Growing up in Park Forest and the Beginning Years of Rich Township High School
by members of the Rich High School Class of 1956

Essayists (click on name): Steve Philips, Susan Cowan Jakubiak, Diane Pettingell Staes, Elaine Umland Brownlee

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE PHOTOS FROM THE FIRST 8th GRADE GRADUATION CLASS IN PARK FOREST AT LAKEWOOD SCHOOL

Steve Philips - A House in Park Forest  1952

At thirteen, there were lots of things I’d never imagined, much less seen. The world is large, and in the years after World War II, most kids didn’t travel far and wide. So when our aging Chevrolet arrived on Sauk Trail in the spring of 1952, and followed the Trail down to an ACB sales office on Indianwood, Mike and I were amazed by this world beyond our horizon. (We later learned that our parents were also a bit dubious about that huge construction site parading as a new community, which promised to be an earthly paradise for people dreaming of owning their own home). It sure wasn’t a town like our town, and we were definitely not enthusiastic.

The only thing interrupting the fields of weeds on the north side of Sauk Trail between the edge of town and Indianwood Boulevard was a derelict little church and cemetery. To the south, it was a vast building site, with brand new houses in various stages of completion, almost until we reached Shabbona Drive. Beyond that strangely named street, the new homes were surrounded by scrawny saplings, struggling grass, and immature shrubbery.  We arrived at our destination without seeing rental units, the Plaza, nor any indication of a town center.

But the promise of paradise was more potent than the raw reality we had seen on our way to the ACB office. Dad saw that the GI-Bill covered the down payment, and that the monthly payments fit into the family budget. So he signed up for a house not yet built on the south side of Sauk Trail. Number 345. Later that day, we got lost several times in driving around the homes area, with its incomprehensible curving labyrinth of streets. Still later, we finally dared cross Sauk Trail to discover the rental area, the shopping plaza, and churches. It appeared green and settled – even if the trees were still pretty slim, and the plaza wildly exotic. It may be difficult for you who lived through the mud of the early days in the rental courts to imagine how permanent and green it appeared in 1952, after our preview of the desolation of Sauk Trail and environs.

We returned with the movers in August  to take possession of our new home. It was not quite as ‘finished’ as ACB had promised, but we moved in with fresh promises that all the ‘details’ would be cleared up in no time. I remember my mother’s growing irritation for the rest of the summer, as she discovered what ‘no time’ really meant to ACB.  But I also remember my father’s soothing refrain: “Everything will be fine, Honey.” And so everything was.... eventually.

Houses beyond ours were quickly completed, moving vans arrived, and the construction crews disappeared down the block beyond Minoqua Street. For Mike and I, it was a time to discover our surroundings. We began timidly in the fields on the other side of Sauk Trail, being careful to give a wide berth to the abandoned church and graveyard. The future site of Rich High was particularly swampy, with reeds and high grasses – a perfect place to find frogs and turtles. But that summer was also a time to shovel and rake topsoil, spread grass seed, plant trees and shrubs, build a wall, lay flagstones. In those days, child labor was in fashion on Sauk Trail. Mike and I had no idea that owning our home would prove to be so much more demanding that just renting a house!

When Mike and I could escape from our yard work, we pursued our exploration of the village.

There were many more children of our age in Park Forest than in our old hometown of Pontiac, and the kids in our area had all arrived before we did. Being the last to arrive seemed a terrible disadvantage in those days. We didn’t know anything, and that sorry state was obvious to everyone. It felt awful to be so dumb about everything. We didn’t know what pizza was. In general, food was a big challenge. Mike came back from a new friend’s home with an urgent request for a dessert called ‘ink letters’. Confronted with mom’s perplexed gaze, my teenage superiority over a mere twelve year old was exposed as a sham. I had never tasted an eclair, didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t spell it.

