Tall trees tell tale of Izaak Walton League, World War II veterans

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Facts about Elgin’s Izaak Walton League chapter

The local chapter of the national conservation group was founded 80 years ago. It owns more than 13 acres of land off Jay Street where Willow Creek meets Poplar Creek. The site includes a pine plantation, woodlands, wetlands and a bluff.

Walton Island in the Fox River in downtown Elgin was dedicated in 1937 and is named after the group, which worked to create the attraction.

Boy Scout Troop 10, which has been around for 90 years, uses the league’s facility for meetings. Twenty-six young men have become Eagle Scouts from this troop. Cub Scout Pack 1855 also uses the league’s home off Jay Street for its meetings.

In the late 1960s, the league used some of its land as a nursery, growing trees for the city of Elgin.

The group is responsible for planting thousands of trees over the years throughout Elgin and for stocking fish in the Fox River.

The group is putting together a project to work with local school children to learn about the environment by monitoring water quality in Willow and Poplar creeks. It has done extensive work to clean and maintain those bodies of water.

The group also holds an annual fishing derby on Walton Island in summer for area youth.

The group currently has 80 members and is seeking others. Annual dues are $71 for a family, $47 for an individual, $25 for high school and college students, and lifetime memberships also are available.

For more information see www.elginike.org, the group’s Facebook page or phone 847-742-8953.

Compiled by Mike Danahey from information provided by the Izaak Walton League.

Article Extras

Updated: January 23, 2012 3:55AM

ELGIN — At the east end of Jay Street, the tall trees tell a tale.

The Izaak Walton League, which has its local chapter headquarters there, planted the canopy of pines in 1944 to honor those who had served their country.

According to an Elgin Courier article from April 1946 kept in a league scrapbook, “Sixty well-developed evergreen trees were planted as a memorial to members who served in the armed forces, and plans are now on foot to add more to the planting in the near future.”

“Besides the trees, over 100 seedlings were also placed on the property,” the article states.

Today, the land looks like a vacation woodlands, belying its urban setting. And this Veterans Day, the conservation group is making plans to honor a member who is the last among “the Ikes” to have taken part in World War II.

For 14 months, Bill Schmoldt was stationed as an assistant crew chief with the Eighth Air Force Seventh Squadron at a base about 90 miles from London, where he worked on B-17s and B-24s, doing his part to help the Allies eventually defeat the Germans, who surrendered May 7, 1945.

Schmoldt recalled that the base had been bombed two days before he arrived, but saw no attacks during his stay. What little free time there might have been sometimes involved riding bicycles back and forth to Ipswich, 15 miles away.

Shifts involved preparing more than a dozen planes in the wee hours of the morning for bombing runs. Those included two missions with two different crews that saw combat on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

“Many people forget that D-Day was put off several times because of weather, and the troops and pilots that day had to deal with fog. I remember there was an endless stream of planes flying above us toward France once the invasion started,” Schmoldt, 87, recalled.

The ride home

Schmoldt’s wife, Margaret, reminded him that a concoction made with sugar beets grown on nearby English farms was used to de-ice fighter planes’ wings. She kids him when they are at or near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in winter about crews forgetting a bucket and mop when clearing commercial airliners’ wings.

The day the war finally ended, Schmoldt said, the captain of his group got on the intercom system to make the announcement. Flying back home was supposed to involve a stopover in Iceland.

“They couldn’t find the airfield, so after 11 hours in the air, we finally landed in Greenland,” Schmoldt said.

From there is was a rough ride to Connecticut, a leave for 30 days, and then back to work in Colorado Springs toward earning the 70 points he needed to be released from duty.

“We were to be trained on maintenance and repair of B-29s, but the war ended in the Pacific theater” with the surrender of the Japanese on Sept. 2, 1945, “and we were never sent to school,” Schmoldt said.

Schmoldt was honorably discharged in October 1946, came back to Elgin and returned to work as a machinist at Elgin Manufacturing. Schmoldt said a shop teacher at Dundee Community High School helped him land his first job prior to being drafted at the age of 19, and skills earned in his classes probably helped him become the airplane mechanic he was during the war.

Schmoldt was born in Charter Grove, between Burlington and Sycamore, and his father served in World War I. When Schmoldt was young, his family moved to land that it farmed near Elgin off Schaumburg Road.

He met Margaret in 1947 at a cousin’s wedding, and the two were married in 1950 after Margaret finished college and began teaching first grade at Franklin Elementary in Elgin (which now houses the Community Crisis Center).

Joining Ikes

At the behest of friends, the couple joined the Izaak Walton League in 1953, when such clubs were at the height of their popularity, and group functions would attract hundreds of people.

“I was always interested in conservation,” Schmoldt said. And he liked that the group was doing things such as stocking the Fox River with walleye that members brought back with them from fishing trips.

His love of the outdoors was such that Margaret recalled that a first date with her husband-to-be involved fishing on the Fox, and subsequent outings included pheasant hunts.

“I always loved being outside,” Margaret said.

And soon she was in love with Bill.

“I was amazed at all the things he knew how to do, between the hunting and the fishing,” she said.

The couple lived for a time on Jay Street, not far from the Izaak Walton League grounds. Margaret’s father helped Bill land a job as a tool-and-die maker at Illinois Tool Works, where he would work for 30 years.

Margaret’s parents both were German immigrants who settled and met in Elgin, with her father going to work as a machinist at the Elgin National Watch Co.

Through Margaret, the couple became friends with Jack Cook, a World War II and Korean War veteran, pharmacist at the family drugstore and fellow Izaak Walton League member who later in life would go on to become a 15-year member of the Kane County Board and president of the Forest Preserve District for eight years. With Cook’s passing in February, Schmoldt became the last World War II vet in the IWL.

‘Still friends’

In 1956, through friends, the Schmoldts learned of land available in rural St. Charles Township, and Bill built the house where the couple still lives. A fence line for their land holds large pines that once were saplings brought over from the Izaak Walton League property.

It’s also set up with a portion of the 15 acres used for farming and another left natural as a conservation area, replete with a man-made lake.

When Bill retired, he found more time for hunting and fishing trips, frequently along the Mississippi, with good friend George Hove, who passed away three years ago. And Bill still finds time to help out the Kiwanis Club, working the group’s annual peanut sale.

Margaret taught at Franklin for 18 years — where only 250 students attended — then at Channing Elementary, which had 650 pupils, for another 17 years before retiring.

“She never got out of first grade,” Bill joked.

But she did make longtime friends with quite a few of her former students, at least one of whom called recently after hearing Margaret was battling cancer.

Her current treatment is such that “Bill takes me every morning to Provena Saint Joe’s. I couldn’t have asked for a better husband. We’ve been married 61 years, and we’re still friends,” she said.

While membership may not be what is was in the Izaak Walton League, the couple thinks it is important for Elgin to keep it going because of the work it has done and it still doing for the environment, not to mention that 26 young men have earned the rank of Eagle Scout through projects done in conjunction with the group.

Like the club, “We’re hanging in, and doing the best we can. That’s all we can do,” Margaret said.