line in the family was my brother Herman F. Meyn. He lived in Mt. Prospect.

BECKER: What was he? What did he do?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, he was a blacksmith and wagon maker, too, but he was selling farm machinery, it seems like that, and later he was selling refrigerators and deep freezes and things like that with the other things. Then there was my sister Bertha, and she married Arthur Schellenburg from Arlington. He was the son of John Schellenburg, the mason contractor. Then there was Elsie, and she married Edwin Busse. He had a grocery store in town in later years.

BECKER: Oh, a connection with the Busse family.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes.

LAWRENCE HODGES: He was in the creamery at that time when they got married.

CHRISTINE HODGES: He was working at the creamery, the old creamery at the time…

LAWRENCE HODGES: His father always ran the creamery.

CHRISTINE HODGES: And then there was William, and he later started a grocery store. And there was John working for Busse Buick. He worked for Busse Buick. And then myself, and I was married to Lawrence here in 1925.

BECKER: Oh, then you brought him out here.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, from Elmhurst.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s where I lived. When we got married I ran a store in Barrington, and then they opened an A&P here when Busse built that building, and I came down here and worked in here for a little over a year, I guess.

BECKER: How did you meet Lawrence?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, I met him at Snell’s Corners, the dance place.

BECKER: Oh, a dance place.

CHRISTINE HODGES: I went in there with my two girlfriends, and I met him through my girlfriends.

BECKER: Oh, he must have been a good dancer.

LAWRENCE HODGES: She’s still alive.

CHRISTINE HODGES: I remember the town. It was very small then. The few children that were here, we were all friends. In the evening we would all get together out in that empty place –well, it was all empty. There were only two houses here.

BECKER: Two houses.

CHRISTINE HODGES: And we played games and things, you know.

BECKER: Two houses, you mean.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes.

BECKER: What two houses?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Schmaling’s.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Schmaling, and my dad’s house was the first one that ______.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And Luella lived upstairs of the tavern.

BECKER: At Main Street and Busse.

CHRISTINE HODGES: They didn’t have the tavern right off. They had a little building that is now the antique place. That’s where they had a building at that corner.

BECKER: Oh, where Wille Lumber is.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. Then later they built this tall building. They lived upstairs, and downstairs was Wille Tavern.

BECKER: Is that the present Wille Tavern?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, it’s a new building now.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s the son.

BECKER: The old tavern was not the present tavern.

CHRISTINE HODGES: No.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s still the owner. That’s the son, Adolph. Adolph started that. His father ran the tavern first, didn’t he?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, he was the first owner, William.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Then Adolph took over the tavern, and then when he built next to that building then his son helped him out in there. Adolph got to be, what, ninety-some years old, and he still goes every day. But he got killed, you know.

BECKER: Yes, I know he did. A couple of years ago, wasn’t it?

CHRISTINE HODGES: ________, I heard.

BECKER: Yes. He walked out in the street without looking, I guess. That was too bad.

CHRISTINE HODGES: But the Wille family lived on the second floor, and the tavern was downstairs. But there were only a few houses down Wille Street. The one at the corner up there at Central and Wille, there was a family living there by the name of Soenksen. And there were a lot of –well, they had about four children there, Erma, Freida, William, Alfred and …I’m trying to remember.

BECKER: I don’t remember the name Soenksen as one of the early families.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes, S-O-E-N-K-S-E-N. They lived there, and that grandfather used to be playing that accordion every night and on Sunday afternoon. Mt. Prospect was so quiet and so small that, we lived on the highway and we could hear the music allover town. For us kids that was great, you know. Oh, boy. We’d run over there and we’d enjoy listening to him. And they were a jolly family.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And where did the Holsteys come in? They lived next door.

CHRISTINE HODGES: The Holsteys, they moved in much later years, across the street on Wille.

BECKER: On Wille?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes.

BECKER: In one of those old houses along there on Wille.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Holsteys, Mecklenburg. There was Charlie Mecklenburg who built later.

BECKER: Henningsmeier is another name that I didn’t remember.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Henningsmeier is your grandparents.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, that’s just my grandparents –my mother’s family. Her parents had a farm on Elmhurst Road and, what’s that first street?

LAWRENCE HODGES: I can’t remember the name. It’s right after you get around the curve, the first street there.

BECKER: Council Trail or whatever that is?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, it’s that far down. The very first…

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s where the farm was.

CHRISTINE HODGES: The very first street there. They had a farm. When they passed on then that was called the Schaeffer farm.

BECKER: You mean where St. Raymond’s parking lot is now?

LAWRENCE HODGES: No,-that’s where St. Raymond’s stops.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Across the street.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That street at the south end of the parking lot.

BECKER: That’s Council Trail.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Council Trail, well, they had it at Council Trail and Elmhurst Road then, and they had their farm. And when the parents passed on, why then the Schaeffer family lived there, which is my aunt and uncle. Fred Schaeffer. They lived there quite a while, and then it all went into Mt. Prospect. Everything was changed. Everything was filled up to now.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And your grandparents had, what, ten daughters? Was it ten?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. I understand they had ten daughters.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And one son. Oh, no, that was the Schaeffers.

BECKER: I’ll bet he was spoiled.

CHRISTINE HODGES: So my aunt was there, and in the summertime when they’d have threshing, well, I was there every time. That was great fun. You’d hear this machine come through town on Elmhurst Road, and they blew their horn, you know. They blew their whistle, and you knew they were going over to the Schaeffer farm. Of course, all the kids were there, watching this thing, and it was great fun because they’d have a lot of food and the men would all come in to eat, you know, in between. They’d be there about two days. Oh, that was lots of fun.

BECKER: Now, when would that have been –about what year, do you think?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, that would have been probably in 1910.

LAWRENCE HODGES: You were only seven years old then.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, I was just this little kid. 1910 to 1911 or in there somewhere.

BECKER: Where did you go to school?

CHRISTINE HODGES: I went to public school on Main Street and Central until I was ten years old.

BECKER: Main and Central.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s that old building that the Episcopal church bought.

BECKER: Oh, the little white schoolhouse that they moved.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, they moved it over there, and now the library is at that corner, you know.

BECKER: But it was Central School for a long time.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. That’s where I went to school till I was ten, and then I went to St. Paul till I was thirteen, almost fourteen. Then they started a little thing, they wanted a high school in town. Well, this old building over there on Busse Avenue which was Bill Wille’s building where, like I said, they were selling feed and all this.

BECKER: Yes, where Wille Lumber and Fuel is.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, and they had a room there. Well, it was quite a big-sized building with a big room, and they tried to arrange for a high school. They didn’t send us to Arlington. They wanted their own high school, but it didn’t ork out. I remember being there, and they had one little old heater in that big room, and it was cold. So the teacher, Teacher Marsh was his name, he would say, “Well, you’d better just all gather around this here little potbellied stove,” they had, as they called it, “and I’ll read for you.” And he’d sit there and read and we didn’t learn very much that season there. So the following year ________.

BECKER: They just tried it for the one year, then.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. Then the children went to Arlington.

BECKER: I see. The high school was there, in Arlington.

CHRISTINE HODGES: That came later –I think it was about a year later.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And Des Plaines. John and Bill went to Des Plaines.

CHRISTINE HODGES: We were put into Arlington. Yes, if you wanted to finish –the schools weren’t graded. You’d studied all the subjects but you didn’t know what grade you were in, so my parents sent the boys to Des Plaines. They’d take the train and go to Maine High School, the main school there, to get their grading and know what grade were they in and what did they know. But I didn’t go. I don’t know why. They didn’t send me.

BECKER: Well, they didn’t used to send girls too much, I guess.

LAWRENCE HODGES: She had to learn to cook.

CHRISTINE HODGES: They figured a girl had better stay home and learn how to cook and bake, I guess.

BECKER: That’s right.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, anyhow, I didn’t get there. But I was more interested in getting going and getting a job. Years ago at fourteen or fifteen you were thinking of working.

BECKER: What kind of job did you go into?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, I went to Chicago.

BECKER: You did?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Sure.

BECKER: And you moved ________?

CHRISTINE HODGES: No, I took the train in. First of all, I went down there and there was a lady there that was taking girls and teaching them how to sew. So I went there and I stuck it out one season, and then I went down to the Loop and I got a job and I was working in Chicago.

BECKER: You were.

CHRISTINE HODGES: That’s were I worked. I’d take the train.

BECKER: As a seamstress?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, well, I worked for Stevens.

BECKER: Oh, you did.

CHRISTINE HODGES: And Hart, Schaffner & Marx –places like that had sewing. I had other opportunities, but I never was interested in changing. I stayed there until I married.

BECKER: Until you got married.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes.

BECKER: Well, then, I gather that you were the early postmaster.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Well, Alvin Beigel was the postmaster at the time, and then the Democrats took over in 1932. The firm I was connected with –I’d worked for the Universal Gypsum for seven years –moved to Buffalo, New York. They wanted me to go along, but I was so attached to this family by that time that I wouldn’t give up. So the postmastership opened up, and then there were the three committeemen from Palatine –George Tatsche and O. S. Johnson, who were the committeemen, endorsed me. Ted Moehling wanted the job, too, at that time, see, but I had the endorsement. And then I was appointed under Roosevelt. I was on a four-year appointment at first. For eight years I was under a four-year appointment, and then they put the postmasters under Civil Service and then they changed that over. Then in 1947 the Republicans took over again, or 1946, and by that time I knew –I used to be very active in politics, the Democratic party here and in Chicago, and I got to know the chief inspector in Washington, D.C., Connor. He used to be inspector for this territory. I wrote him a letter, and I said, “What do you think of the Civil Service?” He wrote back, and he said, “It might be all right, but all it takes is a vote of Congress can change it, and if the assistant’s job opens up, take it because you won’t lose any credits.” So I took over in 1947. I took over the assistant’s job.

BECKER: Where was the post office when you were postmaster?

LAWRENCE HODGES: On Main Street. It was a little store on Main Street.

CHRISTINE HODGES: And from there we moved to…

BECKER: Main Street and what?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Half a block north of Northwest Highway, in that Busse building.

BECKER: That’s right, on the east side of the street.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s right.

BECKER: And it was in the same building with…

LAWRENCE HODGES: Oh, there was a barber shop in there, and Otto Landeck’s private store. And there was a bakery in there.

BECKER: National Tea was in there.

CHRISTINE HODGES: And there was a five-and-dime.

LAWRENCE HODGES: The National Tea was in George’s building. That was built later.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes, National Tea. That’s right.

BECKER: But then I understand when you started as postmaster there was no home delivery.

LAWRENCE HODGES: No, and I even had to buy all of my equipment in the post office. And I got the Paddocks –they built the Arlington Heights Post Office, and the Paddocks, I knew Bob Paddock very well, the old father, and he had all that old post office equipment up in his attic in his printing place, so he moved all that stuff down here. Beigel wanted six hundred dollars for the equipment, and that was too much. I started in for two thousand dollars a year.

BECKER: Was he eligible to take all that stuff with him, Beigel?

LAWRENCE HODGES: He had to get rid of it. He sold it somewhere. I don’t remember at that time.

BECKER: He would sell it to you for six hundred.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Six hundred dollars, but that was a lot of money in those years.

BECKER: Was it his?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Because it was Bill Busse’s –no, it was Al Beigel’s.

BECKER: It was.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Busse was the postmaster, and then when they opened the bank he put Beigel in there as postmaster.

BECKER: Yes.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Al Beigel, see. Then I bought all that stuff from Paddock for a hundred dollars.

BECKER: A good deal.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And the firm I was with in Chicago was moving to Buffalo, New York, and I got the desk down there, a double desk and chairs and all that stuff, I got a lot of stuff I brought out from the firm I was with.

CHRISTINE HODGES: You had to buy the safe.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And a safe. I had to buy a safe. I bought a safe for ten dollars.

