Seventy years ago, anyone in tiny Orland Park could have told you where the Tribune Camp was. But today, close to 40 years after it closed, few still know what and where it was.
In its day, the Tribune Camp was a home for two dozen disabled veterans who sold eggs and small produce items at a roadside stand to be self-sufficient.
M.H. Ewers of Orland Park is among those who recollect the camp, which was in its final years of operation when she moved with her family from Oak Lawn to Orland Park in 1958. Her home at 144th Street and Oakley Avenue was just a short walk from the camp’s roadside stand on 143rd Street.
“I used to go over there and buy fresh eggs all the time,” she said. “There were ex-soldiers living there then. I don’t know exactly when they closed down, but I know I was very disappointed when I heard they were no longer going to be operating.”
In 1988, Ewers suggested to her granddaughter that the camp would make a good topic for a paper she needed to write for a U.S. history class at Sandburg High School.
The fragments of written information that Charlene Ewers gathered and added to interviews she did with local residents were turned into a nine-page paper that earned her an “A” and remains the definitive work on the now long-gone camp.
The memory of the camp has stuck with her.
“Every now and then I think about it, ” said Charlene Ewers, now 28 and living in Denver, where she is a manager for US West and working on an MBA at the University of Denver.
“It turned into a family research project,” she recalled. “My dad and a lot of his friends grew up near the camp. They had a lot of vivid memories and helped me find other sources of information.”
As Charlene discovered, the camp was founded by “The Forty and Eight,” an honor society of the American Legion. The group took its name from the boxcars used to transport U.S. troops in France during World War I. The cars bore stenciled advisories stating they were large enough to hold either 40 men or eight horses.
The purpose of the camp, located on farmland recently bought by the Cook County Forest Preserve District southwest of McGinnis Slough, was to offer convalescing soldiers a place to live while adjusting to civilian life. The property had a farmhouse north of 143rd Street, one-quarter mile west of Raney’s Lane. There also were two barns and a water tower.
With operating funds of $9,000–proceeds of an amateur boxing match sponsored by the Chicago Tribune–the camp opened in 1928 bearing the name of its benefactor.
The camp could accommodate up to 25 men, most of whom had been released as patients from veterans hospitals. The house was used for cooking and dining; the sleeping area was in a donated bunkhouse. A farm stand erected on 143rd Street was used to sell flowers raised by the veterans, in addition to vegetables and eggs.
By the time World War II was over, a new crop of veterans lived at the Tribune Camp, then officially known as the Orland Park Convalescent Center. It was a home for veterans unable to work but not eligible for hospitalization. The Forty and Eight continued to administer and provide funds for the camp.
In the 1950s, difficulty in finding a volunteer administrative staff, in addition to a funding scandal, imperiled the camp. Within a few years, despite fundraising efforts, the camp was closed. At a public auction on Jan. 6, 1962, the camp’s property was sold. Eventually the buildings were dismantled, and by 1969, only foundation remnants and a driveway remained.
“Even though the camp finally came to an end, it served its veterans and community well while functioning,” Charlene Ewers wrote in her paper. “Men who didn’t have a chance to survive in civilization, as they knew it, were given the opportunity to live in another way. . . . The atmosphere created in the Forty and Eight camp allowed the men to function as men among each other and, when they were given the opportunity, the outside community, rather than as post-war handicaps.”
