LeRoy Pohl is the mayor of a community of about 300 people. Sometimes 400. He wasn’t elected, and his community has no legal status as a municipality. But the citizenry is fiercely loyal to its leader-by-common-consent.
He has been around the longest and has the nicest place, after all. The light on his porch signals the end of the day, and when it goes off at 2 a.m., so does everything else.
Pohl, 67, officially lives in Des Plaines but presides over Fox River Recreation, a campground-cum-home-away-from-home on the bank of the Fox River just west of Antioch, where he has maintained a trailer for 24 years. His is arguably the largest trailer in a park that is usually filled to capacity with 144 other camper homes, some of which, like his, are more permanent than not.
Most of the trailers or mobile homes are inhabited only on weekends. Some folks–especially the retired ones–have adopted a rather liberal definition of “weekend” and will say with a straight face that they go to their trailers only on “weekends, usually Thursday until about Tuesday.” Something about laundry and the need to attend to other matters such as paying bills usually comes up to explain their whereabouts on Wednesday.
Pohl, who is among the retired, rarely sets foot in his official residence when the park is open. From April through October, he relaxes at his two-bedroom residence at Fox River Recreation.
“They call me The Mayor, and worse,” Pohl said with a grin while watching television in his well-appointed trailer. “I want to stay all year, but they keep throwing me out.”
Most of his neighbors share The Mayor’s sentiments. On the fringes of suburbia, too far from home to get the two confused and too close to be only an occasional diversion, there lies a patchwork of recreational trailer parks that fill up every summer and fall with people from across the Chicago area who want a permanent resort they can go to whenever they want–cheap.
“Where else can you get a house on a lake for $4,000 or $5,000?” asked Stan Janis, 40, of Itasca while standing in front of his trailer at Smith’s Float-Inn, a park a stone’s throw west of Fox River Recreation. “Our boat is right outside our door, and we can use the water anytime we want.”
A spot at a typical park can be had for about $1,000 per season, sometimes much less. Parking places on the water generally are the most expensive. Trailers can cost anywhere from a couple of thousand dollars for a spartan model with just the necessities to $15,000 to $20,000 for the 99 percent permanent models with multiple bedrooms.
All trailers have electricity and running water, but very few have telephones. Most residents say they prefer it that way.
“I like to get away from phones and people bugging me all the time,” said Jeff Grahn, 12, whose family lives part time in a small trailer at Fox River Recreation and full time in a somewhat larger one in Park City, near Waukegan.
A deck is de rigueur for virtually all trailers. Sometimes more lavish than the trailers to which they are attached, expansive wooden decks for barbecuing and socializing are the norm, and keeping up with the Joneses is a time-honored tradition. Many decks easily dwarf their trailers in usable surface area.
“We build stuff every year, like decks and steps, and we always help each other out,” explained Lois Sloyan, 57, of Bolingbrook, who equipped her trailer with a satellite television system so she wouldn’t miss NASCAR races. “We can be ourselves here, and we don’t have to be all prim and proper. We share everything here.”
That includes keys to each other’s trailers. Coolers, fishing tackle, beer and other staples of weekend life are virtually community property at Fox River Recreation, where status in the community is determined in large part by the number of other people’s keys a person has been entrusted to carry on his or her key ring (Pohl has the most, “about 50.”).
Access to the water and the other outdoorsy recreational activities that are so sorely lacking at their full-time homes in the city and suburbs is the common denominator among residents of the parks.
Smith’s Float-Inn, for example, was built decades ago on land reclaimed from swamp. Trailers cluster around picturesque manmade lagoons and canals that wind westward to the Lake Marie Channel and from there into Lake Marie proper.
Once in the lake, boaters can take the short trip north to Wisconsin or enjoy a longer journey south through Chain O’ Lakes State Park all the way to, say, Algonquin on the Fox River.
“The way they built this place was pretty smart. But they could never do it today because the government would call the swamp wetlands and say you couldn’t build on it,” said Ken Reinhofer, 52, of Chicago.
Reinhofer and wife Karen, 49, own a trailer at Float-Inn that was mobbed on a recent weekend by more than 20 family members throwing an impromptu reunion, mostly on the large, screened-in deck that looks out over a lagoon.
Most of the residents of the parks are regulars who show up pretty much every weekend during the season, usually for years at a time. Many parks have waiting lists for permanent spots, and the coveted parking places on the water’s edge don’t come up for renewal very often.
“We like it here a lot,” said Sheri Dreiling, 40, who comes to Fox River Recreation on weekends with husband Bill, also 40, from their home in Hammond, Ind. “It’s like a second community for us, and we have a lot of friends here. But we are thinking about applying for a spot at a lake in Indiana because it would be a lot closer to home.”
The feeling of having a second community to which one belongs is another asset the parks have that regular vacation resorts don’t, most residents agreed. At a conventional resort, you would never give a set of keys to your room to your temporary neighbor, for example. Nor would you borrow their cooler or drink their beer without asking. Only neighbors can get away with such shenanigans.
“It’s nice that way, because we have friends here and can do things here that we can’t do at home,” said Sandy Janis, 40, Stan Janis’ wife. “Everybody’s nice, and nobody has a chip on their shoulder here.”
Float-Inn is a private park. It doesn’t even have a sign on Illinois Highway 173, which is the only way in or out of the park, unless, of course, one counts the sign at the entrance that warns interlopers that the park is private and for the use of “members” only.
Fox River Recreation, however, like many other parks in the Chain O’ Lakes area, is open to the public. Not all trailer sites are earmarked for long-term leases, so a steady stream of transient trailer-dwellers is always passing through to keep things lively.
“We were passing through to get some warranty work done on our motor home,” said Joanne Nilsson, 62, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, who stopped at the park for two days with husband Bert. “We stay at a lot of places because we enjoy the traveling so much.”
There also are 70 tent sites at Fox River Recreation for regular camping, although the resident owner of the park, Ted Kovacs, 57, rarely rents out more than 20 or so at a time.
“When I see a pickup truck full of guys with a keg of beer pull in, I just tell them that we’re full. I’m all for people having fun in their own ways, but that kind of crowd just won’t mix with families, and I prefer families,” said Kovacs, who has owned the park since 1988 after retiring from a career in real estate.
Kovacs, who said he spends most of his five-month “vacation” every year attending to maintenance and bookkeeping, likes to give his residents plenty of opportunities for social interaction. About once a month he throws a theme party and encourages residents to bring a dish and a smile to the common area at the southern end of the park. The most recent was given a luau theme, so residents dusted off their grass skirts and loud shirts and threw a party.
“We just get to do stuff here that we can’t do in the city,” said Gianna Maicucci, 8, of Chicago, whose family owns a trailer at Fox River Recreation. “I’ve never been to a luau before. You can’t have this Hawaiian stuff in the city. That would be weird.”