BECKER: Did you have to pay for all that? You did.

LAWRENCE HODGES: I had to pay for that, that’s right. So then when Bill Busse, later on in years, they signed a lease with them, then he bought the equipment from me.

BECKER: Well, tell me, you said you started home delivery.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Yes. At that time I started in there it was a third-class office, I think. It had to be second-class before any delivery service started. And the receipts were not high enough. We only had twelve hundred people, I think, at that time. So I got all the businessman and a lot of friends –I had made a lot of friends in town that worked in Chicago at different businesses –come out here and buy their stamps to bring the receipts up, see. And by the first of July the next year when they changed the ratings, we made the class where we could get delivery service.

BECKER: Then you got one mail carrier?

LAWRENCE HODGES: No, there were two –one on the east side and one on the north side.

BECKER: You said first, though, you had to number all the houses.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Yes. I had to number all of the houses in town. I took the plat and numbered all of the houses and drew a regular plat that I had to send in, you know. And then the carriers, they could walk around the street with just a handful of mail at that time, you know. Especially the afternoon delivery.

BECKER: Oh, that’s right. You had twice-a-day delivery then.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Yes. When I first went in there, stamps were one cent in town. You could mail a letter in town for one cent.

BECKER: In town.

LAWRENCE HODGES: It was two cents out of town.

BECKER: Two cents out of town.

LAWRENCE HODGES: That’s right. So we’ve still got some of those old stamps. She’s got a lot in a stamp collection.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes. I saved stamps –something special.

LAWRENCE HODGES: She worked in the post office for twenty-two years.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes, I was __________.

BECKER: You were, in town.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes.

LAWRENCE HODGES: She was just part-time in there, then the war came along and then she got in as a __________.

BECKER: Rosie the Riveter?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, I worked there twenty-two years.

BECKER: That was after you were married, then.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes.

BECKER: You helped him out.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes.

LAWRENCE HODGES: She had to work longer hours than I did — not longer, but I’d start earlier and then I’d go home and can. I used to can. We’d do a lot of canning –two hundred quarts a year we’d can. Peaches and tomatoes and all that stuff, and I’d go home and can that. She would work until six o’clock.

CHRISTINE HODGES: He’d go to work early, and then I’d come home at six o’clock. I had to get out the last mail, and then I could go home.

BECKER: I think you got the break. I’d rather be working than doing the canning, I think.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Right.

BECKER: So, how many children did you two have?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Three children.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Two boys and a girl.

BECKER: What has happened to them?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Well, they lived in town. Larry lived within three blocks of us, and Betty lived within two blocks.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Larry was in the garage business at that time.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, a builder. He would build garages. Then suddenly the one of them moved to Wisconsin, the other moved to Florida, and the other decided to try Pennsylvania for a while, and then he moved to Florida, and we were here alone. But we’re still here.

BECKER: That’s good. At least you’ve got places to go to now.

CHRISTINE HODGES: I feel like I belong here.

BECKER: You certainly do.

CHRISTINE HODGES: I feel at home here.

BECKER: Where are you living now?

CHRISTINE HODGES: On 209 Lewis, top floor.

LAWRENCE HODGES: 14 Elm Street.

CHRISTINE HODGES: We lived there first.

LAWRENCE HODGES: We lived upstairs of her father’s over here for a while, too, then we moved on the east side. We rented a place. Then I bought Barclough’s place at 14 Elm Street. It was a house, and I bought that for forty-two hundred dollars.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Can you believe it? A two-story house.

LAWRENCE HODGES: A two-story house.

BECKER: Frame.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Frame, yes. Of course, I did an awful lot of work. We scraped varnish off with razor blades.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. You know, the old style, well, the floors would be varnished and then there was carpeting in the middle, or a rug. Well, it wasn’t covered completely and we, oh, we worked.

LAWRENCE HODGES: A pipeless furnace.

CHRISTINE HODGES: We worked hard to get it into shape, but when we left there, which was nineteen years we lived there, it was beautiful. But he didn’t want a big, two-story house anymore. He wanted something lower.

BECKER: That’s right. When the kids move out, why, you have to make changes.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. So we moved into a range.

BECKER: A one-story ranch.

LAWRENCE HODGES: By that time I got enough out of it that I built a brand-new house for what I got for that house, without any mortgage. I didn’t want any mortgage.

CHRISTINE HODGES: No, you don’t want no more mortgage.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Because, believe it or not, in those years it was hard to get a mortgage, for even forty-two hundred.

BECKER: Really?

LAWRENCE HODGES: I had a lot that I traded in. But I was under a four-year appointment yet at that time, and then they changed it to Civil Service and then they put an FHA in, and then I got a loan from the bank.

BECKER: What years were you postmaster?

LAWRENCE HODGES: From 1933 to 1947 –no, in 1947 I changed over to the assistant’s job.

BECKER: Were you in the service at any time, military service?

LAWRENCE HODGES: No. I was over that age at that time. You didn’t have to go either at that time. I was offered a captaincy. They were asking to take postmasters into service at the time, but I wouldn’t leave my family.

BECKER: How big was your family in Elmhurst?

LAWRENCE HODGES: I had three brothers. Four boys.

CHRISTINE HODGES: You were the oldest.

LAWRENCE HODGES: I was the oldest, yes. I was twenty-nine years old when I went into the post office.

BECKER: Well, it worked out very well for you, then.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, we were very fortunate. Just great.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Well, I said I worked forty-four years without losing a day’s pay. It wasn’t always good pay.

BECKER: Well, that’s true. And now? Now you’ve retired, and how do you spend your time?

LAWRENCE HODGES: I don’t know where the time goes. Well, we head for Florida in the wintertime, and in the summertime I like to fish. We seem to keep quite active.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes, we do all our own. ..

BECKER: You said that you had real buddies that you went fishing with.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Oh, yes. I knew all the fishermen in town.

BECKER: Like who?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Les Best and Fred Meeske.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Eddie Haverkamp.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Eddie Haverkamp.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Art Miller.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Art Miller and Al Hockey.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Clarence Winkelman.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Clarence, I never got any –when I got sick then Clarence took my spot. There were always six buddies, and we’d go to Canada every year.

BECKER: Always go to the same place?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Yes, in the wilderness, really, way back. Fish, fish. I’d never had anything like that in my life.

BECKER: And what did you do when you retired? What do you do now?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, I work. I fill in at the post office hours, you know, in between subbing, and stay with the family, the children. I might be home.

LAWRENCE HODGES: But our family was very close-knit.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes. I had my family all living in town here. My sister –Edwin Busse’s wife, Elsie, is my sister. I have her, I have my brother and my sister-in-law. I have another sister up in Arlington. I will never get lonesome.

BECKER: That’s right. That’s wonderful.

CHRISTINE HODGES: all the friends that you know. When you live in town that long you know everybody.

BECKER: That’s true. You certainly must have known everybody.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, sure. We knew everybody. It sure changed.

LAWRENCE HODGES: You go to church today, there’s very few of them left that we know.

BECKER: That’s true.

CHRISTINE HODGES: A lot of new people.

BECKER: Well, we have to face that.

CHRISTINE HODGES: The funny part is, they meet me and they ask me, “Are you new here?” I say, “Oh, no, I’m not new.” I said, “You’re new.”

BECKER: Isn’t that something, yes.

LAWRENCE HODGES: So, we’ve had a blessed life. I can say that.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, we surely did.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And then we get down to Florida and we get all the kids and the children and the great-grandchildren. There are thirty-two of them, down there in Florida.

BECKER: Is that right! So you don’t have any time to sit around down there, either.

LAWRENCE HODGES: They keep us busy. Our daughter has a four-acre farm with a little four-room cottage on the back. It was kind of dilapidated, but I went in there and fixed it all up. Then last year they put in air conditioning, and therein a furnace, and it’s very nice.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, it’s a cute place.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Two horses, two cats, two dogs.

CHRISTINE HODGES: It’s not really a farm, it’s right off of …It’s not really a farm.

LAWRENCE HODGES: No, but I mean, four acres.

CHRISTINE HODGES: They’re taken into the village now. It’s building up all around. Big homes, you know.

BECKER: Where is this now?

LAWRENCE HODGES: Ormand Beach. It’s right near Daytona.

BECKER: And that’s where you go. Do you have a place down there? Is that where you stay down there?

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes. It’s right on her property. We had bought a home but we gave it up. We never moved down there. We thought we’d take it for later, but it was too much work. You’d go down there for the winter, and you’d be raking leaves all winter. Sure. Those leaves drop all winter long.

LAWRENCE HODGES: It was a big house –a four-bedroom house I’d bought down there.

BECKER: Oh, you don’t need that.

LAWRENCE HODGES: The house was eighty-five feet wide. It was a big ranch, all ceramic floors all the way through. I rented it out, and my daughter had to take care of it when we weren’t there, so…

BECKER: Now this is just about the right size for you.

LAWRENCE HODGES: Then my son, when he was in Pennsylvania and he wanted to go back to Florida. He wanted to live in Florida, so he took it over and bought it from me. He lived in there for two or four years, I guess, then he moved out and built himself another place.

BECKER: Well, this has been a most delightful conversation. We’ve just about come to the end of the tape here. I’m sorry I didn’t follow you around while you were making all these comments about all the pictures that we see here. So many of the people you recognize.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Oh, yes.

BECKER: That’s interesting.

CHRISTINE HODGES: Yes, lots and lots.

LAWRENCE HODGES: We were surprised the other night, we had our sixtieth anniversary three years ago, and we had a party down in Florida, too. We had one of these cameras where it picks up the sound, you know?

BECKER: Oh, yes. All the young people have them now.

LAWRENCE HODGES: And so, my daughter brought the tape along, and we showed it the other night. It was good. When I think back even three years, the way those little grandchildren grow. We’ve got ten great-grandchildren and nine grandchildren.

CHRISTINE HODGES: We invited friends that we made since we go down there all the time. We had a real nice.

 

Does MPHS have photographs: No

Date of Interview: Unknown

Interviewer: Unknown

Text of Oral History Interview:

Q: Good morning. This is November 16, 1994. This morning we’re interviewing Mr. Samuel Hess. I want to thank you very much for consenting to the interview. We really appreciate your taking the time to do this for us. We’re going to start with a little bibliography information, and I would like to have your full legal name first.

HESS: Samuel Andrew Hess.

Q: And when and where were you born?

HESS: I was born June 1, 1921, in Detroit, Michigan.

Q: Can you give me your mother’s full name?

HESS: Florence.

Q: And her maiden name was?

HESS: Smith.

Q: Do you know where she was born?

HESS: Yes, Montrose, Pennsylvania.

Q: That’s T-R-O-S-E.

HESS: Yes, R-O-5-E.

Q: And your father’s full name?

HESS: Samuel Peter Hess.

Q: Do you know where he was born?

HESS: Yes, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Q: I’ll ask about your spouse. Her name is…

HESS: Annabelle.

Q: And where was she born?

HESS: Detroit, Michigan.

Q: If you would like to, I would like to list your children.

HESS: Okay, sure. Andrea Hess.

Q: Okay, you want to give an age?

HESS: Let’s see. Andrea’s forty-one, Annabelle?

ANNABELLE HESS: Yes, she was born in…

HESS: And Mary Hess would be what? Thirty-nine?

ANNABELLE HESS: No, no, no. You’re off. She was born in ’50, and Barbara was born in ’53—- forty-four and forty-one.

HESS: Yes, forty-four and forty-one.

Q: What was your occupation?

HESS: I was a manager for Mobil Oil Corporation.

Q: And how about your spouse?

HESS: Well, she’s a house manager, also –well, she worked for a bank and the children’s clinic early on.

Q: Would you mind telling me of the names of your grandparents?

HESS: Andrew Smith and Cralile Smith –those were the ones in Montrose.

ANNABELLE HESS: Lillian Cralile.