Slowly we met some of the real ‘old-timers’ in the rental area. They seemed to know everything, and were generous, if sometimes condescending, in sharing their knowledge with us. They explained the mysteries of the courts, demonstrated the proper use of the Plaza, and warned us about the ‘hoods from the Heights.’

Then, one month after moving into our new home, on the eighth of September, my new friend Bob Wehling stopped by 345 Sauk Trail to take me to the Faith United Protestant building for our first day of high school.  My initiation into Park Forest life suddenly accelerated, and high school filled me with memories that squeezed out the more pedestrian ones of a new house.

-- Steve Philips
 

Susan (Cowan) Jakubiak: Remembering the Early Days of Park Forest

Galoshes: when we first moved into the rentals in April 1949 (I was almost 10 years old), we were in mudville – no streets, sidewalks or curbs. We had duckboards and lots of mud. We all – adults and children alike – wore red or black galoshes over our shoes.  Park Foresters were instantly recognizable by our boots. When we were bused to school in Chicago Heights, we got off the bus and were paraded into the basement en masse to take off our boots and line them up on newspapers in rows before we were allowed to go upstairs to our classes.  When our families went shopping on weekends in Chicago Heights (there were no stores of any kind in Park Forest), everyone knew us as Park Foresters wherever we went – the rubber boots were our trademark.

And likewise we could identify all other Park Foresters by the boots. On the drive back to Park Forest, the universal convention was that if we saw someone standing at the bus stop on Western Avenue waiting for the connecting bus and wearing boots, we stopped our car, picked them up and gave them a ride home. It would have been considered extremely rude to drive by without picking up a car-less Park Forester.

The maintenance man: anyone who has read Erma Bombeck’s “Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” knows about the frantic search for the maintenance man – the suburban counterpart of the “super” in a city apartment building.  The maintenance man was responsible for the stoves, refrigerators, and heating and plumbing in a specified area of rental units (row houses). When we lived in the rental row houses before my parents bought a house on Gold Street behind the high school, our maintenance man was Fred Runge, who lived on Elm Street. And if anyone spotted him in our court or even across the street, word would get about as though jungle drums had sounded and suddenly he would find himself besieged by every housewife within shouting distance.

Carpools: some families’ wives took their husbands to the IC (Illinois Central Railroad, the commuter lifeline to Chicago) and picked them up.  But in our neighborhood of Gold Street and Rocket Circle, families grouped into 5-family car pools where each family was assigned a specific day of the week on which that commuter took the family car and drove the whole group to Richton Park station for the 8:04 express in to town and the 5:10 p.m. express home. The five families shared a single parking space in the station parking lot. And each wife accepted the fact that she had the family car only 4 days a week.

Diane (Pettingell) Staes: Mud, Mud, Mud, and the First Grade School and Rich High School Class

Somewhere under Fir Street in Park Forest is a boot of mine.  A red, rubber boot lost in the Spring of 1950 when my family visited what was soon to be our new home.  At the time, Fir Street was unpaved, and the swamp upon which it and most of Park Forest is built was putting up one heck of a good fight to reclaim the land!  "Duck boards" were in place as sidewalks and we walked down Fir Street to Court J-9 and the duplex at 252 into which we moved that summer.  Unfortunately, I did not stay on the "duck boards" but tested the muddy street which promptly swallowed up my boot.  I felt lucky to still have my shoe when I reached the "duck board" again!  Not only was there a lot of mud in Park Forest in those early days, but there were many creatures which were unknown in my Chicago neighborhood!

The first year that school was held in Park Forest was just coming to an end when 252 Fir became my new home.  Those sixth graders were to be my seventh grade classmates when school resumed in September of 1950.  School was held in temporary quarters*, vacant row houses, that year just as it had been the first year.  Our seventh grade teacher was "Mips" Morgan, the first of many Park Forest teachers that we all loved.  During seventh grade, construction was going on at Lakewood School, the first real school building in Park Forest.  It was completed in time to house our eighth grade class in September of 1951 and graduate this class in June of 1952 -- Lakewood School's and Park Forest's first graduates.

