Memorial crosses back up in DuPage County

Crosses commemorating the 22 deaths of DuPage military personnel since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are being reinstalled at the county complex in Wheaton.

Thirteen crosses were placed Friday around a brick-paved rest stop along a walking path south of the courthouse. The other nine were expected to be up by Saturday, county officials said.

The steel crosses originally were along a grass slope near the new site. County workers cut the crosses down before Thanksgiving at the behest of a county military monument oversight committee that worried the site was dangerous. The panel also decided the crosses no longer were necessary because the names of fallen troops since 2001 had been added to a granite marker.

However, no one told the families the crosses were being removed and when the father of a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004 came to leave flowers on Thanksgiving, he was shocked to see them gone.

Herb Wehling, the World War II veteran who spearheaded the campaign to create the crosses, didn't know they were coming down either and called county board members to find out where they had gone.

"Well, they're up and they're all right," a still-miffed Wehling said Friday. "It's an appropriate location for them, but I still have the question of why. (The worry about people) slipping down the hill is blarney."

Workers had to weld on steel supports and reapply anti-rusting paint to the crosses before sinking them into small concrete-filled tubes in the ground.

DuPage County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom expressed regrets earlier in the week and promised the board would have greater oversight of the fate of the crosses in the future.

Several board members said they agreed with the chairman's decision to include more oversight. That doesn't mean the monument committee that recommended the removal of the crosses will be disbanded, though.

"I just think it will have much more to do with checks and balances like any committee," said board member J.R. McBride of Glen Ellyn. "When the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, that's when you have problems."