HESS: Well, Lillian Cralile. Then there was Peter Hess. I guess Peter Hess was my other grandfather’s name.

ANNABELLE HESS: Okay, we’ll get back to your other grandmother then. When did you move to Mount Prospect?

HESS: Well, it was twenty-six years ago.

Q: We have your address. Have you ever lived at any other address? Is what I meant to ask.

HESS: In Mount Prospect. No, no other address in Mount Prospect.

Q: How has Mount Prospect changed since you’ve lived here?

HESS: I remember when we bought the house the real estate man said, “Well, we’re at 30,000 now,” and he said, “I’m sure we can’t possibly get any bigger than this.” So, yes, in that sense it’s changed, and then of course the whole area’s become more industrialized and commercialized than previously, although the basic core of the town hasn’t changed that much.

Q: What did you know about Mount Prospect before you came?

HESS: That they had nice elm trees, that’s all. Our place that we had in Detroit had beautiful elm trees, and so when we saw Wapella, Wapella had beautiful elm trees. Of course, we were not experts on the Dutch elm disease, and so unfortunately, shortly after we arrived here they began to deteriorate and even after doing everything under the sun to try to save them it was just not. ..

Q: It was so sad.

HESS: …accomplished. Although I have to say that, and I think this is part of the historical pattern of Mount Prospect, I think that the village has done a very good job in reforestation as evidenced by the fact now a lot of these trees that are the replacements are coming to maturity. ..

Q: And really looking. ..

HESS: …and really looking. ..

Q: …very nice.

HESS: …very nice.

Q: And giving it a nice, settled look again other than the barren look. What are some of the events you remember happening in the village?

HESS: I think one of the things that was kind of interesting to us, and this is not an isolated case, but when we first came to Mount Prospect we of course had come from an area that was a little bit different in its context. It wasn’t really an integrated village like this is, and we got a notice from the mayor inviting us to attend one of the town meetings as new members. That was kind of impressive to us because we had not had that kind of welcoming situation ever before, and that was kind of …

Q: That is very interesting. What do you feel are landmarks in the community?

HESS: Well, of course, your new historical museum is obviously a landmark, although I think more in terms of where the old historical museum was next to the Lutheran –is that a Lutheran church?

Q: Yes, St. John’s.

HESS: St. John’s Lutheran Church, I think of that as kind of a…

Q: They’ll be keeping that, you know. They’re going to turn that. ..

HESS: Yes, right.

Q: …Into a site for field trips and other things, and of course there are big displays there that will probably always remain. Let me ask you a little bit about downtown Mount Prospect. What do you remember most about shopping downtown?

HESS: I think what I remember most was the fact that that happened to be an era of personalized commercial establishments. I guess it was Mieske’s(sic) Market was one of them, and they delivered and very personalized. Then of course we all know about Busse Hardware. There was a shoe store over there on Prospect Avenue, and I was saying to Annabelle the other day, I can’t remember the name of the shop, but it was so different than most shoe places are today where you go in and you have a wide range of shoes and you pick up your own –this was a fellow who took a great deal of care and…

Q: Personalizing that too. How about clothing shopping? Do you remember some of those?

HESS: I don’t think I really did much clothing shopping in Mount Prospect.

Q: Okay, what about hardware items?

HESS: I’m trying to remember if it was the Busse Hardware which was the key hardware and of course very good place to go because you could get really good service, personalized service, which now is an extremely difficult thing. That hardware’s going out of business now, the one on –no, the little one over in the middle of town. That’s Busse Hardware. It’s not the old Busse Hardware, but it has the same name, and they’re going out of business. One of the reasons they’re going out of business is, as he said, people would come in to him to buy the nuts and the bolts and the little items, but the big-ticket items, they’d go to Montgomery Ward or Sears or the big Ace Hardware, whatever.

Q: And he couldn’t really afford to stay in business for nuts and bolts.

HESS: That’s right.

Q: What about things like cars? Where would you have purchased those over the years?

HESS: We have always purchased our cars at Lattoff Chevrolet, which is not in Mount Prospect, but he has a lot of business. He actually was instrumental, the Latoff family of course started that Latoff YMCA and we liked the Chevrolet because it’s got a lot of room and so forth. As a matter of fact, I guess we’ve been doing business with him for twenty-some years.

Q: How about medicine?

HESS: That’s of course the great Keefer establishment, and Jack Keefer was the owner and Jerry runs it, bought it from him, worked for him, and I have a special preference for that kind of a pharmacy because you get personalized attention and they are under, of course, severe duress now because of the big HMOs, the company provisions that you have to buy from a certain place, but they were always and always have been a very great place to buy prescriptions.

Q: Do you remember what some of the other things that the early stores carried besides the drugs at the drug store and the shoes at the shoe store and so on?

HESS: That doesn’t make any impact on me. Maybe it’s because I got up in the morning and went to work and maybe my wife would remember more about that than I do. But if you want to talk about, I suppose, services, of course Louie’s Barber Shop was there –I think Louie has been I business. ..

ANNABELLE HESS: And Adam. Adam has always done all our upholstery.

HESS: Adam’s done all our upholstery and he’s been there a long time, but Louie, I’m sure he’s been in that shop for thirty-five years, and he not only provides haircuts but he is a reservoir of …

ANNABELLE HESS: The cleaners on Prospect Avenue we’ve always gone to.

HESS: …political statements of what’s going on.

Q: And the climate.

HESS: One of the things –this hasn’t anything to do with the recent –I mean it has more to do with recent history than anything else, and that is that to show the changing climate, I remember this Master Craft Cleaners that we go to now, but the first day that they opened business, and they were Chinese from Taiwan, and they had a very, very difficult time even understanding what you were trying to tell them to do with your clothes. Since then they have become very successful, and I think it’s probably a good signal from a historical point of view of the opportunities that are here, not only in Mount Prospect but in the world, for people who have the initiative and so forth because here are people with no educational background, you know, and. ..

Q: Didn’t know the language.

HESS: …didn’t know the language, and they came in and made a great success of a business in Mount Prospect. One of the places that we’ve never been in before, we always were threatening to go in sometime, and that’s that Sam’s Tavern. We’ve never been in it. That’s the one next to the…

ANNABELLE HESS: All our neighbors and friends have.

Q: Okay.

ANNABELLE HESS: Randhurst was brand new when we ________.

HESS: Yes, that was just opened. I suppose when you’re talking about buying things, then if we include Randhurst –I was tending to think of the core of the town –when Randhurst opened, it was really in the vanguard of modem shopping centers. I mean, now you kind of look at it as a more mature, older center, but I mean the ability to walk around in that big. ..

Q: Enclosed.

HESS: …enclosed area and so forth, this was quite. ..

Q: Very unique, it really was.

HESS: …very unique and very different.

Q: It really was quite a nice addition to the community. We’re going to work on grade school memories now. We’ll get to the high school and beyond that later on. Now we’re just working on grade school.

HESS: And this doesn’t have to be Mount Prospect because. ..

Q: No, just what grade did you attend and the years?

HESS: I attended actually an awful lot of the grade school because we were moving around a great deal in the Detroit area. There was Patengill in Detroit.

Q: Gill or Gale?

HESS: Gill. And Doty School in Detroit. And Hally –H-A-L-L- Y. But in those days we were renting and you would go to the school, of course, where you rented.

Q: Okay. Patengill, Doty and Hally.

HESS: Right.

Q: And the years attended would be from first through…

HESS: Through eighth.

Q: What were your favorite subjects or classes?

HESS: Well, I suppose anything that had to do with writing or spelling or English or history, you know, more of an emphasis on that than the mathematical. Mathematics didn’t give me any problems but I was more interested in those things.

Q: Do you remember how far away you lived from each of these schools?

HESS: Actually, I can’t remember the exact distance, but almost all of them were substantial walks. In other words, it isn’t like today, where you either have a bus or a –I mean, they were quite a long walks.

Q: How did you get to school? Walking sounds like the. ..

HESS: Walking.

Q: …the preferred method. Do you remember what time school started?

HESS: I suspect at eight-thirty, but I can’t recall precisely.

Q: Do you remember what time you had to get up in order to be at school in time?

HESS: I think we got up pretty early because my dad was going to work, and we usually got up when he got up, so I would say six-thirty, quarter to seven.

Q: Did you have any chores to do before you went to school, before you left in morning?

HESS: The normal chores of getting the rooms cleaned up and so forth — no monumental chores like milking the cows or anything like that.

Q: Did you eat breakfast before you went to school?

HESS: Absolutely, and obviously that was the time before caloric intake was restrictive so you had a real good breakfast usually.

Q: Do you remember a typical breakfast?

HESS: This, again, was before cholesterol –we were great ones for eggs. Of course, in those days, as you might not remember them, but in those days eggs were considered a staple of life.

Q: Yes, they were.

HESS: If you had a couple of good eggs in you and some toast and…

Q: Milk.

HESS: …and milk and maybe even some sausage, that was considered the fuel to keep the engine going.

Q: Did you bring your lunch to school or go home or …

HESS: A couple of places I brought my lunch, but Annabelle and I were laughing the other day because there was one place where there was a restaurant nearby –I remember the name of it, the Peter Pan Restaurant — and they catered to the younger people, so your parents had given you a certain amount of money and then you’d go in there and buy. ..

Q: And that was in grade school.

HESS: And that was in grade school. ..

Q: My goodness.

HESS: …and today when I think of it, we didn’t think anything of it, you know. There was no security problems and the fellow that ran the Peter Pan Restaurant was very solicitous to the kids. That was later on.

Q: Can you describe a typical lunch?

HESS: One thing I would describe is mashed potatoes and gravy and lots of bread and butter.

Q: Okay, a heavy lunch. Do you remember about how many students you had in your class?

HESS: Oh, I think maybe fifteen to twenty would be certainly maximum in those days.

Q: What was the typical order for the day? Did you start with a special song, prayers or the Pledge of Allegiance?

HESS: I don’t know that in grade school– I think we had certain –we didn’t have a prayer. There were certain –I can’t remember the names of the songs, but there were certain songs we sang and…

Q: Okay. Can you go on to describe a typical day?

HESS: I don’t think I can describe a typical day in eighth grade.

Q: Okay, what did you wear to school? Was there a dress code?

HESS: Yes, there was a dress code in the sense that you were always properly dressed. In those days I do remember there was a period, and I can’t remember what grade you transferred from knickers to long pants, and that was a monumental and I don’t know if you know what knickers are, but, anyway, the boys wore knickers and then when you got to a certain age then you were considered a young man and then you would put on your long pants.

Q: Was there anything your parents refused to let you wear to school?

HESS: I would put it in kind of a general context. I wouldn’t say there was anything specific, but anything that was not, let’s say, proper if that’s the word that can be used. I don’t know if I can use that word, but…

Q: Was refused. I mean that was. ..

HESS: I mean, you wouldn’t wear a wild shirt or a wild sweater or anything like that. It was not a uniform, but it was to a certain degree formal attire.

G; Describe some of the things you did during your play or recess period or any games that were popular. ..

HESS: Well, one of the things, which you don’t see at all nowadays, is marbles, in that early stage. Of course, you had the two kinds of marbles. You had the kind where you would throw the marbles against the wall to see how close you could get, and then there was the other where you had a circle, and the reason that this was played considerably during the recess was because you didn’t need a lot of physical facilities to do it, and there was a great trade that went on between different marbles. You know, you’d trade me two small blue marbles for a big red one and that sort of thing, so it was kind of like the marketplace.

Q: Do you remember any specific songs that were taught and frequently sung at school?

HESS: I don’t think I can.

Q: What art and crafts projects were done at school that were especially memorable?

HESS: The thing that I remember most of all, and it was really an impractical thing, they had a print shop program, and why they had it I don’t particularly know, except in those days I guess they figured that you should assume some sort of dexterity and you put your hand up and actually plug the type into the hole there. Of course, they had wood shop, and you made little items like knickknacks.

