Elmer Vliet, former Lake Bluff resident and chairman of Abbott Laboratories, liked facts.
Answers had to be exact and details meticulously researched, family members recall.
Such traits were put to good use during Vliet’s 43-year career as a research chemist at North Chicago-based Abbott. Vliet, who died in 1994, also put them to good use in his hobby of some 50 years as unofficial historian for Lake Bluff, a town of 5,500.
Driven by his own curiosity, Vliet collected facts, pictures and anecdotes about the little community on the lake that grew out of a religious summer camp.
He secured letters and information from early families who could offer a glimpse of life before the turn of the last century. He investigated and detailed as much as he could about such events as the grisly 1928 death of Elrieda Knaak, who was found burned in the Village Hall boiler room.
“He just liked to get facts, and he wanted to make sure they were correct,” said Northa Dawn Edwards, his daughter, who still lives in Lake Bluff. “He was a chemist, and you had to have the proper answer.”
Vliet kept all the information with him–giving presentations at local schools–until 1982. That was when he turned the results of his fact-finding over to two local school teachers, who opened the Vliet Center for Lake Bluff Area History.
But since then the center has struggled to retain a permanent home, having been bounced from two locations.
And that has left all of Vliet’s information–plus what has been added over the years–stashed in about 300 boxes and in storage.
But if voters approve a referendum proposal for the Lake Bluff Park District to build a community center that could house the museum, museum directors/teacher-historians Janet Nelson and Kathy O’Hara will unpack the museum’s collection–possibly for the last time.
“I know what’s down here. Kathy knows what’s down here,” said Nelson, a former principal at Lake Bluff’s East Elementary School, as she inspected the boxes recently. “It needs to be put some place where it can be easily cataloged.”
“It needs a good home,” added Nelson’s husband, Herb.
The Vliet Center first opened at East Elementary, but was pushed out in 1996 because of growing student enrollment.
It then moved to a storefront in downtown Lake Bluff. But the building was sold last year, and the museum had to vacate in January.
Nelson and O’Hara, the principal of Lake Bluff Middle School, decided to look for some money and a permanent solution. They went to the Park District for help.
As it turned out, the district had already planned to ask voters in November to approve a $5.9 million bond issue to pay for expanded programs and space. If the referendum is approved, park officials say, the museum will be part of the new community center at Blair Park.
The same referendum question was rejected by voters in April.
Nelson said that as director of a not-for-profit organization, she legally can’t take a position on a political issue.
But as a former librarian and teacher, Nelson said she can say she is eager to have back on display the old photographs, police blotters, fire-call books and 1909 newspapers advertising such things as a 19-room house for $4,000.
“The best way for children to understand history is to understand the history of their own community,” Nelson said.
Nelson and O’Hara began trying to convince Vliet to allow them to make the museum more widely available in 1980 after he had stopped giving presentations at schools.
“He truly had lost his vision. He didn’t like to go out and meet with the children. We needed to find a way to keep this history,” Nelson said. “We met with him several times, and I guess he decided we were safe and would take care of it.”
Credit for the museum also belongs to Vliet’s first wife, Mabel, who started the photo-gathering in 1938 when she was organizing a program for the local Ladies Guild.
Vliet helped her and later maintained and expanded the collections. He even wrote a book detailing the first 100 years of Lake Bluff’s history.
In the back of the book is a letter dated Sept. 25, 1850, by John Cloes, a member of one of Lake Bluff’s first families. Cloes had gone to California to join the Gold Rush.
“I don’t think this gold business is what we thought it to be, so I decided to start a blacksmith shop,” Cloes wrote, adding, “I hope to do good business, and maybe next year I will start out again to find a place to dig for gold, if it is God’s will.”
Vliet secured the letter much as he did all the other early pieces–by doing a little digging of his own, his family said.
“If he hadn’t done it, who would have?” asked Edwards. “He dug it out. This is where Lake Bluff came from.”
