Women who influenced Arlington Heights history
In my February column, I referred to the redoubtable Myrtle Lauterburg as a "town mother," one of those women who exerted unusual influence on Arlington Heights' history.
Myrtle did it, by her own self-definition, as a mover and shaker. Kay Olivo recalls that, as a kid, she was moved to shake at the thought of passing Wheeling House (Lauterburg Tavern) where Myrtle, her mother and her sisters, sat in judgment on all who dared walk by their front porch. "The Lauterburgs had a hotel on Campbell and Evergreen where City Bank is now," Kay says. "They terrified me." Surely village President Arlene Mulder's modus operandi is at the other end of the spectrum from Myrtle Lauterburg's, but when I saw her picture in the Daily Herald representing us at the White House, I recognized her as a "town mother."
True, she has the power of office which the early models did not have. But I can't leave her out. She carries the title of "mayor" with the forthright realization that women have come into their own and women mayors are no longer unusual. But before they had the designated titles, there were women in town who wielded the power. Daisy Daniels, who wrote Prairieville, U.S.A., the first history of Arlington Heights, was never a minister at the First Methodist Church, but she ruled there.
"She was a force for good," says Pat Craig, who was married in the Methodist church when it was still on Dunton. "But she also had a negative effect because she was uncompromising on getting her own way. What she said was right! She could reduce a woman to tears who disagreed with her on a biblical interpretation." There are those who say that Marjorie Allen, who as a child had a pony cart when most kids in Arlington were lucky to have skates, played the power behind the throne at the Presbyterian Church for decades. Pastors came and went, but Marjorie Allen was a permanent powerful force. In Daisy Daniels's book, there is a picture of Nellie Noyes Best, "Creator of the Library." There were literally dozens of women who worked to create the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, and many teenagers, but Nellie Best had the "town mother" personality and got the photo op. Florence Hendriksen, library board president during the 1960s, is my favorite of the historic "town mother" because she built the present library on my corner over a lot of opposition. A grammar school friend of mine was amused when she heard about it. She remembered that in 8th grade I'd announced that in my dotage, I would live half a block from a library. I'd forgot. But she remembered because her mother hooted memorably at the time, "She has no idea where she will live in her old age."