Q: Did you have a favorite teacher, and why did you like him or her?

HESS: I remember the high school teachers. I don’t think I remember too much about the grade school teachers.

Q: How would you answer this –I will never forget the day at grade school when…?

HESS: It’s interesting that you say grade school because I would have to include kindergarten, and I remember making butter, which is kind of a stupid thing to remember, but I remember for some reason or other that the kindergarten teacher decided that we should make butter, and we made it in the class.

Q: That is interesting, isn’t it? What did you do after school in the way of chores or work or play?

HESS: First of all, the chores very often were related to things like having a magazine route or a newspaper route, and the chores that you did around the house were probably not as monumental. They were more custodial –in other words, keep your room clean or don’t leave things around. The recreational activities were more pick-up stuff.

Q: Okay, that’s the hang-out kind of thing. What did you do in your free time?

HESS: Well, you would play an awful lot of baseball and football, but it was quite different than it is today where the parents take their kids out to a formal soccer game or a formal football…

Q: It would be a pick-up.

HESS: Yes, it would be a pick-up because there were a lot of vacant lots around, and so there was a lot of spontaneity involved in it.

Q: What school did you attend for junior high and high school?

HESS: That would be Post Intermediate, would be the one in between.

Q: And how about high school?

HESS: That would be Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Michigan.

Q: What special memories do you hold about junior high or high school?

HESS: I think that the teachers in high school were what you would call the individuals who were as dedicated high school teachers as a minister might be dedicated or a doctor, whatever. Like a Latin teacher, you know, today people say why in the world would anybody take Latin? Yet the Latin teacher was a –Dan Loon was his name, and he was a very disciplined person. The Latin proved to be a disciplinary exercise that taught you a great deal. And the French teacher, I remember Madame Lampa was –I remember when I went to Amherst and they took the introductory course to see what your status would be in the French course, I was amazed at how effective she’d been. So I think what they were is they were a very high professional caliber, and the counseling department was a woman who, very, very impressive person, white hair, and her name was Babcock, and she really felt a great responsibility to try to direct people to the appropriate college or the appropriate field of endeavor and so forth.

Q: Which was wonderfully important back…

HESS: Very important.

Q: …then as it is today.

HESS: It is today. The only problem today, I guess they’re faced with such a large volume of…

Q: ________________.

HESS: Our church brought over a bunch of Vietnamese from the old country, and one of the things that concerned us was that although the counselors were very good in a way, their counseling in the case of the Vietnamese was very much influenced by the affirmative action program. Like the one chap was encouraged to go to a college where he never should have gone, because they were trying to get affirmative action incidence in the college, and so they offered him a good scholarship, but he didn’t last very long. He never should have been sent there. So they were influenced to a certain degree by that program. The choosing of a college in the old days was quite different than it is today. Today is quite a scientific procedure. They have the counselors come from the different colleges, and you analyze the courses and everything. The only reason I went to Amherst was because when I graduated from high school there happened to be an Episcopal minister in one of the Episcopal churches nearby who had been to Amherst, and he talked very positively about the college and so forth. So we went out there and looked at it. Of course, it had been a college that was well recognized as being high academic background and so forth. The interesting thing is that culturally, it was the home area of Emily Dickinson. As a matter of fact, when our fraternity that I was a member of was historically –well, it was Calvin Coolidge’s fraternity when he was at Amherst, and it was right up on the top of a hill, and the Emily Dickinson house was right at the bottom of the hill. So when I would go to class, I would walk right by the Emily Dickinson house, and Emily Dickinson’s niece lived there, and she was also a poet and also kind of a recluse. The interesting thing about the Calvin Coolidge relationship there, every year we would have a dinner, and the fellow that pledged Calvin Coolidge to the fraternity would come back and visit. He had the same speech every year, but the criteria for the speech was, you never can tell somebody by somebody’s appearance what they’re going to do later in life, because he told about Calvin Coolidge was a young farm boy from Northampton and he was a good friend of this lawyer who later became successful in Boston, and he wanted Calvin Coolidge in the fraternity but nobody else wanted him because he was not dynamic, as he never was later, even when he was president. They had a system then they called “the black balls,” so this gentleman said, “Well, if you won’t take Calvin Coolidge, I will vote against all of these special guys that you want to bring into the fraternity.” So of course they took Calvin Coolidge and he became president of the United States, so the philosophy just indicating that you never can tell what the story is.

Q: What was the fraternity, would you mind answering?

HESS: Phi Gamma Delta.

Q: Fiji?

HESS: Right.

Q: Our son is a Fiji.

HESS: Oh, is he? That’s interesting. Very good. Oh, we are the marching, marching Fiji men. Those were the war years, so we went through college in a little over three years. Almost all of the people that were in that class were going to go on to war. It’s always quite interesting when you look at the situation in those days and you think of these people who –well, I won’t say they were spoiled, but they certainly were not any type of person that you would normally select to be a soldier. Then of course at the end of their college career they went off to all kinds of …

Q: To train for the military.

HESS: For the military, which was quite a monumental change from this quiet little New England college to the battlefield, which is always kind of interesting that the United States was able to make that transition, or the men involved were.

Q: Yes, I imagine that was a very big change for most of them, and the training period –how strenuous was the military training?

HESS: I took infantry training and that was quite strenuous. Then I was in the invasion of Letei and the invasion of Okinawa, later then at the occupation of Korea where we occupied after the war.

Q: Do you have a little more to say about then a few of your days after college and your college experience at Amherst? How did it serve you?

HESS: The educational process, and there’s always been a strong battle about this in educational circles, the education at Amherst of course was liberal arts education, and I think that in terms of even the business environment, in the decision-making mechanism, that that kind of education is very, very important in developing leadership. I think that we have maybe gotten away a little too much from that in the sense that everything is very specific nowadays. Yet if you’re looking at the new philosophy of work, where people have to be able to do all kinds of different things, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to have any specific courses in college that are going to prepare you for what you’re going to be doing. You mentioned your son-in-law or son that was a geologist and then he does certain things that are related to that, but they’re peripherally related to it. Then the other thing I think it does do, if one looks at the philosophy that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, the. ..

[Side 2]

HESS: …I think that the Chicago & North Western has helped to really develop all of these towns, you know. They’re on time, they’re very efficient, and I think that this has been a major factor in the. ..

Q: Development.

HESS: Mount Prospect, from a historical point of view, the one dark cloud on the horizon is the downtown area. It is still a very serious problem. They’re doing a lot of things. They’re -in the new condominium complex up here on Northwest Highway and so forth, but there’s a lot of vacant shops and part of this is due to the fact that the landlords keep raising the rents, and I don’t deny them the right to raise the rent because they own the property, but there’s not enough volume of business in these small shops to really justify the rentals. …After all of the discord and bitterness and political in-fighting and so forth,the library was finally completed and reflected a lot of enthusiasm on the part of the population, so all’s well that’s ends well, and that was a satisfying thing to see.

Q: Very fond memory, I’m sure, to see that go up and be replacing the old building, Central School. Is there anything you’d like to add about living in Mount Prospect?

HESS: I think the thing that’s interesting about Mount Prospect, the thing that’s good about Mount Prospect is the diversity of its population. I don’t want to in any way demean any other suburb because I know they all have their assets, but I think Mount Prospect has a lot of young people, they have a lot of senior citizens, they have people that are very well-to-do, they have people that are not too well-to-do, and, to be quite frank about it, they are even faced with some with real gang problems and minority problems and so forth and so on, so you’re really living in a microcosm of our society and to a certain degree I think that keeps everybody on their toes.

Q: Is there one thing you’d like your children to remember about the history of their home town? What would it be?

HESS: Well, they used to have a phrase, “Where neighborliness is a way of life.” That was the phrase –I think that was the phrase, wasn’t it, Annabelle, something like that?

A: It used to be down here on the _____________.

HESS: Yes, I think “Neighborliness is a way of life” or “Friendliness is a way of life.” I think that generally that I would like my children to remember Mount Prospect as a place where, notwithstanding the discord and problems and so forth, it was basically a friendly town.

Q: In what respect is Mount Prospect the same now as it was in the past?

HESS: Well, I think it’s the same. I give your historical society a great deal of credit to this. I think it’s the same in the sense that it has a lot of sensitivity to historical things, I mean, the fact that they put out a booklet on the history of Mount Prospect and the fact that they put so much effort and energies into their historical society, so with all the Kensington industrial complex and a lot of these other things, they have not lost their sense of history, and I think from that point of view it’s still the same.

Q: I want to thank you very much for consenting to be interviewed.

HESS: I don’t know that you’ve got what you want from me, but…

Q: Well, I think we’ve gotten a lot of. ..

HESS: …as a matter of fact, when Annabelle said, “Did you call?” I said, “Well, I don’t know. She may be very disappointed in talking to me,” because I don’t think that I…

Q: Not at all. And if there’s anything else that you’d like to say extemporaneously now. ..

HESS: No, no, that’s –of course, you’re a very good interviewer. I suppose what you do with all of this, you take it like –which is nice about the way the system works nowadays –you can take all this group of things and pick out the things that seem to have a common denominator. ..

Q: And, yes, work it in…

HESS: …and work it into a dialogue.

Q: Yes, well, we certainly do appreciate the fact that both of you, the two of you have really added an awful lot.

HESS: Thank you for coming.

Q: Thank you so much.

 

Does MPHS have photographs: Yes

Date of Interview: 8/13/1991

Interviewer: Patricia Kelly

Text of Oral History:

PATRICIA KELLY: …[remarks joined in progress] patricia Kelly and this morning I have the pleasure of interviewing Dolores Haugh for the Mt. Prospect oral history project. Today is Tuesday, August 13, 1991, and it is approximately 10:35 in the morning. Thank you for joining us this morning, Dolores. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to talk with you about early Mt. Prospect. Can you tell us your full name including your maiden name, where you were born and the year?

DOLORES HAUGH: Okay. My name is Dolores Norma George Haugh. I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and that was back in 1923.

KELLY: Who were your parents or your grandparents, Dolores?

HAUGH: My mother was Norma Lucille Leonard George, and then she later married and so her last name when she passed away was Bemberg. And my father’s name was Sanford Orvil George. What else did you want to know?

KELLY: Did they live in the area?

HAUGH: Yes. They lived in Chicago. I was born and raised in Chicago in Logan Square.

KELLY: Oh, okay. When did you move to Mt. Prospect?

HAUGH: We moved here-well, basically we bought property out here in 1948, but we didn’t build our house until after Cheryl was born, so that would be about 1952 that we came out here. We had lost a little girl and so we wanted something to keep our minds busy, so we decided to build a house. So that’s how we came out here.

KELLY: You were living in Chicago?

HAUGH: Right. I was living in the same house that my grandfather built back in the late 1800s.

KELLY: Oh, how exciting! So you’ve lived here since the early ’50s?

HAUGH: Early ’50s. I can always the remember the population. My dad had passed away so Mama was living with us, and so she said, “You know, the population is 4,004 now.” So that’s how I always remember what the population was. Otherwise I never would have remembered it.

KELLY: Okay. What was the address of your home?

HAUGH: Seven South Edward.

KELLY: Seven South Edward. You had not lived in any other address prior to that?

HAUGH: No, not out here.

KELLY: When you first came to Mt. Prospect, what was considered the downtown? What did it look like?

