As a kid we used to walk out into what we called the swamps; now we call them wetlands. And we used to walk out there towards the Nike Base which was there in the 1950s. And the Nike Base was a military installation that was supposed to protect us from the Russians. It was located on the north end of Wolf Lake. And that was pretty much as far as we got. We didn’t get into the rest of the Lake, but it was a kinda neat thing for a kid to walk out there and hit the cyclone fence with the barbed wire, and the armed guards patrolling the outskirts of the installation with guard dogs. And we would talk to the guys and they were really nice guys. That’s kinda the early memories I have.
Later on, my uncle used to come over and take my younger brothers and sisters out on Saturday afternoon hikes, and that is kinda the way they went, through Eggers Woods down to Wolf Lake.
In later years we did a couple of historical projects in Hegewisch in the mid ’90s. One of the most satisfying... projects that I worked on with my students was the restoration of veterans’ markers at Wolf Lake. And by the way, most of my work is the Illinois side, and I’m sorry I don’t know much about Indiana. But the veterans’ markers are on the Illinois side and they were placed there in 1946, actually a month before the park itself opened up. And over the years they had been forgotten, and overgrown, and very few people knew about them. I was in a hardware store in Hegewisch. (If you ever wanna know what’s goin’ on in Hegewisch, go to Aniol’s Hardware, keep your mouth shut, and your ears open, and you’ll find out all kinds of stuff.) We were sitting around talking and the conversation came up actually about that long-lost plant Thismia Americana and someone said “oh yeah” they …supposedly someone had seen them over by the veterans’ markers in Wolf Lake. So I didn’t say anything about the plant, but I was interested in the veterans’ markers. So we went out there...with a number of my students. And we got a hold of a map from the then new superintendent Saki Villalobos, who is still at Wolf Lake today. He found a map of the original layout of the markers. My student went there and we started poking around in the ground out there with iron rods. We ended up finding 98 out of the 104 markers that were originally placed there. We dug some out; we opened them up. Veterans’ organizations got interested in the whole thing and eventually we had a rededication of those markers in September of 1999. We had several thousand people out at Wolf Lake for the rededication, and half a dozen veterans’ organizations from the area were involved.
We actually had a “fly-over” …by one of the stunt teams that performs at the Air & Water Show in Chicago, and in one of the incredible strokes of good luck, as they were flying over we were on a phone… and this is 1999 so it’s not quite where we are on technology and cell phones and all that. But we were on a cell phone to a base who was then on a radio to the planes. And we coordinated. There was a speech, and a band. And the band started playing at exactly the moment when the fly-over came, and they did that “missing-man formation” where the one plane kinda takes off and moves up. I’ve actually got a picture of that taken by one of my students, because I was on the stage.
I did community service with my students at Wolf Lake, and a lot of the kids got familiar with Wolf Lake. I remember fetching a speaker’s platform that had obviously been stolen from a church and dumped in the water at Wolf Lake which we fished out of one of the ponds. I’ve also been involved in Wolf Lake as a historian, and have learned a tremendous amount about the lake itself, and early history. The early family that lived there, the Neubeisers, who were early Hegewisch residents; the Wolf Lake Amusement Park that was designed but never built by Frank Lloyd Wright; of course, the Nike base; the Delaware House [(see chapter on Wolf Lake Watershed History], which stood on the shores of Wolf Lake, which was one of the state houses from the World’s Fair in 1893; and on the Indiana side, the Wolf Lake Speedway, which was basically very close to this area, where they had a racetrack built in Wolf Lake, which was surrounded by water. And we actually—at the museum—have a race-card for, I think it was 1933, where every other event they alternated between an auto-race and a boat-race, and that was right off the Hammond beach.

Rod Sellers, Frankfort, IL

It was fun growing up in the ‘50s. My oldest sister is 10 years older than me. During the summer, Pat and her best friend would round up all the kids on the block and take us on a hike to Eggers Woods. On the way we’d get to pet the horses at the stable off of 112th Street behind Amaizo. We’d get to feed them with carrots and apples.
In the woods they’d make a fire and roast potatoes. There were about eight to 10 of us.
Later we would go to Wolf Lake. The lake was really shallow, and we could walk to a series of islands. They knew one which had small caves. They’d lead everyone on the path through the water. I was pushed along in an inner tube because I was the shortest. I can remember collecting shells. And we’d swim in the channel behind the houses on Blossom Row.
It was also fun at Forsythe Park. In the summer they had crafts to make and games to play. We lived on 118th Street and Caroline Avenue, where the lake came right up to Caroline Avenue. After they filled in the shoreline, trees grew rapidly. When going to and from the park, it was like walking through a forest.
In the fall I remember my mom wouldn’t let us go by the lake because they allowed duck hunting in the early ‘50s.
Winter was fun ‘cause we went ice skating on the lake. After they put in a skating rink near the pavilion, lots of kids and adults went there. They had a pot-bellied stove in the pavilion where they provided hot chocolate. The limestone and brick pavilion, later destroyed by fire, was south and west of the current pavilion.

Kay Gregorovich Rosinski, Whiting, IN