Four years ago, a tornado threatened to ground Lisle’s blockbuster Eyes to the Skies Balloonfest. The next year, it was an earthier snag: 240 portable toilets failed to show up on the same day 30,000 people did.
But Hank Van Kampen takes it all in stride.
Van Kampen, who has been dubbed “Mr. Lisle” for his tireless service to his community, gets much of the credit for Lisle becoming host to the 4th of July extravaganza that attracted 120,000 people last year and this year has a budget of $498,000.
As many people, if not more, are expected this year. For one reason, the Eyes to the Skies festival, scheduled for June 30 through July 4, has been named one of 1995’s Top 100 North American Events by the American Bus Association (an organization of motorcoach operators), a distinction it shares with such attractions as Colorado’s U.S. Olympic Festival and the National Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony in Washington, D.C.
The Eyes to the Skies fest has grown significantly since its first year in 1982, Lisle’s 150th anniversary, when then-Park District President Van Kampen and his colleagues came up with the idea of keeping local residents home and safe on the 4th of July weekend by staging a gala hot-air balloon show.
Today it has become one of the area’s biggest holiday attractions.
Not everyone in town thinks a bigger-and-better festival is such a great idea. Lisle Mayor Ronald Ghilardi supports the Balloonfest because of the revenue it generates in the community but doesn’t want to see it get much bigger for fear of straining village services.
Van Kampen, who was defeated by Ghilardi in 1989 in his only run for mayor, is accustomed to critics.
“I don’t let them bother me much,” he said. “There’s always opposition whenever you do anything. Take something as American as apple pie. Some people want cherry.”
He’d rather talk about the newest attractions planned for this year’s event, such as Captain Eddie’s Flying Circus from Columbus, Ohio, a precision kite-flying act famed for flying as many as 150 kites on a single string.
A handicapped-accessible balloon will be another first. One hundred wheelchair-bound adults and children will be offered free rides in the tethered balloon.
Favorite return acts include three nights of Melrose Pyrotechnics fireworks, the same outfit that puts on Chicago’s lakefront 4th of July show and the White Sox fireworks. Daily launches of 25 hot air balloons are also scheduled.
Even more festival action will be earth-bound. On the main stage, country western singer Louise Mandrell, the Jefferson Starship and Survivor will be among the big-name entertainers.
For the kids, the Spectacular Midways carnival with its roller coaster, Zipper, Octopus and other stomach-churning rides is always a favorite, while adults enjoy the craft and food fairs staged as part of the non-stop holiday happenings.
Ringleading the four-day event, as he has for the last 13 years, will be Van Kampen, a matter-of-fact man with a healthy dose of ambition for his community who has been trying to improve life in Lisle ever since he moved there with his wife, Hazel, and their young children in 1955.
At the time the village had no parks. As a Little League coach for his sons’ teams, Van Kampen was continually scrambling to find a field where the kids could play.
Banding together with four other parents, Van Kampen started a campaign for a park district referendum to set aside land for parks and baseball diamonds before industrial and residential developments gobbled up all the available property.
“I even took out a $10,000 mortgage on our house, unbeknownst to my wife,” to fund early park district office expenses before tax dollars became available, Van Kampen said over breakfast at Lisle’s Fox Restaurant, where he’s a fixture weekday mornings.
Dressed in a brimmed cap and Kiwanis International Brew Crew shirt from the 1993 Eyes to the Skies event, Van Kampen looks like the long-distance trucker he once was. Only the portable phone, parked next to the salt and pepper shakers, gives him away as a man who knows how to get things done.
“You can never have a conversation with Hank without being interrupted,” said Wayne Dunham, co-chairman of this year’s Eyes to the Skies event, who will take over as chairman next year because Van Kampen, 66, thinks it’s time to pass on the reins.
Dunham was one of seven civic leaders whom Van Kampen corralled four years ago to help save the fest when the village cut back the funding. Van Kampen and his recruits formed the all-volunteer Lisle 4th of July Committee.
“People are under the impression we are getting rich off the festival,” Dunham said. “In fact, we get nothing at all,” he said, explaining that it’s a break-even event. To make ends meet, an adult admission fee will be charged for the first time this year. Admission for children 16 and under will still be free.
