When Glen Lenzi signed on as one of the first students at the brand new College of Lake County in 1969, he selected courses from a list of 54 and registered on a card table in a crowded office at St. Therese Hospital in downtown Waukegan. His tuition was $7 per hour, or about $105 for the entire semester.
When school opened on Sept. 25 that year, Lenzi and 2,359 other students left their cars in a gravel lot on the school’s Grayslake campus, walked across a field of mud and sat down in the six trailers that served as CLC’s first classrooms. The bathrooms, when the plumbing was working, were in adjacent temporary buildings. When the plumbing wasn’t working, students and teachers alike had to trudge across the mud to use the facilities of the then private Brae Loch Country Club.
Although physical education classes were required, there was no gym, and students drove to the gymnasium of the old Waukegan Armory on Glen Flora for their required basketball and volleyball games.
Science equipment was scarce. John Shelton of Libertyville, one of the original faculty members, remembers ordering starter kits for his physics classes from catalogs.
There was no library, and what passed for social life centered on the bookstore, Lenzi said.
When Lenzi’s daughter, Jana, registered for CLC classes this fall, she used a touch-tone telephone. The CLC computerized system let her choose courses right from the family room of the Lenzi home in Gurnee.
Her tuition was $41 per credit hour, or about $675 for the first semester. When school opened on Aug. 22, Jana was one of 14,073 students attending classes in the college’s 40-plus locations.
Jana’s science classes are held in well-equipped laboratories. A nearby library provides 100,000 volumes. And the bathrooms are right down the hall.
PE classes no longer are required, but a dozen different sports teams train in the Health and Physical Education Building or on adjacent fields.
The school’s social life has moved out of the bookstore and into two cafeterias, the school’s art gallery, the corridors of the Grayslake campus’ sprawling Main Building or the hallways of its Waukegan Lakeshore Campus.
The miracle of the College of Lake County is not that it has grown into a large, vibrant institution and served 300,000 students in a scant quarter century. The miracle is that it exists at all.
The history of the school, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, is a tale of opportunity nearly missed. A committee of high school superintendents presented a referendum to create an all-Lake County junior college district in 1964. That request was turned down flat by county voters.
Luckily, the committee regrouped, and in October 1967, Illinois Junior College District No. 532 was approved 10,411-4,919.
No one could miss the ballot two months later for District 532’s first trustee election; it was 27 inches long and contained 41 candidates. One of the winners, attorney James Lumber, has been on the seven-member CLC Board of Trustees ever since.
“Polling places were in the high schools then,” said Lumber, who also is mayor of Round Lake. “I remember standing outside each of the county’s 12 high schools, introducing myself to people and asking them to vote for me.”
That first board, which also included, among others, an optometrist, a bank president and a clothing salesman, began the dual task of finding a site for a college and a person to run it. Surprisingly, acquiring the land was the easier job.
A pair of Lake County developers, A. Harold Anderson and Paul W. Brandel, agreed to donate 181 acres to the college if the town of Grayslake would annex another 1,000 acres they planned to develop.
“We’d just finished a survey that determined that the county’s center of population was at the intersection of Routes 45 and 120, and these men were offering to give us a campus less than three miles away,” Lumber said.
Today the CLC campus site, which includes another 50 acres acquired from the same developers, “is easily worth over $8 million,” Lumber said.
By 1968 the CLC board also had one employee, a secretary named Margaret Lewis, and an office in space donated by St. Therese Hospital.
The St. Therese nuns had a mission, Lumber added. “They were phasing out their school of nursing, and they wanted to make sure our new college would take it over.”
But the college still lacked a president. “We’d spent months looking,” Lumber said. “Finally, in frustration, I called someone I knew in education who recommeded Richard Erzen, who was working as the administrative assistant at Illinois Valley Community College in LaSalle. When I called Dr. Erzen, he said he’d applied for our job six months ago. Mrs. Lewis found his application and some others that had slipped behind a radiator in our office.”
Erzen, hired at a salary of $25,000, and Lewis then began sorting through 5,000 applications to select the 42 teachers who would serve as CLC’s first full-time faculty.
“I think we made some good choices,” said Erzen, who left CLC in 1977 to set up an educational program for the NCR Corp. in Dayton, Ohio, and is now retired and living in Normal, Ill.
Fifteen of those original teachers, including John Shelton, are still there. “When we first started,” Shelton said, “we weren’t just sharing offices in those mobile buildings. We were sharing desks. But when I look back, I realize that we were fostering camaraderie here, and we were all enjoying building something together.”
Ruth Rickard, a recently retired history and political science instructor who wrote a history of the college in 1986, remembers selecting textbooks for the first Western Civilization classes from books stacked on the floor of her family room. And Barbara Richardson, now Lake County coroner, was, in 1969, CLC’s second secretary and the person responsible for writing, and printing, the college’s first catalog.
As she carried those booklets from her car into the CLC Waukegan office, a wind from Lake Michigan almost blew them away.
That mishap aside, college officials were concerned how many people who got the catalogs would enroll.
Erzen recalled, “We announced an on-campus registration for our first semester. I remember sitting in one of those temporary buildings, looking down that long driveway, wondering if anyone, besides those nurses, would arrive.”