In ninth grade (freshman year) we were back in temporary quarters in the United Protestant Church building but we were still the highest grade level in Park Forest.
What a unique situation we had without sophomores, juniors or seniors.  We chose the school colors, the school song and the team name. And we worked hard
at our studies. (To see what our report cards looked like, click here.)

In September of 1953 we moved into a beautiful new high school building and began our sophomore year along with freshman, juniors and seniors. Joe Brooks, Sue Cowan, Larry Fuller, Liz Logrbrinck, Al Smith, Mary Ellen Thimblin, Claude Wells, and Ruth Ann Wigley were all in the seventh grade class in September, 1950,  that went on to graduate from both Lakewood School and Rich Township High School.

     --  Diane (Pettingell) Staes

(*Click here to see a depiction of a classroom before the first school was built.)

Elaine (Umland) Brownlee: The Beginning of Rich Township High School

Born in 1938, I grew up in the area surrounding Park Forest before there was a Park Forest. My family owned 5 acres in what is now the Lincolnwood section of Park Forest. Sauk Trail was a dirt road then with a few farms dotting its skinny shoulders. Lincoln Highway was paved but was only a two-lane road. It was the route to Chicago Heights for shopping and Saturday afternoon movies. Western Avenue was also paved; it led us to the city of Chicago with a frequent stop in Blue Island for White Castle hamburgers. My father and brother hunted pheasants and trapped muskrats for their pelts in the marshy fields and bogs. We raised turkeys and chickens for sale. Cornfields and daisy-strewn prairies were my playgrounds.

When I was 10 years old, I became conscious of the constant sound of heavy-duty building equipment to the south-east of us. People in the surrounding areas were not happy the land had been sold to "the developers." Change is hard to accept. In 1949, my father sold our 5 acres to the Lions' Club International who planned an international headquarters near the Illinois Central Railroad Station at 211th street. Surrounding neighbors did the same. We then moved into the town of Matteson.

In 1952, I was thrilled to find out that I would be attending this new high school called Rich Township High School, and that it would be MY class that would be the first complete 4-year graduating class! That meant that I would not have to ride a bus all the way to Bloom or Thornton high schools. But Rich High School was not ready to open its doors in the autumn of 1952, so we started classes at Faith United Protestant Church in Park Forest. It was my class of 1956 that chose the name of the high school's athletic teams, "The Rockets," and the school's colors, green and gold. History in the making! It was a joy to meet my "Park Forester" classmates—how nice they were, so bright, witty and vibrant. And the teachers were the cream of the crop.

There was a lunchroom but no cafeteria so we were permitted to leave our Faith United Protestant classrooms at lunchtime to have a hot dog or hamburger at S.S. Kresge's dime store, or The Park Forest Grill. The shopping center was not yet completed, and I remember navigating muddy wooden platforms instead of sidewalks to get from place to place. Mr. Raymond Janota, Rich Township High School's first biology teacher, sent us on forays into the boggy fields to find frogs to dissect, or wildflowers to examine under a microscope. (We did not have the resources to have our own yearbook that first year, but some of the photos in the Yearbook of 1954 were gleaned from that first school year of 1952-53 when we were freshmen.)

The next autumn, in 1953, Rich High School opened its brand new doors to all classes, and what a high school it was! It was a "model" high school, and, as students, we were always conscious of the many visitors who had come to see what these visionaries in Park Forest had created, both as a remarkable new community and for its high school of academic excellence. Naturally, we sometimes balked that we were "on display" and compelled to be on our "best behavior"
because well-known national dignitaries visited frequently. Their arrival was announced over the public speaker, usually a few moments before they arrived! But we were also consumed with pride, a pride that has endured among all my classmates throughout the years.

Hail to thee Rich High, all hail. We still sing your praise!

     -- Elaine Umland-Brownlee