HAUGH: Well, it’s basically the same area. I think one of the reasons-I wanted just to say this because it’s very important. The main reason we chose Mt. Prospect was it had good building codes. We went allover and found that there were a lot of places that were built that had a beautiful home and right next door there would be a little teensie-weensie house, you know. So there were a lot of building codes out here, and we chose a street that was partially populated because we wanted to make sure that it was an established neighborhood. We wanted to make sure that we were close to schools and good shopping and so on. It was very important that we chose where we did. It was also one of the highest portions in Mt. Prospect-not flooding. That was one of the reasons. The downtown area was very simple. Keefer’s Drugstore was right on Northwest Highway. He had a soda fountain in it. The Kruse’s Tavern was where it is now, although it’s called Mrs. P and Me. But my husband was in the Army Reserve, and he would have to go to meetings on Wednesday evenings. So when the children were little, we used to go over to Kruse’s because there was a family restaurant in the back in the tavern. We’d go in the back way, and we’d sit and have our delicious hamburgers or fried chicken. They were really known for that. Busse Bierman, of course, was here, and Frank was such a wonderful helper to us because neither Bob nor I, of course, had ever built a house before. If you think Mr. Blandings had problems, believe me, we did too. But Frank was so helpful because he would-sometimes Bob would say, “Gee, I’m having trouble with this or that,” and he’d say, “Oh, I’ll come on over and I’ll give you a hand getting this installed,” and so on. And so that was always made a soft spot in my heart for Frank, and, of course, we were friends for years. We’ll miss him now. The doctor that we went to. I don’t see his name on here and I’m trying to think of what it was. Woolfarth was his name. He used to have his office where the Chiropractic Center is now on Prospect Avenue. Basically he was the only “hospital” because the closest hospital was Elgin or in the city. There was no hospital out here. In fact, we helped contribute to the Northwest Community Hospital when it was built because we felt there was a need for it. I’ll tell you a funny incident. My husband was finishing up the last bit of the painting of the eaves on the house. It was a brick house but the eaves needed to be finished, and we hadn’t had the blacktop put in on the driveway, so it was kind of uneven. Daddy got up on a stool instead of getting out the big ladder and fell into the window well, which is hysterically funny, and of course, I stood and laughed as he was sitting there with bucket of dark brown paint over his head. He did not find it as humorous as I did. It took me three boxes of Tide to get it out of his hair and his eyes, and he’d kill me if he knew that I was leaving this to posterity [laughter]. But anyway, the reason I mentioned it was that we had to take him into Dr. Woolfarth for an examination and he had hurt his back, so it wasn’t really as funny as it did look. That was one of the things. Of course, the Mt. Prospect Oil Company was there. I mentioned Keefer’s Pharmacy, and, of course, Van Driel’s was there, too. Next door to him was a little butcher shop that was run by, I think it was Ed Busse. Edwin Busse had that. And, of course, there was Meeske’s. Then on that block was the Gift Box, which was a nice store for cards and things like that. There was also a little tiny paint store and, of course, Schmit’s Bakery. Let’s see. I’m just trying to think. Now, across the street was the National. That was newly built, if I remember right, across the tracks on Prospect Avenue. The A & P didn’t open until-let’s see, Sandy was about a year or two old-so that was about ’56 when it opened at 83 and Central because we went to the grand opening with our babies, per se, in buggies. I didn’t drive. The first few years I was out here I didn’t drive. That was the great thing because we could walk downtown. There was another store. McMann’s Dry Good Store was where the Sound Post is now. They carried a pretty nice line of children’s clothing, which was needful because otherwise you’d have to go into the city because neither of the shopping centers, of course, were built at that time. The church that we went to-we moved in on a Saturday and on Sunday morning we went to St. Mark Lutheran Church, which was a little cement building, and it was a very small little tiny church. There was no big edifice as it is now. There was no educational center that they have now. There was no big gymnasium center that they have now. It was just a little cement-brick building. We got involved at the church right away and I became-after we adopted Sandy, I became Sunday school superintendent there. We used to have our Sunday school down in the furnace room because there wasn’t any room. We were very involved in St. Mark, especially with the building of the sanctuary. Then later I was asked to serve on the committee to design the educational center. Then we felt that we had had so much experience in building that when the opportunity came to start a new church, which was Grace Lutheran out at Wolf and Euclid, why, we were on the steering committee for that, and I was Sunday school superintendent there for many years. And actually, that is where I began my writing career because I started to write for the church and some of the things were published. My first publication was with Cook Publishing in Elgin. It was a little play that I had written. And, of course, it spurred me on to greater things. Also, all of us were pretty much the same age on our block, and we had very little money. We were young and we all had young babies and so we looked for things that we would like to do, and Pastor Steve [Stephens] was with the South church and he started the Marcos [YMARCOS?], which at that time was Young Married Couples, but now it’s Your Married Couples because all the young married couples have grown up. We were invited by our neighbors, Bill and Mary Keith to come and we went to that and we had a wonderful time. I’m still, believe it or not, they’ve invited me to come back into the couples group after all these years. Of course, many of them I’ve known for a long time.

KELLY: You talked a little bit, when you were talking about looking for a place to build, about the reason that you came here was because of the building codes. What were some of the things in those building codes that really drew you to Mt. Prospect?

HAUGH: Well for one thing, the neighborhoods were very well established with like buildings. Now, I don’t mean that they were exactly alike because they didn’t start building those look-alike buildings until the Bluetts went in, which was over there behind Gregory School, and that was much later. But what we liked is the fact that the houses were all well taken care of, and when we built we had to get permits for different things. For instance, we didn’t have our garage contracted. We had that separately done, and so that contractor had to get a building permit from the village and so on. So it was very important to have that because it kept the buildings on a higher level in likeness. In other words, you didn’t have just a little shack and then a nice building, and that was important.. Then the other thing that sold us were the trees because the trees were just all archways, every single street. Busse School was in walking distance. And then within a few years after we moved here, the Mt. Prospect Plaza started, and so we were only four blocks from that. And then Bob could walk to the railroad station. So those were all really important things for us to consider in locating here.

KELLY: In coming from the city, did you find that you were able to purchase most of the items that you needed for day-by-day living here in the downtown area? You’ve talked about the hardware store and the grocery stores and those kinds of things.

HAUGH: We did mostly although we’d go shopping-Mary Keith, my neighbor drove-and so we’d go into Des Plaines once a week. There was a butcher shop in Des Plaines that we liked and we went in there. It was little less expensive than Meeske’s, you know, for our pocketbooks. See, we didn’t have anything but the National out here, so we got some of our meat there. Oh, yes! You know what else we had was a dime store! We had a Ben Franklin dime store on Prospect Avenue. Later it was across the street or vice versa. I can’t remember. Mrs. Smith is still around. She was the owner. She and her husband owned it. I remember it moved, but I can’t remember if it moved from Prospect to Main or from Main to Prospect. But I do know that we had a nice Ben Franklin store. The kids just loved it.

KELLY: Where did you go to buy your big ticket things like cars or buggies or those kinds of things?

HAUGH: Well, actually we didn’t have any money for a car for a long time. Most of our cars were second hand to begin with, and I don’t think we got our first new car until way later. I mean, like in the ’70s. That sounds funny, but. that was really true. We had fallen heir to a couple of cars from our families. That’s what brought us out here. Then we bought a second-hand Chevy, and we bought a second-hand Mercury, you know. So, I mean, we really weren’t involved in that kind of thing. As far as furniture is concerned, I was abundantly blessed because since my dad had passed away, I had a lot of my mother’s things and basically I went into Chicago at that time for my big things like drapery material and rods and things like that because that wasn’t out here. Now Wille’s Lumber was there, but Wille’s Lumber was really a lumber yard. It wasn’t a gift shop like it later was. They just did the lumber kind of things. We got most of our things there except I can’t remember where-we got the carpeting from Chicago, and I think we had the linoleum from Chicago, too.

KELLY: So for transportation you basically relied upon the train then and your pedal extremities, so to speak?

HAUGH: Right, right until I learned to drive, and then after that harrowing experience of my husband teaching me. …Well, the other thing was, too, Mama drove and Mama lived with us and she had a car. So we weren’t totally isolated and, you know, have to walk everywhere, but it was good to walk. It was great!.

KELLY: So your groceries then you went to Meeske’s or the National and into Des Plaines?

HAUGH: Yes.

KELLY: How did the stores that were in Mt. Prospect at the time, how did you learn what they had and what their hours were? How did they advertise?

HAUGH: Well, I’ll tell you, they had a little shopper that they used to throw up onto the front. I can’t remember that we ever subscribed to any papers at that time. We were all too busy trying to get our houses finished and raising our children and going to PTA meetings and things like that. I can remember one thing that I thought was so terrific, and it was a little later on. It must have been maybe in the late ’50s or early ’60s even. They had a shopper that Paddock put out. It was always distributed on election day, and the stores would post numbers on the front of their doors and in the paper that you got were like numbers. You had to go downtown and you had to go up and down all the streets to see if any of the numbers matched and then you got a prize. But it did bring the people into the downtown area. I want to talk a little about that because it’s very important to me because I’ve worked hard on the downtown area over the years in many ~apacities. We had a group of people who came in who were very, very interested in developing the downtown because here’s what happened: This nice little cluster of little small-town shops that I talked about were wonderful except what happened was when the big centers came like the Plaza and then later Randhurst, of course, the novelty of it drew all the people away from the downtown. It really did, with the exception of a few people who had like charges at the different places like the drugstore and Meeske’s and things like that. But basically it completely changed the downtown. What happened was the non-retail people came in. By that I mean, real estate offices, the lawyer offices and so on. And slowly but surely it became a non-retail area, which was very detrimental, because it’s hard to survive economically for the people that are there. So, in 1974, I believe it was, the village started a comprehensive plan. Now, I can’t remember if it was the beginning or whether it was the revision of it, but at least they were beginning to look again to the downtown. I served on that committee. And then, later on I served also when I was with the village and then afterwards when I was with the Chamber of Commerce with Ken Fritz and we went down to see Naperville and toured Naperville to copy, if you will, their program of rehab of the downtown. I have to say Ken Fritz has worked terrifically hard on this, and it was not an easy job. It took four years before we actually got the first street in, and it was Busse Avenue from Central to Wille Street. Is that Wille Street that Wille Lumber is on? I think it is. Or is it Pine? Anyway, that first block. I know I worked with Ken, and he had a beautiful display made and I helped him to get the display in the bank and different places so people would become aware of what we were trying to do. We had a lot of opposition to it. Many, many of the people on that street were adverse to it because they felt they were losing parking spaces. However, in the long run they didn’t really do that because there was additional parking on some of the side streets. That was when Wille became a one-way street, which it is now, and then there was a whole new thing. Also on beautification, I wanted to mention that was important to me, too. As the downtown became non-retail, it became kind of run-down and nobody seemed to care too much about what it looked like. When I went into the Chamber of Commerce, one of the first things that I did was initiate a beautification program. Through that, working with the elected officers and with the people from Public Works, we were able to get a man to come out from the arboretum and design our entranceways. That was really our very first step. The second step was to sell planter boxes to all the merchants, which basically, I was told, couldn’t be done. However, I called a meeting of the downtown merchants. I want to mention that too, that Jack Keefer worked very hard and so did Gary Pospisil in trying to maintain some form of a downtown nucleus. They did this with a turkey trot every fall, they did it with sidewalk sales in the summer. I think that those people should really be acknowledged for trying very hard to keep the downtown alive. As I say, the Downtown Merchants Association really started to develop through the chamber’s interest because I always felt that the small business was very important to the chamber. That was one of my philosophies. For three full years we tried desperately to bring a Downtown Merchants Association into being. It did work. And I have to tell you when I first met Jerry and first talked about it, he absolutely was against it. He did a 360- degree turnaround when he saw what was happening. What happened was I went to all of the downtown merchants and sold them a planter box for $25. It was a six-foot planter box. Now, let me tell you what happened. Public Works filled them with dirt. I got the Park District to grow the flowers. I got the senior men to plant the flowers, and we got the Boy Scouts to water the flowers. So basically, other than the $25 it did not cost any of the merchants any money. Some of those planter boxes are still out there today being planted. The boys at Prospect High School built the boxes for us. I’m trying to think of the fellow’s name-Dick. ..Oh, isn’t that awful? I can’t think of his name. I’ll think of it. He was the woodshop teacher, and so he supervised the boys and so on. But it has always been a very interesting development. I think that we could not have had the refurbishing or redeveloping without the elected officials giving the merchants the facade program. I think the facade program was the axis on which it turned because under that they could have their property upgraded-especially the fronts-all the way up to$5,000 in matching funds. That was a real plus and that, of course, what you see today, is the results of that.