They did arrive, and CLC’s initial registration, of 2,360 full- and part- time students, was the largest of any junior college in Illinois. Although those students came from all parts of Lake County, most of them, like Glen Lenzi, had either started college somewhere else or wanted to stay close to home for two years before moving on to a four-year school.
Erzen wanted more. “My vision for CLC was what it has become,” he said. “I hoped to create a real community college, not a two-year transfer institution. I wanted CLC to serve the needs of our businesses and all our populations.”
Today that vision of diversity is CLC’s greatest strength. Eighty-four percent of the school’s almost 15,000 students go only part time, attending the school while tending to their full-time jobs or their children.
The average age is 30.7, with some students as young as 16 and others over age 90. While some students are there for engineering courses in the school’s futuristic computer-aided design and manufacturing center, others are there to learn English or to pick up enough skills to earn a GED (high school general equivalency degree).
“Twenty-five percent of all of Lake County’s high school graduates come here,” said Daniel LaVista, the college’s third president, who has served since 1987. “And once we get students, our job is to give them some support. We may not be able to offer dorms or fraternity parties, but we can provide solid teachers who get to know the whole student and his or her employment or child-care needs.”
Glen Lenzi said, “Everyone in our family has benefited from the College of Lake County.”
Lenzi participated in CLC’s first graduation, which was held at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein. Fifteen students were awarded Associate in Arts degrees and 40 students received nursing degrees. Lenzi later earned a degree from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. He is a manufacturing project engineer at Outboard Marine in Waukegan and serves as president of the board of education for Gurnee’s Elementary School District 56.
Lenzi’s wife, Donna, a teacher’s aide, took child-development and psychology classes at CLC, and their two sons are also CLC graduates. Steven Lenzi, who took pre-medicine and health sciences courses, is a paramedic at Highland Park Hospital, while his brother, Jason, has an administrative job at Abbott Laboratories.
“When Jason started at CLC, his goal was to finish at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana,” Lenzi said. “A CLC counselor helped design Jason’s class schedule, and after two years every CLC credit transferred to the U of I, where he was accepted into the honors fellow program.”
Unlike many college students today, Jason earned his degree in four years. Jana, a second-year student who is a member of this year’s CLC Student Senate and serves as the student body’s representative on the college’s Board of Trustees, said, “A lot of my friends went away to school last year, and socially, they did a lot more. But I don’t think they learned more. Many of them attended lectures in huge auditoriums, and their only personal contact was with TA’s (teaching assistants). All my classes were small and taught by teachers who were easily accessible. Every class I had was a mix of students of all ages and backgrounds. and I could learn from their experiences.”
“Our commitment is to the student who wants a solid two-year foundation at a reasonable cost before moving on to another school,” said President LaVista. “But our commitment is also to the high school dropout, who needs to develop a skill to get a job, to the secretary who wants to upgrade her computer skills and to the disabled student who needs a full range of services, not just a lower desk in the registration line. If a plant coordinator from Abbott sends us a supervisor who needs to improve his writing skills, we try to get him to do more, to sign up for a speech class as well. We want people to get so interested in education that they’ll advance into lifelong learning.
“Because we have an open admissions policy, we used to be called the `College of Last Chance,”‘ the president continued. “But in the last few years the word on the street is that we have gotten better, that we do have good teachers and equipment here.”
Lumber of the Board of Trustees said he’s proud that the institution he helped plant in a muddy cornfield has grown so well. The strength of CLC, he added, is not in its facilities-after all, six of those “temporary” buildings are still in use-but in the character of its teachers and longtime employees.
“If I had a worry about the future,” he said, “it’s that those 25-year people would all walk out the door at once. I know they’ll have to retire someday, but I hope we can bring in new people slowly, so they, too, can absorb some of CLC’s past.”
FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE OF LAKE COUNTY
Facilities
– The Main Campus is at 19351 W. Washington St., Grayslake. Phone 708-223-6601. It includes administrative offices, classrooms, library, art gallery, vocational center, child care center, gym and sports fields.
Under construction: Multi-use Instructional Building and Performing Arts Building.
– Lakeshore Campus (former Hein’s Department Store), 111 N. Genesee St., Waukegan. Phone 708-623-8686. Classrooms, video instruction, continuing education classes, registration.
Under construction: Expansion into newly purchased former Globe Department Store.
– Southlake Educational Center, 1860 1st St., Highland Park. Phone 708-433-7884. Registration and testing site.
– Great Lakes Naval Training Center Extension, Building 2, Navy Campus. Phone 708-688-2365. Registration, textbook purchase.
– Extension sites in area high schools, several hospitals, public libraries and shopping malls. For registration and class information, phone 708-223-6601, ext. 2573.
Faculty
Full-time faculty members number 183, earning salaries from $32,576 (new, with master’s degree) to $74,526 (25 years, with doctorate). These nine-month salaries are comparable with Illinois’ 48 other community colleges.
The 600 part-time instructors earn $405 to $435 for each credit hour taught.
Area
Serves all Lake County high school districts except Barrington, which chose not to affiliate with the college.
