Some of the most famous residents of the northwest suburbs are here to stay.
Some played on Chicago’s ballfields or coached from the sidelines. One became famous for leading people to their seats, another for leading youth toward the straight and narrow. Others preferred the rugged outdoors, exploring unknown territory.
Whatever their chosen arena, they left their mark, they made a difference. Now all that’s left to remember them by is what’s written in history books and newspapers and on their tombstones.
The cemeteries of the northwest suburbs are the final resting places for these famous folks.
– – –
Chicago native Andy Frain, known as the “King of the Ushers,” died of a heart attack on March 25, 1964, the day he turned 59. He had begun working at 14, renting ballpark seat cushions for a dime apiece at Comiskey Park. He started ushering at 23 and soon was put in charge of ushers across town at Wrigley Field.
He built his ushering service, Andy Frain Services, which closed in July 1996, into an empire that provided ticket-takers, security and, of course, ushers to at times more than “100 events in a dozen different cities in a single night,” according to his obituary. His ushers covered political conventions and presidential dinners. Frain called it “crowd engineering.”
Frain said he learned his trade watching his mother feed her 17 children. Frain had five sons of his own and a daughter who died in infancy.
More than 20,000 young people were Andy Frain ushers. “Most of his ushers were high school or college students . . . with white teeth, short haircuts under their peaked caps, and gleaming shoes,” the obituary said.
The Frain family marker at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines is largely devoted to Frain’s wife, Dolly, who was killed in an airplane crash in 1960. Andy’s name and birth and death dates are engraved on the base.
– – –
All Saints is also the final resting place of three sports hall-of-famers. The Chicago Bears called football hall-of-famer Paddy Driscoll head coach from 1956 to 1958, between George Halas’ initial retirement and his comeback. Driscoll was also Halas’ longtime assistant.
The Evanston native really shone as an All-America quarterback at Northwestern, and his team won the Rose Bowl in 1919.
“Driscoll, the quarterback, ran back nine punts for 115 yards, drop-kicked a 30-yard field goal, completed four of eight passes and kicked a 60-yard punt in addition to carrying the ball for 91 yards,” his obituary said.
After graduation, Driscoll entered the Navy and played for the Great Lakes base team, along with Halas.
He died June 28, 1968.
– – –
Baseball hall-of-famer Charles Leo Hartnett, better known as “Gabby” or sometimes “Old Tomato Face,” was 21 when he started catching for the Cubs.
Perhaps Hartnett communicated best in baseball signals. He was known for calling the right pitches. In fact, disregarding a Hartnett sign could put a slow spin on a pitcher’s career, as happened to Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals during an All-Star game.
After Dean shook off one of Hartnett’s signals, the batter hit a line drive that broke Dean’s toe. The event led to a change in Dean’s pitching rhythm, an arm injury and a downhill slide in his career.
Hartnett caught for the Cubs from 1922 to 1940. He both played for and managed the team to a National League title in 1938. In the heat of the pennant race, it was the bottom of the 9th with two outs and Hartnett hit a home run to defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates. The incident, which occurred at darkness, became known as “The Homer in the Gloamin’.” He averaged .298 over his career, reaching a high of .354 in 1937.
After managing other teams, Hartnett left baseball in 1947 for a long stretch. He came back as a coach for the Kansas City A’s in 1965 but retired two years later. He died on his 72nd birthday — Dec. 20, 1972 — in Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. His tombstone at All Saints Cemetery notes that he entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.
– – –
Frederick “Freddie” Lindstrom, an ex-Cub, Giant, Pirate and Dodger, was the youngest player in a World Series; he was 18 when he helped the New York Giants defeat the Washington Senators in 1924. He had started with the Giants two years before and was a star by the time of the playoffs.
The Cubs claimed him for only one of his 13 seasons in the sport. That was when he joined Hartnett to win a pennant in 1935.
Lindstrom hit .311 lifetime, peaking in 1930 at .379, second only to Rogers Hornsby in the National League.
He left baseball in 1936. He coached the Northwestern University baseball team from 1948 to 1961, leading the Wildcats to the Big Ten title in 1957.
After retiring from coaching, he served as Evanston postmaster, retiring in 1964. He died at age 75 in 1981 and was buried in All Saints.
– – –
Bernard Sheil played baseball in college and was sought by the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox, but he preferred to suit up in a priest’s robe.
Born in 1888 and ordained in 1910, the Chicago native rose to the rank of auxiliary archbishop of Chicago — this despite those who opposed his liberal stand of supporting organized labor, civil rights and errant youth.