KELLY: The restoration of some of those older buildings that were existing buildings and stores. The drugstore, I’m sure, the hardware store, which were original stores.

HAUGH: And, of course, we lost some old buildings, and we have over the years. We’ve lost a lot of old buildings, and sometimes you look at it from a historical angle and you wish you probably could have saved some of them, but on the other hand, they were necessities that had to be fulfilled in the name of progress. One of them was that we lost the old Schimming Oil, which was the very first business in Mt. Prospect. It was a creamery originally, and so, of course, when that went down, that was sad. Also they tore down the original municipal building, which we had converted through the Historical Society as a museum. However, that building was not original in the fact that two feet had been removed when they built the new water tower. But basically, I think the downtown development has certainly upgraded. I think that there’s still things that have to be done. I also feel that by getting the merchants involved, I have seen so many of them change over from anti-progress to really being supportive, and I think that’s terrific.

KELLY: You talked a little bit about going to Dr. Woolfarth as your physician when you came to Mt. Prospect and the lack of hospitals. Was his practice different than what you would find in a doctor today? Did he dispense medicines?

HAUGH: Yes. In fact, he would give you the medicines. I mean, a lot of times you would get the medicines directly from him, which, of course, you don’t do anymore. Mostly it goes with your prescriptions and so on. But, yes, he would dispense medications. He made house calls, and he also liked to sail a boat, which I thought was real interesting. He had a big sailboat, and he went around the world, if I’m not mistaken, in it. So he was a very interesting person. I did not know Louise Kester, but she was practicing, I believe, at the same time. However, as I say, we started to go to him because of this accident that Bob had had. Later on when we to Dr. Karnes, who was one of the first pediatricians in town. And Dr. Bagnolo was out here.

KELLY: Did they also make house calls?

HAUGH: Yes, they did on real serious things. There was no place to go. You didn’t have a hospital emergency room like you have now. And you didn’t call him for everything, either. In the good old days, you know, you’d call a doctor, and he’ll you over the phone what to do. I mean if it’s like mumps or measles. I’ll never forget when Sandy came down with the mumps. Cheryl had had them so we knew she was going to get them. I had my relatives out for Sunday afternoon dinner and she was running a temperature, and my father-in-law was hysterical that we hadn’t called the doctor. And I said, “Dad, she’s getting the mumps.” He was so insistent, and, of course, it cost a lot to have them come out in those days. It was $20 a call, and that was a lot of money for us. So my husband said to my father-in-law, “You want him to come so darn bad, you can pay for it.” He said, “Okay.” He came out and he took one look at her and said, “Mumps.” But at least it didn’t cost us anything.

KELLY: Did the people that work in the stores and as helpers for the doctor, were they local people or did some of them come from outside the area?

HAUGH: Oh, no, mostly local. It was a very small-town atmosphere, very tight. In fact, it was where town and country meet. That was our motto. Because we were country. It was farms allover. When we built our house on Edward Street and we looked north, it was all farm. Central Road was just a little tiny two lane very narrow road. I can remember when they widened it. All the dirt we got when it was paved with the four lanes and everything. On the other side of town across the railroad tracks you had hardly any homes at all. It was all farmland.

KELLY: So the building was mostly between the railroad track and what is now Central Road?

HAUGH: Right. It was called the Busse Development, the George Busse Development. He had the homes that went all the way, I believe, from Central all the way to Rand Road. Then it was like a triangle that came down Busse and then over. In the 1920s, when I did my research on it, he was the one that planted all the elm trees and, of course, subdivided and sold the property.

KELLY: Those are the streets that have the boys’ names?

HAUGH: Right. Right. It’s really funny because Mt. Prospect has one point in it that’s supposed to be the highest point in Cook County, which happens to be that little rise on Central Road just as you go up to Edwards Street. So, I always lived on top of a mountain. It’s real interesting as far as the development of it goes. As I say, I think the chamber had a lot to do with pulling things together and it still does, of course. There were all kinds of things to remember. We always had the fireworks on the Fourth of July and the parade and we had the Zenith Towers, which my kids called the Winken and Blinken lights. They were over on the corner of Rand and Central.

KELLY: What were those?

HAUGH: That was the tag ends, if you will, of one of the first broadcasting centers in the suburbs. In fact, a gentleman is writing a book on it and I just did the research on it for him and talked to Ben Tripani’s son, who was at that time involved with WWMM out of Arlington. We got pictures of the old Zenith Towers, and, of course, they were taken down.

KELLY: You mentioned the creamery as being one of the first businesses in the downtown area. Where were they located and what did they do? Did they actually deliver milk and cream to homes?

HAUGH: Oh, yes. They processed the milk there. The farmers from all around would bring their raw milk in, and if they didn’t send it in in the milk cans, which they did at first-they just sent it in in the milk cans. But a lot of it was processed there and the cream separated. Of course, that was before my time. Most of what I know about it is just through research from the Historical Society. But it was one of the very first creameries out here, and they did cheese. There was another factory that made cheese. And we had Wille’s Lumber and Coal. But that was all before we came. When we came, of course, it was still Schimming Oil at that time, I believe.

KELLY: The creamery was Schimming Oil?

HAUGH: Yes, when we came out. Then I remember, too, under the water tower was the old municipal building, and that was used mainly for storage and the shooting range for the police department was in there. There was a man in there who repaired the parking meters, which we used to have downtown. We had parking meters downtown. I think the biggest thing that hurt the downtown also was the widening of 83 because it eliminated frontstore parking. And, of course, parking has always been the major problem of our downtown. I’ve always suggested we build a second layer over the whole thing and let people drop in from the top because there’s no way you’re going to get enough people, cars and everything in those streets.

KELLY: …[remarks joined in progress] the buildings that are in downtown Mt. Prospect when you came here and you’ve mentioned that the creamery had changed hands. Were there any other major manufacturing kinds of businesses?

HAUGH: Yes. Right next to the municipal building was a battery-I think it was batteries. I don’t remember too much about it because I wasn’t too interested in it. You know what I mean? It was there. But I didn’t know the persons until 1967, and the only reason I got acquainted then with the man was because he collected old office equipment and we needed that for the 50th anniversary display and we needed old office equipment because we were going to set up the old bank. And because we had- let’s see, I’m trying to think of her name. I don’t know. It’ll come to me. Anyway, we worked with the business and professional women. Doris Webber and a whole bunch of us worked together to get the equipment over there to set up an old bank building, because they had an old teller’s cage and we used that and then built around that. And this gentleman-and I can’t remember his name-he had some old typewriters and things that he loaned, adding machines and things. Those are some of the things he collected.

ELLY: What kind of batteries did they manufacture?

HAUGH: I have no idea. I really don’t. I don’t have any idea.

KELLY: Was it a pretty good-sized plant?

HAUGH: Ch, yes. Well, it took up that whole block where the water tower is on Evergreen. You know, there was the municipal building, which was a small building, and then the rest of it was the battery factory.

KELLY: Would you say that that was probably one of the largest manufacturers in town in terms of employees?

HAUGH: Oh, I’m sure, at that point. The other ones didn’t come in, if I recall right, they didn’t come in until later on Prospect Avenue.

KELLY: What were some of those?

HAUGH: Oh, I knew you were going to say that. I can’t think of the names of them. I should remember them, too, because they belonged to the Chamber before they moved out. I can’t think of it right now.

KELLY: Did you know anyone who worked in any of these businesses?

HAUGH: Well, mostly the bank. Walters-what was her first name, a real nice gal. I’ll think of that, too. [laughter] I can’t think of her first name. Anyway, she worked at the bank, and she was always very helpful in any of the community activities that we planned. She always would be with us, and she was also in our business and professional women’s club.

KELLY: Other than the stores and businesses which were downtown, when you came here, was there a library? You mentioned the municipal building. What was in the municipal building?

HAUGH: Actually they had not had moved into the current one. The one they were in was over where the police and fire is now. I didn’t have too much to do with that. My husband usually went down and got the licenses and things, so I wasn’t as involved with that building. But the library, I was very involved with because I’ve always been a library buff myself. It was-let’s see, where was it? It was where the senior center is now. But before that there was a little tiny building across the street from the Doretti’s [Pharmacy], where Doretti’s is now, and in there was the first bank. The first Mt. Prospect State Bank opened in there in 1910. Then later the library was moved in there from a little paint store that I mentioned down on Main Street. So the library really grew and I knew Mrs. [Irma] Schlemmer, and when we started the Mt. Prospect Art League-not the council, but the league-which had to be back in, I’d say, around 1958 or something like that, she let us have our first art exhibit at the library over the fireplace-just five or six paintings-but it represented works from the five of us that were getting together to paint in Crystal Hansen’s basement. But that was the beginning of the Art League. And then, of course, we saw the growth of the library, and then Mary Jo [Hutchings] came and then you and so it’s been a real progress.

KELLY: What was Wille Hall?

HAUGH: Wille Hall was where the little Wille’s Tavern was originally. Now, a lot people think the little white house was Wille’s Hall and basically it was because Wille built it, and it was a community center also. But the original Wille’s Hall was over next to where the old tavern is where the barber shop was. The way I understand it, that was where people met. Now, when I talk to Bessie [Barnes], there was a bigger hall that I had no record of or pictures or anything called Wille’s Hall, and that was on the other side of the railroad tracks, the south side of the railroad tracks, and that’s where they had all their barn dances and their get-togethers and everything.

KELLY: It was bigger than the Wille Hall that is the tavern?

HAUGH: Right, right. KELLY: What kind of things took place again at this smaller place?

HAUGH: Well, again, that isn’t when I was here, so from what I’ve learned is that they would have their meetings. They’d have their first meeting for the association there, you know, the business association that they started downtown. That was way before-practically about the time I was born. So, I mean, you know, I’m only saying this from things I’ve learned. But we had the-I can’t remember if the movie show was there or not. Seems to me that that was a little later after we came here. Yes, I’m almost sure it was. But the little building that the bank was in and then the library was in was still here when we moved in. The bank, of course, was where the village hall is now. Let’s see, we didn’t move into that as a village hall until 1974. So it was there until 1974, and then, of course, the new building was built, the six-floor. And then the village moved in there. I’m trying to think of some other things.

KELLY: Was there any place in the downtown area where groups of people got together for entertainment?

HAUGH: No, mostly we were in churches. Most people went to the churches. Now, there was a park district. There was a country club over where the park district golf club is now, but it was a privately owned. I don’t know too much about it. We were involved in it. We were mostly involved in our church, and in South Church and with the YMARCOS. Those were the two things. The first thing we went to, and I cannot remember-I think it was held at one of the churches at Arlington. Some friends asked us to go to a square dance. That was really one of the first things we were actually invited to go to. That was Meeske’s invited us to go, and we went to that dance. But that was the first time we were invited anywhere after we moved out here.

KELLY: What did the teenagers do that wanted to be by themselves? Was there a special place where they congregated?

HAUGH: No, we didn’t have that. Most of the teenagers were home, and they went to church with their parents. It was an entirely different quality of life at that point in time because the family was much closer-knit. Television, of course, was just coming out and it was a big deal to have a TV and I think people were clustering at home more than that. We didn’t have anything. The only thing I can remember later on is having floats built in my garage for the high school when Cheryl was in high school. That was when Central was being widened.

KELLY: What were the floats for?

HAUGH: For homecoming. They always had a big homecoming parade in the fall.

KELLY: Where did that parade go?

