Right before Oak Park and River Forest High School’s Homecoming football game Friday evening, more than 200 of the school’s alumni strolled across the football field to honor the school’s 150th anniversary this year.
One of the school’s oldest graduates was unable to make the trek, but he is no less a fan of OPRF than his more mobile alums.
Mike Lindblad, class of 1950, shows his loyalty to his alma mater by regularly revisiting his Huskie haunts. Whether he’s thumbing through his yearbook or talking with his children, none of whom attended the school, Lindblad loves to share experiences from his student days. His stories offer a glimpse into a very specific moment in OPRF’s extensive history and reveal the impact Lindblad’s high school years had on his long life.
“We used to have a sock hop on Friday nights,” Lindblad told Wednesday Journal. “And then we’d have our proms and one girl in our class—her uncle was Ralph Marterie, the bandleader—so we had our prom at the Edgewater Beach Hotel and the big-band leader Ralph Marterie played our prom.”
Lindblad shares his memories with such ease one might think they happened only yesterday. Today’s students likely don’t know what sock hops are, let alone attend them. Neither would they realize just how exciting it must have been for their predecessors to dance to music played by a big-band ensemble fronted by a bandleader with ABC Radio.
Lindblad’s grandson, Ben Iverson, class of 2017, the only one of his grandchildren to attend OPRF, had a more modern high school experience, although he and his grandfather both swam in the same pool to fulfill their gym requirements. At Iverson’s prom, however, there was a DJ, not a band. And he wasn’t quite sure what a bandleader even was before speaking to Wednesday Journal.
“I can only speculate, but in my head, it sounds like the leader of the marching band,” said Iverson, who admitted he also confused sock hops with burlap sack races.
That long-ago prom might have been unforgettable, but Lindblad can recall so much more than one sparkly night. If memories are gems, Lindblad’s mind is a treasure chest full of colorful, multi-faceted jewels.
Even at age 92, he can still vividly recall details from his childhood. As a kid, he would cross South Harvey Avenue to his neighbor’s house to pick up freshly baked bread, a task he undertook every Sunday for his mother. His father was an Oak Park policeman who drove a motorcycle and while Lindblad attended OPRF, one of his teachers had just returned from World War II.
“I have a vivid memory of him,” said Lindblad. “He was still in his uniform.”
Lindblad served in the Korean War after high school before becoming a state trooper, getting married and moving out of Oak Park. He joined the army with some of his high school buddies, and despite being in different units, they all met up with each other while overseas.
One of his former classmates had a different experience in an international conflict. Donald R. Lesh, whose sister Jane was in Lindblad’s graduating class, served as the second secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Cold War but was expelled on spy charges by the Soviet Union on Sept. 14, 1966. Lindblad learned about it from an article in a newspaper.
“We didn’t have good relations with Russia back then,” he said.
Lindblad still reads newspapers, including the one from his hometown when he can get it, even though it began publishing after he moved out of Oak Park. Whenever his daughter, and his grandson’s mother, Julie Iverson, comes to visit her parents in Palatine, she brings a copy of Wednesday Journal.
“He immediately goes to the obituaries, and is like, ‘I knew him, and I knew him,’” she said.
Julie Iverson coincidentally ended up marrying the son of an OPRF alumnus, which made introducing the two sets of parents to each other a breeze. Her father and father-in-law, class of 1944, became instant friends. And the father of her father-in-law actually went to OPRF too and was in the same graduating class as Ernest Hemingway (1917).
Lindblad loves making these kinds of connections, according to his daughter, but one of the closest is the one he has with his grandson Ben. Julie Iverson believes Lindblad and her son have a special bond because of their OPRF ties and their love of golf.
Ben Iverson played on OPRF’s golf team and Lindblad, an avid golfer, would often go to the matches to see him play. When his grandfather was there, Ben said, he wanted to play his best.
With such a knack for remembering history, it makes sense that Lindblad likes to visit the Historical Society’s Oak Park River Forest Museum whenever he’s in the area. And, in honor of the high school’s 150th anniversary, the museum will be hosting a special exhibit beginning next month. Ben Iverson hopes to take his grandfather to see it.
Lindblad doesn’t get out to Oak Park as much as he’d like, due to his wife’s health, but when he does, he visits his old neighborhood haunts and, of course, his high school. A lot has changed, but Oak Park is still his hometown—even though he missed homecoming.
“They say you can’t go back, but there’s a lot of things that you can go back to in Oak Park,” said Lindblad.