In 1930, Sheil founded the Catholic Youth Organization and became known as the “Apostle of Youth.” The CYO grew to 10 million members. One obituary said that when the CYO was taken to task for pushing boxing as an outlet, Sheil responded, “Show me how you can inspire boys away from brothels and saloons with a checker tournament, and I’ll put on the biggest tournament you ever saw.”
In the 1920s and ’30s, he championed organized labor, joining picket lines. He helped Saul Alinsky found the Back of the Yards Council and the Industrial Areas Foundation, both designed to help the poor make better lives for themselves.
He established the now-defunct Sheil School of Social Studies for adult education and the still-thriving Lewis University in Romeoville.
The longtime pastor of St. Andrew’s Church on Chicago’s North Side retired to Tucson in 1966, where he died of congestive heart failure three years later. He was 83.
Sheil is buried next to his parents at All Saints.
– – –
While Sheil was standing firmly on the side of labor, Orville S. Caesar was driving the operations of the Greyhound Corp. A mechanic and auto dealer, in 1916 Caesar turned a failure of being unable to sell two buses at his dealership into the success of using them to transport passengers, mainly lumberjacks, between Superior, Wis., and Duluth for a quarter a ride. Six years later, he got rid of the dealership altogether in favor of his bus company, Northland Transportation Co.
In 1925, his firm merged with Greyhound, an 11-year-old company based in Hibbing, Minn. He alternated between company president and board chairman over the years. He lived in Barrington and served as president of the Barrington Hills Country Club for a time. He also belonged to the Barrington Hills Riding Club, the Evanston Golf Club and the Evanston Garden Club.
He died the day before his 73rd birthday, on May 19, 1965. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Barrington.
– – –
Back when the main form of transportation was horse or train, an Elgin couple, the Tallents, got gold fever and headed West from Elgin in 1874. The mere fact of Annie Tallent’s presence may have contributed to an Indian revolt and the massacre of Custer’s troops at Little Bighorn on June 26, 1876.
The story is recounted by Elgin historian E.C. “Mike” Alft in his book “Elgin: Days Gone By” (Crossroads Communications, $21.35). Alft said the Tallents — David, Annie and son Robert — joined a covered-wagon party that left Sioux City, Iowa, for the Black Hills on the rumor that they contained gold. Annie was the sole woman on the journey.
A treaty between the U.S. government and the Sioux prohibited settlers from establishing themselves in the Black Hills, but that didn’t stop the Tallents from camping there in the winter of 1874-75. Come spring the U.S. Calvary evicted the group, escorting them to Ft. Laramie, Wyo. Soon the cavalry realized that trying to keep the settlers out was a lost cause, and the Tallents returned.
Annie’s presence especially riled the Sioux. Alft writes: “The Indians were not only enraged at another example of white treachery when the first gold seekers arrived on their reservation, but also by the presence of a woman among them. To them she meant permanent white settlement of their sacred hills, and in the view of some historians her arrival contributed to the uprising of the Sioux and the massacre at the Little Bighorn.”
But to others, Annie Tallent, who taught in the settlements and later went it alone in the West after her husband disappeared, represents “the heroism and resourcefulness of pioneer women,” Alft writes. A monument to her was established in the Black Hills in 1924. She died in 1901 when she was in her early 60s. She is buried in Elgin’s Bluff City Cemetery.
– – –
Robert Kennicott, another pioneer, became famous for discovering new species, including a variety of snake; mapping and collecting in the Midwest, Canada and Alaska, including in the Arctic; and helping to found the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Kennicott’s specimens are still held at the Smithsonian Institution.
Born in 1835 and raised in The Grove, in what is now Glenview, he was nicknamed “Nimrod” and “Bob the Serpent Tamer” because of his experiments using snake venom, according to information provided by the Arlington Heights Historical Society.
Kennicott became known for his work in what was called “Russian America,” now named Alaska. Western Union Telegraph Co., which planned to connect North America, Russia and Europe with a line through the Bering Strait, chose Kennicott to survey a route up the Yukon River. Kennicott’s party collected hundreds of species before Kennicott died on the river’s shore, possibly of a heart attack, at age 30.
Kennicott’s work in Alaska played a role in the U.S. decision to buy the territory from Russia the following year, 1867. Supporters of the late Kennicott, including Chicago newspapers, urged that the new territory be called “Kennicottia” in his honor.
He is buried in Wheeling Township Cemetery in Arlington Heights.