HAUGH: Down Main Street. But see, there again, you didn’t have the wide streets and things like you did now. Some of them went down Northwest Highway later on. I can remember coming up from Central down Busse Avenue and up Northwest Highway. So they took different routes different years. But those are some that I can remember anyway. The kids always had a great time with that, you know, with the football season and everything.

KELLY: Did they have other parades and activities that would gather the people that were in the downtown area together?

HAUGH: Well, mostly the Lions. They Lions had theirs. I can remember we’d go up there and all the ladies would be frying hamburgers and the men would be working.

KELLY: Where did that take place?

HAUGH: That was at Lions Park. We always had it at Lions Park. It was a lot of work. They did a lot of good. They gave all the street signs to the village, they donated Lions Park land and that’s why it’s called Lions Park. They get mad when you spell it L-Y-O-N-S, too.

KELLY: Was there a Fourth of July parade?

HAUGH: Oh, yes. We had a Fourth of July parade.

KELLY: Memorial Day?

HAUGH: The Fourth of July parade was one of the big things because all the people on our block got together in our driveway. We were the only ones that shared a driveway with our neighbors, the Keiths. And so we were always the spot that everybody gathered in, and we had a breakfast. We’d have a great big Fourth of July breakfast. Everybody would bring stuff and homemade cake and coffee cake. The kids all would decorate their bicycles. That was a big thing. And then they were allowed to go in the street that day because otherwise they were verboten to go in the street. They still have the picnic on Edwards Street. Of course, I’m not there anymore. It’s still nice to know it’s still going on.

KELLY: Did the village decorate the downtown area at Christmas time or other times?

HAUGH: It seems to me that they did. They decorated the poles, I think. I doesn’t really stand out a great deal in my mind in the early days if they did or not. I just really don’t remember. But I do recall that they had stuff hanging on the posts.

KELLY: And when was the gazebo built?

HAUGH: Oh, that was in 1976. That was part of the bicentennial. And that was from the Junior Women’s Club. They did that. Because there were a lot of things that went on in those years. I think one of the things I wanted to mention, too, was about the newspapers because it was interesting. I was telling you about this little throw-away. There was also another little-we always called them throw-aways because you didn’t pay for them-and that was Topics which came out of Shephard Publications in Palatine. They were shoppers. They just told you what the stores had and so on. And, of course, Paddock was out here. We did take Paddock. We subscribed to Paddock, and then later I began to write for them.

KELLY: What was the name of the paper at that time?

HAUGH: It was Mt. Prospect Herald. It was just called the Herald. And then, of course, they had everything in it-I mean Arlington and allover. It wasn’t as divided up as it is now. It’s interesting to learn about Paddock. They, of course, are well over a hundred years old. I went to see Mr. Paddock, Sr., and this was in about 1955, ’56, around in there, because Bob and I as I told you was in the YMARCOS group. I had planned all these parties. I had spent so much time researching and everything, I thought, “Gee, it would be fun to write a party column.” So I went to him and I asked him for a job and he said, “Well, Grace Mott writes about parties.” I said, ItCh, I don’t mean a reporter. I mean to create a party.” He said, “Well, if you can get that past Mary Ann.” She was the woman’s page editor. “If you can get past Mary Ann, you’ve got a job.” So I went in and saw her and she looked at my copy, which happened to be a Mardi Gras party that we had given for our block. She said, “I like it, but it’s too late to run.” I said, “You tell me what you want and I’ll write it,” and we were friends from them on. I wrote it at home. I never went to the office. All I did was dump it off at Paddock in Arlington Heights. And then, of course, I did that for seven and a half years and finally the Day Publications came in. Now, this was the very first newspaper, suburban daily newspaper, in the United States and it was put out by Field Enterprise, and it started in Arlington Heights. I went for an interview to just be a writer, a feature writer, and I was offered the position of women’s editor for the Prospect Day, which, of course, had not even come out yet, which is another whole story. I can do a whole tape on that. But basically the paper grew, and as it grew, Paddock, which was a weekly, became bi-weekly, tri-weekly and then they went daily. Well, when they went daily, there was not enough advertising in the area to hold both of those papers together financially, and Field’s opted to keep his television and he sold the paper to Paddock for a million dollars, which, of course, threw me out of a job. But I went over to Des Plaines Publishing and started to work for the Mt. Prospect Times as woman’s page editor there. I worked my way up to being managing editor, which is a whole different ball of wax. Then I left there and worked for Shephard Publications for one year and then Bob died and I had to go to work for money. I always say I gave up journalism for money. Bob, when he passed away, I had to start looking for a better income. That’s when I went into the village, and I went in as an assistant to the village clerk. The first newsletter I wrote was in 1974 and the village only had one newsletter and it was sent out to remind people to buy their licenses. So after I did design the first one, which was really a nice looking job-it was a three-fold, but the last fold was doubled and folded in so it folded out when you read it and the top of it carried the anticipated bicentennial calendar, and it was all done in red, white and blue. It was a real nice piece. That was sent out to everybody in the village by mail. Then Mr. [Robert] Eppley, who was the village manager at the time said, “We ought to really expand the newsletter,” because that was the coming thing of getting people involved in municipal government.

KELLY: How long had the village been sending out that newsletter?

HAUGH: Well, they had been sending it out since they had vehicle stickers. Before all it was a letter reminding people of vehicle stickers. That’s all it was. It wasn’t really a newsletter. It was just more or less a notice, you know. So then, he got the village board to approve four newsletters. Well, the first thing we had to do was reduce the cost of distribution, so we went to door hangers. I got an outfit that would hang the little letters on the doors, and that’s how they used them. Then we went to six newsletters a year. I really got hooked on newsletters at one time when I was working for the chamber. I was doing thirty-six newsletters a year, which is kind of a lot of newsletters.

KELLY: I would say so. Did the newsletter advertise activities that were going on in the village, as well as …?

HAUGH: No, it was mostly held to municipal news and education of the public as to the staff and as to the elected officials. One of my first projects besides the newsletter was to design a calendar. I brought that in under budget, and it was very well received. We did that two years, and that was the annual report. But we made it up into the newsletter.

KELLY: We were talking about parades and activities that people who lived in the downtown area were involved in. Were there any special things that took place at the train station that you can think about, politically or …?

HAUGH: Not really. As I say, the downtown didn’t do very much at Christmas, per se. It wasn’t until I got into the chamber and suggested we have our Christmas walks. That was in 1980. I can’t say that they didn’t exist because maybe they did. The only thing that I can really remember with downtown is that election day deal. Other than that, of course, when Randhurst opened then, of course, everything was at Randhurst and the Plaza. Santa Claus came in at both places, and we really didn’t need anything.

KELLY: Did Santa Claus come to the downtown area before that?

HAUGH: If it did, it was special occasions that were paid by private people because I don’t think there was any organization whatsoever that brought Santa in until we did with the chamber. And then, of course, the first year was a Christmas walk that we had-and actually I copied that from Geneva because I was so impressed. All the merchants opened their stores and served refreshments, and then, of course, Santa came for the children.

KELLY: When was the first Christmas walk?

HAUGH: In 1980. The chamber took that over. When I was with the village, we initiated a farmer’s market, but it was taken over by the chamber in 1980 when I went in as executive director. Of course, it’s still going, which is nice. And at that time we also initiated the Elderhonor, which lauds the seniors who give so willingly of their volunteer time. We also did the conversion from the Christmas walk to the Teddy Bear walk in 1983. And, of course, then we incorporated the library and the bank and the Woman’s Club later joined in. Before that, the chamber had the Santa Claus come. They are really funny because the first one was a real stitch because it was old Doc Baumann. Did you know Doc Baumann?

KELLY: no.

HAUGH: He’s an elderly man. He had his own white mustache and he refused to wear a Santa Claus beard with a mustache, so it was very hard to find one. Actually it was pretty awful as far as I was concerned. We decided to bring him in on the train. There was a mix-up, and we were allover at the Village Hall by the Christmas tree waiting for Santa Claus and, of course, he’s coming in on the train. So half the people were at the train station and half the people-it was terrible. The worst part was we didn’t have a nice costume for him. We just had a real-it was the only one I could get-it was like cheesecloth. [laughter] It was awful and he was so mad about this costume! Anyway, we got through it all right. And then the next one we had, I had a Mrs. Santa Claus. That was Ruby Morton. And we had Don May, who is a gigantic man. He’s got to be 6’6″. You know Don don’t you?

KELLY: Yes. HAUGH: Well, he was my Santa Claus. We had to have a way of getting him there, see. So I had him go up to the roof of the village hall and appear on the roof. [laughter] It was hysterical! And then after that we had John Foster. He was our Santa Claus. But, we’ve been lucky in having good Santa Clauses. And Mrs. Santa Claus-I think Ruby did that for seven years. She was Mrs. Santa Claus.

KELLY: Was the train station essentially the same building now as it was then?

HAUGH: No. It was built when [Robert] Teichert was mayor. He got the funding to rebuild that from the state.

KELLY: What was there before?

HAUGH: And again, I’m only telling you from pictures because I never did see the old station. The original station was just a clapboard job and it was just a little tiny place. Just almost like a little shed, if you will.

KELLY: For many two or three people?

HAUGH: Not even two or three because I think they just had one station master. And the mail, they didn’t even stop for the mail. They grabbed it as they went by off of an arm, you know. So they didn’t even stop in Mt. Prospect because, remember, we didn’t have our growth spurt until the late ’50s. That’s when people came out from Chicago to be suburbanites.

KELLY: So when you first came here, the train didn’t make a regular stop here?

HAUGH: It stopped, but I’m going to tell you something. Those were the oldest trains I ever rode on. They had gas jets on them, would you believe? And they had pot belly stoves on them! If you can visualize that in 1950. And dirty! Whenever you came off that place, you had to go home and take a bath. It was soot from the old engine. We had the old engines. I mean the steam engines out here when I came out.

KELLY: About how many cars would be on the train?

HAUGH: Oh not very many. I mean maybe three or four, but never more than that. I mean now you can get six and seven. KELLY: Were they used by what we call commuters?

HAUGH: Oh, yes, definitely. But there was a lot more, you know, freight cars because they would load up sugar beets, corn. All the stuff would be put onto the freight cars to be brought into Chicago.

KELLY: So it was a combination passenger and. ..?

HAUGH: Oh, there’s like one passenger car. All the rest would be taking produce and stuff to Chicago. Of course, we used to have onion sheds allover. There used to be one next to the old Public works Building on pine Street, but it was torn down.

KELLY: These onion sheds were right downtown?

HAUGH: Yes, they were downtown. And then, of course, they were out on the fields, too, where they would sort the onions. That was one of the big things they exported out of here, too. And mushrooms surprisingly enough. Some of those mushroom farms are still in Des Plaines. I don’t think we have any more in Mt. Prospect. But the mushrooms was another big, big export from here.

KELLY: What were some of the others? I remember beets.

HAUGH: Yes. Beets and potatoes, but mostly dairy. A lot of dairy stuff, you know, milk especially. They would pick up the milk cans, and they stopped for the milk cans.

KELLY: How did they keep that cold?

HAUGH: I don’t know. I don’t think they did too well. But don’t forget, it wasn’t that long of a ride either. And if you figure it’s right out of the cow, it’s warm. So by the time it gets in, it would probably be down to room temperature by the time they got it to the dairy.

KELLY: About how often did the trains actually stop? Was it a regular schedule?

HAUGH: When we came out, we were a scheduled stop. In the ’50s they stopped here. Before that they didn’t.

KELLY: About how many times a day?

HAUGH: Not very many. I think there was like three or four trains at the most. At the most. And that would be early morning and then there’d be one in the afternoon around three and then, of course, another one in the evening. They didn’t run every hour or half hour or anything like that. As I say, we very seldom took the train. We didn’t have any money to go anywhere really.

KELLY: Do you remember how much it cost to take the train?

