Take away one of the classiest horse racing operations in the world, and many of us in the immediate area did little more than shrug our shoulders.
A dark track actually provided some benefits, at least for nearby residents: no more shifty-looking characters hanging around train stations with smelly cigars, no more threats of a casino, no more nasty traffic jams. Not such a big loss on a day-to-day basis for those of us who never could figure out how to handicap anyway–at least not until the next tax bill comes in.
But take away our 4th of July fireworks display, and, whoa, you’ve touched a nerve. Maybe we ought to rethink this casino thing, after all.
Unfortunately, Arlington International Racecourse and the annual 4th of July fireworks show in Arlington Heights were inextricably bound together, for one very good reason: The track footed the bill for the whole shebang–and it wasn’t cheap.
Except for a few years when the Frontier Days Committee made a contribution to the overall cost–after a nasty episode in which residents complained so much about the quality of the show in 1989 that it was canceled in 1990–the entire fireworks display has been a largely unappreciated gift from Richard Duchossois to the village of Arlington Heights.
Even though the track will be hosting several events this summer, it is scheduled to be closed over the 4th of July, and it would be prohibitively expensive to open it for a one-evening freebie event, said Mayor Arlene Mulder.
Kay Leck, a co-chairwoman of Frontier Days, the annual five-day festival that typically culminates with the fireworks display, said a good fireworks show–the kind that won’t provoke nasty letters to the editor the next day–costs about $30,000, just for the fireworks. If Frontier Days forked over that kind of money, it would have nothing left for the hefty charitable contributions it makes to village projects, she said.
But there’s more than just dollars keeping the skies over Arlington Heights dark this 4th of July.
According to Mulder, both Frontier Days and the village looked into picking up the torch, so to speak, but even if money weren’t an issue, there is simply no other site in town that the village’s Fire Department would approve as safe for a major fireworks display and that could accommodate huge numbers of people and parking.
In the old days, fireworks displays were held at Hersey High School, and the mayor said she has heard from many residents hoping for a return there. But Mulder noted that was indeed in the old days, when Arlington Heights had a population of 40,000. Hersey is no longer big enough to accommodate the kind of crowds that attended the event at the track every year.
Sometimes you just don’t appreciate a good thing until it’s gone.
Spooky Schaumburg: There’s only one explanation that we can come up with for the mysterious recent events in Schaumburg: A poltergeist must be loose in the village.
Who else but an invisible phantom would be able to swipe an entire case of Beanie Babies from under the very nose of the Schaumburg Police Department, which was holding the Beanies that were recovered after a theft in the department’s own evidence room?
And not only is our Schaumburg specter smart enough to know the investment potential of the cuddly Beanies, it is big and strong enough to tip over a 2 1/2-ton sculpture in the village’s brand-new sculpture garden, which is recent spooky event No. 2.
Surely, it couldn’t have been the teenagers seen hanging around the park about the time the damage was discovered, perhaps fresh from a physics class on the principles of leverage.
Nah, we’re sure they were just young art lovers, out for an after-school stroll in the quiet ambience of the new sculpture garden.
We prefer the poltergeist argument–somehow it is more comforting than thinking that the Schaumburg police can’t guard their own department or that local kids are so stupid they trash donated artwork.
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