Van Kampen, Dunham and other committee members donate their time. For Van Kampen, it has become a year-round labor of love. One of his greatest satisfactions is that local service groups such as the Lions and Rotary Clubs that run the concession stands have turned the Eyes to the Skies fest into their biggest moneymaker of the year.
“Much of the money stays right here in the community,” Van Kampen said.
The site for the annual fest is the 110-acre Lisle Community Park, which probably wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for Hank Van Kampen and other park district advocates who lobbied for saving the land in the late 1960s. At the time, the site was a sod farm scheduled to be sold to an industrial developer by the Joliet Diocese of the Catholic Church, which then owned the property.
Van Kampen dreamed of turning it into the hills, trees, sports fields and ponds it has become.
He not only battled to save park land for Lisle but, when the village needed a new high school, he also was instrumental in pioneering a joint-use agreement between the village schools and parks to save taxpayers’ money. Today this compact has become a model for communities throughout the state.
At the time, a state law prohibited such agreements. Van Kampen urged Republican U.S. Rep. Harris Fawell, then a state senator, to carry the ball in Springfield to change the law.
“Hank Van Kampen is one of the most innovative and energetic guys I know,” Fawell said. “He is one of those people who blesses a community.”
Van Kampen was one of two community leaders who were serving on both the school and park district boards when the state law was changed. “We felt it made good common sense to save tax dollars by combining services,” he said.
Today the Lisle Park District owns some of the high school athletic fields and maintains all school district exterior properties, while the school district provides facilities to the park district when they’re not being used for educational purposes.
“The Lisle Park District doesn’t have any gymnasiums, and the school district doesn’t have any lawn mowers,” said Carlin Nalley, Lisle Community District 202 school superintendent, who gives Van Kampen “a lot of credit for that agreement because he had the vision to look down the road to see what was the best thing for the taxpayers in the district.”
Park district president for 24 years, Van Kampen also played a vital role in Lisle’s successful land and water management system. The village parks, located on the east branch of the DuPage River flood plain, include ponds, lowland areas and a golf course designed to retain storm water, protecting home basements during heavy rains.
“We learned from others’ mistakes,” Van Kampen said.
“Hank Van Kampen is a thinker,” said Bob Pindar, director of SEASPAR, the Southeast Association for Special Parks and Recreation. Van Kampen was a founding board member of this organization, a group formed to combine the resources of 11 neighboring communities to meet requirements for recreational opportunities for people with disabilities.
Even before he graduated from Morton High School in Cicero, Van Kampen was a man with big ideas. “It was World War II with no men around. I owned a couple of trucks while I was in high school and had a little business going,” he said, explaining that he sold his trucking business in 1944 at age 15 for $15,000.
“I wanted to buy a motorcycle and see the country.” After a year on the road he came home contented “with less than a dollar’s worth of change in my pocket.”
Van Kampen married a year later and spent the next 20 years driving a long-haul truck between Chicago and New York, followed by another 20 years as a salesman.
He saved his creative energy for his community. Driving the truck “left me plenty of time on the road to dream up ideas and to see how things were done in other parts of the country,” he said.
Back home he put his ideas to work, chalking up “150 volunteer years,” including nine years on the school board, 22 as a volunteer firefighter, 14 years on the Lisle Fire and Police Commission. The list goes on.
His wife, Hazel, remembers the years “when we wrote plenty of notes to each other” as they jockeyed between their kids’ scouting, sporting and school activities. “But our kids are all successful, so it was worth it,” said Hazel, who still finds time to stuff envelopes and help her husband with Balloonfest assignments.
Three of their four children, including David, president of Glenmark Foods, now a corporate sponsor of the Balloonfest, still live in the Chicago area. One daughter and her family live in Madison, Wis. But they all come home, including 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild, for the Eyes to the Skies event every year.
About his legacy to his community, Van Kampen said, “You’ve got to have a little vision to the future. My children didn’t have the Lisle parks to enjoy, but now my grandchildren do.”