HAUGH: If I remember right, it was like 35 cents from what I can remember.

KELLY: And you said they were steam engines and then. ..

HAUGH: Well, at first, yes. And then later, of course, they had the other engines on. That was a real experience to ride on those. You could hardly believe that they would still have those in the ’50s. But I can remember those old jet things and the stove like in the movies. Cowboy movies.

KELLY: Down at the train station, did they have a station master that was here all the time?

HAUGH: Ch, no. Most of the time he would just be there in the morning. It’s still like that. You’d be lucky if you could catch him. If you wanted any information you usually called downtown, you know. Ch, I was going to tell you about another shop I remembered. It was that little baby shop. Louie the barber was downtown, and there was another barber shop on Main Street. I can’t remember that man’s name. I think when I took over in the Chamber of Commerce, we had twelve beauty shops and barber shops in the downtown area, which is a lot, really, and a lot of real estate offices. As you can see, we’ve had a nice changeover. We have a lot of nice retail sales. Mary Jane’s [Dress Shop], of course, was there. She’s been there a long time. I don’t think she was there when-no, because the only restaurant we had at first was Doris Kirkibe’s, and that used to be in the building where Daneo’s Restaurant is right there on the corner of Busse Avenue and Central. In 1966, it was a piano store because I was working for Day Publications and I wrote a song, and we went down to play it on the piano. So that’s how I remember there was a piano store in there. Before that it used to be a Buick distributor. William Busse used to have it. So that building’s been there a long time.

KELLY: You mentioned the dime store. Did they have reacty-towear?

HAUGH: Oh, no, no, no. They just had the usual things of a dime store-school supplies and a lot of sewing things. They had a little bit of fabric, toys. That was the big thing, of course, for the kids was the toys and the books. But not like we have now. Not like paperbacks or anything like that. Maybe coloring books and things and shoes strings and shoe polish and things you can’t find anymore.

KELLY: What would say, Dolores, were some of the favorite things that you remember positively about Mt. Prospect as you first came here and started to build your home and raise your family?

HAUGH: Oh, I think most of it was the friendliness. When you went downtown, people talked to you. You could walk down the street and say hello to everybody. I mean, you didn’t feel funny, you know? And if you were new, you’d stop and talk and ask when they moved in and where they lived and where their house was in, you know, in Chicago or where they came from. It was a very nice, warm community. Of course, I feel it still is, although I know in reality we’ve grown to include a lot of multi-families, a lot of people who only commute out here and live out here and work in Chicago and really don’t get involved in their community. But I can’t really say that’s across the board because I live in a very large unit over at Huntington Commons and I have people in there that come to the auto show and things as long as I tell them about it. So I think a lot of it is still wound up in communications. If we don’t have good communications, you’re not going to get people to do anything. I think we should have newsletters like the library has and like the village has.

KELLY: You talked about Mt. Prospect when you first came here having some retail outlets, places where, for the most part, you could purchase the kinds of things that you needed for your day-by-day living and then the change from that to a service environment and then you just alluded a little bit ago to perhaps that you were seeing that changing back.

HAUGH: Oh, yes.

KELLY: How do you feel about that? Do you think that’s good, bad?

HAUGH: It’s got to be good. There’s two reasons it’s got to be good. First of all, when the Kensington business area opened, you know, the industrial park, I was with the village at the time.These people would come to the mayor, and one of the first things they did was look at the downtown because, you see, your downtown is a reflection of your total community no matter where it is. It never has moved from where it is because of the railroad tracks, which are positives and negatives, okay, because they do divide the town. But basically by upgrading your downtown, you attract your better people into your industrial areas. So that’s important. It’s very important. Also I feel that the attitudes of the merchants have been more cooperative through the chamber now and in the past. They’re working together to bring people back downtown. Like when we were talking about it originally, I said to the downtown merchants, “You must get the attitude that you are a shopping mall. Downtown is a shopping mall. Offer them everything they can get at a mall, and they’ll come back.” So you have. ..

[end of tape] [Tape 2: Side 1]

HAUGH: I think that by having the sidewalk days and the hometown days and bringing the people back-it’s a hard job to bring people back. Once you lose them, it’s very difficult to bring them back, but I think by having these different things downtown, you’re seeing a lot of people saying, “Oh that’s what’s going on,” like Teddy Bear walk and the hometown days. And then, you see, the merchants can offer one thing that a mall can’t, and that’s service. One of my favorite stories is a little girl that went into buy a present for her mother.and she didn’t have enough money and the lady gave it to her anyway and the father came in and was so delighted. I’m sure there’s still customers of that store because that’s what the small downtown area can do where your malls can’t do that. So they sell service. I think that we have a good mix downtown now. Plus the fact that because of the redevelopment program and the commission that works on it, you’re seeing more people being brought into the downtown area who will be shoppers. That’s why you have your multi-families coming in closer to the downtown area because they will run out to the drugstore, they will run out to the local grocery store, and you will have the people shopping downtown. If you don’t go on a planned action of bringing people down around that town-senior citizen development, all those kind of things should be downtown. That’s why we’re so happy of having our museum downtown, because that’s going to bring people in. And whenever you have that-you’ve got your library, you’ve got your village hall, senior center, Historical Society-when it’s downtown, it’s going to do nothing but bring up the retail sales for your local people.

KELLY: So you think that what you’re seeing now is better than the way it was?

HAUGH: Ch, absolutely. Absolutely. But it’s taken time. It’s taken a long time to develop the ambience, if you will, by having the upgrade of the landscaping of the railroad station. All this takes time. It took, as I said, four years before the actuality of the first street downtown. So you know how long it takes. It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just the way life is. You have a lot of things to overcome. When you work, for instance, with the streets, you work with the state. If you work with the railroad, you work with the Chicago & Northwestern, so you’re never working on a two-point thing [where] you go from the beginning to the end in one stroke. You go from the beginning to here to there to back and forth until you get there. So it always takes time. It takes a lot of time.

KELLY: Dolores, if there was one thing that you would want the children in Mt. Prospect to remember about the history of Mt. Prospect, what would it be?

HAUGH: I think it would be the spirit of the town, the spirit of the pioneers who came here when the Des Plaines River was a roaring torrent, when they had to really go out and cut the trees down and build the homes and cook venison to stay alive and to do all these things. I think the pioneer spirit of the town still is there. Even though we’re a modern city-we are a city. I mean, everybody says, “We’re a village.” Yes, we’re a village because we’ve chosen this form of government, but basically we are a city, and when there’s more people, you have more problems. When you have more problems, you have to have more police. When you have more police, you have to have more taxes. Everything is relevant. But I really feel that we’re going to be doing a great step towards bringing the history of the pioneers to our children through our Historical Society, because we’ll be introducing a third-grade curriculum through our new history book and through our education committee, and I think that’s going to give the children a springboard into what they will be learning at the new museum because the new museum is going to tell them a lot more of how life really was in this town. I think it’s important for people to know what their roots were. I think that to me-of course, I love this town. I’ve loved it since I’ve lived here, and I’ve always seen needs and jumped in and hopefully helped. I’ve known so many people through the jobs that I’ve had and I found such good people here. I really do. I said I think it’s indicative. Imagine in this day and age when the big me is the big thing to have people giving money to a museum. It’s almost unheard of. People can’t even believe sometimes. But I know the kind of people who live here and they are good people-very good people.

KELLY: Reflective of the spirit that built the community?

HAUGH: Exactly. You get them together and they’ll form up things that maybe aren’t exactly what the elected officials want. They’ll go forward as a group and they’ll present their problems and they don’t always win, but at least they do it. That’s the thing. I just think one of the biggest things is the apathy and the voting. But there again, a lot of people, (a), aren’t interested in it, and, (b), they don’t have cable to watch the meetings. I think if people get involved in it, then they start wanting to vote and putting people into office and so on. I think it’s good to have controversy. If everything goes well, there’s something the matter. But I think we’re lucky, too, in the schools that we have, our library, our post office. Everything we have here is of top quality giving. It’s giving to the public. Sure we pay taxes, but we get things back for our taxes that you don’t get in Chicago. You don’t get your taxes back in Chicago like you do out here.

KELLY: You mentioned the post office. It just brought to mind, when you first came here, was there a post office in Mt. Prospect?

HAUGH: Yes. It was over on Evergreen where Carolyn Krause’s office is, 200 East Evergreen.

KELLY: Right off Northwest Highway.

HAUGH: Yes, across the street from the water tower. That’s where our post office was. I’m not sure, though, if that’s where it was When we first came. I can’t remember. But that’s the only one I do recall.

KELLY: And then they moved to their current site?

HAUGH: Yes, from there. They built that in 1976, too. It was opened. That was another one of the big bicentennial things we did. That’s another thing, I think, too. I give a lot of credit to the village because they do take the time to celebrate some of these things. Like in ’76 it was the bicentennial of country, and now again in the last five years with the celebration of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. You’d be surprised how few people are doing this in the country. They would like you to believe there’s a lot, but basically a lot of communities don’t care about it, and yet Mt. Prospect’s always done that.

KELLY: Dolores, is there anything else that comes to mind while we’ve been talking that you’d like to share about early Mt. Prospect or when you first came here that you can think of?

HAUGH: Well, I think we’ve kind of covered it. I think Busse School was an important part in our lives because both the children went there. They both graduated from Central before it was torn down, and, of course, they both went to Prospect High School and got a very good high school education, which of course, I think is another plus for the community. I find that now, compared to what we had in the downtown area, your merchandizing is like a million percent more because you have so many stores at Randhurst and right in your own hometown. I think it’s wise to say that you can see this growth in retail sales revenue that the village gets because when I first started in 1980, we were getting as revenue from retail sales under three million dollars, and now it’s well over six million. So you know that these things are showing up and that’s what keeps the taxes down.

KELLY: And certainly the growth in the downtown area has contributed to all this?

HAUGH: Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, because as you changed over from the non-retail to the retail, you see, then you started to bring in your retail sales again, which is great.

KELLY: Okay. Well, thank you very much Dolores. I certainly enjoyed our conversation.

HAUGH: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it too.

KELLY: Well good! Thank you.

 

Does MPHS have photographs: Yes

Address in Mount Prospect:

Birth Date: Circa 1935

Death Date: February 25, 2001

Marriage
Date: It is rumored that he has been married and divorced

Spouse:

Children:

Interesting information on life, career, accomplishments:

Richard Hauff is one of the more colorful characters in Mount Prospect History. For a short time he owned the Mount Prospect Country Club and was the center of attention in town. In 1958 A man named Henry Sophie sold the golf course to a 23 year old Richard Hauff, although he later said that he never would have sold it if he had known that Hauff was reputed to be involved in the seedy underworld of Chicago. Hauff had been born in Iran and was orphaned at a young age. He was found wandering in the desert by a couple of U.S. Army Engineers who were there during WWII. He was later adopted by one and brought back to Arlington Heights. He showed great potential as a golfer in high school but at some point ended up associated with members of organized crime. To this day, no one really knows where he got the money to purchase the course in 1958 but it is suspected to have had Mafia ties. He was known as a Rush Street Playboy and moved in very high profile circles, claiming people like Frank Sinatra as friends. Rumors claim two main things about Hauff, first that he was a great golfer with “the sweetest swing in the northwest suburbs” and second that he was “one heck of a lover” supposedly having dated Zsa Zsa Gabor and other celebrities. He spent a lot of money on the Mount Prospect Country club and had the course redesigned. He was able to attract The Women’s Master’s PGA Tournament in 1959. This certainly put Mount Prospect on the map; however it was not very profitable for Hauff. He declared bankruptcy in 1960 and put the course up for sale. He faded from the spot light for a long time, until he was murdered in the kitchen of his restaurant in Greencastle, Indiana in 2001. Apparently he was involved in a love triangle and was shot by the husband of the woman he was having an affair with.