June’s Day on the Dixie tour includes chances to explore area history, including Chicago Heights’ contribution to Roosevelt in World War II at Bloom High School.
Students file through the library during a passing period May 10, 2024, past a giant globe created during World War II that’s identical to ones made ifor President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For a little while, there was a big secret in Chicago Heights. Washington bigwigs were visiting. Mysterious shipments of valuable resources would arrive.
“The War Department placed the full resources of the government at their disposal,” including supplying “secret geographical information” from the Office of Strategic Services. “Scarce materials needed in the plate making department were rushed by plane from all parts of the country,” the account states.
Weber Costello made several of the 50-inch globes during the war and a few more by commission into the 1950s, marketed as The President Globe. In an advertising pamphlet from the ‘40s, the company printed an endorsement from Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who had received the third one. Not long after that, Weber Costello went out of business and the globe was donated to Bloom High School. By then, it had seen better days. In the early 1970s, the school threw it out, according to a 1990s newspaper story, but a social studies teacher retrieved it and placed it in his classroom. When that teacher retired, someone proposed splitting the cherry wood globe at the equator and turning it into two large planters.. Donations poured in from alumni, history buffs and community members.
But one of those opportunities is coming up June 22, thanks to a group of car enthusiasts who will once again drive the nearby Dixie Highway.Members of the A’s R Us Model A Ford club erect new storyboard signs along the Dixie Highway in 2015, the 100th anniversary of the historic highway. Drivin’ the Dixie returned for 2019 going from Momence to Blue Island, and then “the pandemic hit and destroyed lots of things,” Serviss said.
In Crete, a display will highlight the village’s plethora of Sears kit homes, including one street with a concentration of “six or seven of them.”A presentation in the village of Grant Park will showcase how the grain elevator there works, and “the complexity of maintaining grain so that it doesn’t rot.”
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