After a childhood altered by World War II, Jack Koenig immigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia when he was 13 and spent most of his adult life in uniform, first as a Marine and then with the Wheeling Police Department.
He retired in 1995 after 28 years, the last 17 as a sergeant.
“He was very accommodating to everybody, the kind of guy who would go out of his way to help people,” said Rich Poppenga, a fellow sergeant.
A master shooter, Mr. Koenig was in charge of the department’s shooting range for years.
His other jobs included beat cop and investigations supervisor, and he knew whether to take a gentle tack or “arrest somebody and put him in handcuffs,” depending on the situation, Poppenga said.
Mr. Koenig, 66, died of congestive heart failure Monday, Jan. 12, in Kalamazoo, Mich.
When Mr. Koenig was 8, he and his family were forced to leave their home in Yugoslavia. The family, grieving Mr. Koenig’s father’s fatal heart attack a few months before, traveled to Holzhausen, Germany, and lived with a farming family from 1945 to 1948. They spent the next two years in a displaced-persons camp on a U.S. military base before coming to the United States in 1950.
Mr. Koenig arrived in Chicago that year, attended Lane Technical High School for a year, then transferred to Waller High School “because there were no girls” at Lane Tech, said his daughter Lynn Ann.
After three years, he quit high school to work in his family’s grocery store, where he met his wife, Marie. They got married in 1959.
Mr. Koenig enlisted in the Marines and served as a corporal from 1958 to 1960 in Okinawa; Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and Camp Lejeune, N.C. He spent the next seven years as a truck driver and supervisor for Chief Laundry in Chicago, then became a police officer and moved to Wheeling in 1967.
From 1995 until 1999, he worked as an Illinois field coordinator for the federal government’s Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center. He and his wife moved to Watervliet, Mich., in 1999.
Other survivors include his wife; a daughter, Diane M. Carlston; and two grandsons.
Visitation will be held from 2 to 9 p.m. Thursday in Kolssak Funeral Home, 189 S. Milwaukee Ave., Wheeling. Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Friday in St. Edna Catholic Church, 2525 N. Arlington Heights Rd., Arlington Heights.
