As we prepare to celebrate that worldwide day of loving, the past week has left me thinking about five Elgin- and Hampshire-area people worth who are worth knowing about and loving. But one thing they have in common is that all are (or were) the last ones who would ever blow their own horns.
Into the flames
It has been said that firefighters and cops are the people who run toward the danger when everybody else is running in the opposite direction. And that was true last Friday night for Hampshire Deputy Fire Chief Trevor Herrmann and Hampshire Police Officer Roy Maki.
The other three people we’re writing about are “heroes” only in the sense of being admirable and hard-working and unusual. But Herrmann and Maki showed they are genuine, life-risking warriors.
Herrmann was off duty, enjoying a Friday night out in downtown Hampshire, when somebody yelled that smoke was coming from the Fenzel Motors building, next door to the village hall. Running over there, he realized an apartment above the car dealership was on fire. And somebody pointed out that there was a car parked in the tenant’s parking space.
Police Officer Maki arrived soon after. They went upstairs and kicked open the apartment’s door. A blast of smoke and hot air rushed out. Now, unlike the action you see in burning rooms in TV shows and movies, walking into a real fire scene is more like walking around with your eyes tight shut. You can’t see anything through the smoke. And if you stand tall, your head may be in air hot enough to melt lead.
But they heard someone groaning inside. So even though it would have taken guts for a firefighter to go into such a room wearing the usual fireproof mask and air supply and helmet and turnout coat, and he was dressed only in his civvies, Herrmann decided to go in and try to rescue whoever was inside.
Maki stood at the top of the stairs and kept calling out to Herrmann, so Herrmann wouldn’t lose track of where the door was. Herrmann crawled under the hot smoke until he could feel an unconscious woman. Then he dragged her out and, discovering she had stopped breathing, began doing CPR until a properly equipped ambulance crew arrived.
Herrmann had breathed in so much soot that he had begun coughing uncontrollably. So Fire Chief Bill Robinson sent him to the hospital too, where he spent a night under observation.
Sadly, the woman he had dragged out, Georgia Hartman, died Tuesday. But Herrmann and Maki had given her at least a shot at surviving.
Herrmann, by the way, is the community relations guy for the Hampshire Fire Protection District, the guy who usually explains to us reporters what went on. But when I phoned him Monday for details about the fire — not having a clue that he had risked his life in it— he just passed my inquiries on to a lieutenant in the fire station. The lieutenant reported only that a woman had been taken to a hospital and that two firefighters had sustained minor injuries.
Only when I interviewed the building’s owner, John Fenzel, later that day did I find out that I had been telephoning a genuine hero.
Checking out the librarian
His story is the one most directly connected to Valentine’s Day. But our third “hero” is so modest, he refuses to let me use his name in telling the story of his romance.
Back in the 1950s our anonymous romantic hero was an undergraduate student. Hanging around the college library, as he often did, he became smitten by the co-ed working at the checkout counter. So he picked up one of the forms used to request that the librarians retrieve a book from the library’s closed stacks. On the line where the form asked what book he wanted to check out, he wrote that he wanted to take out “the librarian.”
When he presented the request to her, she read it with surprise, looked up at this unknown masher and said that she would call him on the phone with her answer “after I check you out.”
They have been married now for 64 years.
Telling untold stories
I also found out this week that Wiley Edmondson, a retired Kane County judge, has been writing 90-minute plays for the Elgin Area Leadership Academy for some 25 years. Based on controversial historical events like the Titanic sinking, the My Lay Massacre and the Our Lady of Angels school fire, each play challenges leadership academy students to consider the ethical questions involved. The play he presented last week, through the mouths of 10 actors from Elgin Community College, asked whether the heat wave that killed more than 700 people in Chicago in 1995 was really an avoidable, man made disaster.
Edmondson must have devoted hundreds and hundreds of unpaid hours into researching all these and, before the ECC Theater Department started staging them, in arranging to explore each event in the form of a mock trial. But after last week’s heat-wave play, when I asked the jurist/playwright about his work, he just kept trying to get me to talk to the young actors, as if the thought-provoking drama had just sprung magically from their lips.
A low-key, modest judge who prefers to stay behind the scenes? A reporter runs across something new every day.
A lifetime at the movies
Finally, last week our obit page revealed that June Grady had died in a Rockford senior center. She was 97. A longtime employee of the David White store in downtown Elgin, she was a cousin of legendary Elgin fundraiser/philanthropist Jack Shales and Elgin-born Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Tom Shales. She had moved to Rockford after her husband died and her health began to fail.
June’s brand of heroism was to show what enthusiasm and activity even the most elderly person can continue to sustain. Back when I was the Courier-News’ movie critic, Grady was already in her 80s. But she went to the Cinema 12 movie theater in Carpentersville several times a week. She would respond to my reviews with a letter or phone call every week or two, saying how she agreed that this movie was great but she thought that other movie had gone wrong because —.
I kept intending to write a feature story about June Grady’s love affair with the movies. Now it’s too late. But at least we have now saluted Trevor Herrmann, Roy Maki, Wiley Edmondson and Elgin’s book-loving lover.
