Lincolnshire plans to re-honor slain Marine at park

In the late 1960s, a scoreboard was added to a ballfield at Lincolnshire's Spring Lake Park to honor a local Marine killed in the Vietnam War.

Private First Class William Gregory Landon was 20 when he was fatally wounded in combat in 1967. He had played baseball at the park as a youth, so the memorial was fitting.

Current Lincolnshire Mayor Brett Blomberg remembers the scoreboard from when he played at the park as a teen himself.

"It wasn't real fancy. It was plywood and 4-by-4s," recalled Blomberg, 57.

The scoreboard eventually came down, though, and with it Landon's memorial.

But Lincolnshire officials are set to rectify the oversight by renaming the diamond Landon Field.

Plans call for a plaque to be installed, with information about Landon's military service and death. The village board approved the wording of the memorial Monday night.

Village leaders realize few people who visit the field, let alone the kids who will play on it, would have known Landon or even heard of him. They say it doesn't matter.

"He kind of represents, for everyone, a mother, a sister, a brother, a son ... who gave their life for their country," said Stephanie Gould, the village's recreation supervisor. "You don't have to know (him) to appreciate what he gave."

Landon shared his father's first name, so everyone called him Greg, said his sister, Kathleen Landon, now of Evanston.

When he was growing up, his family home was not yet part of Lincolnshire, which only incorporated in 1957. As a result, his hometown is listed in military records and on the official Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Web site as Deerfield.

A graduate of what was then called Ela-Vernon High School in Lake Zurich, he joined the Marines in 1966 and was sent to Vietnam the following February.

He was killed by enemy rifle fire in Quang Tin Province, South Vietnam, on May 26, 1967.

Blomberg was 15 at the time. His family had moved to Lincolnshire the year before.

He and his friends who played at the park, which is on Oxford Drive south of Half Day Road, knew what had happened to Landon. They knew what the scoreboard represented.

"It's a small town now and it was a smaller town then," Blomberg said. "I didn't know the (Landon) family, but I know they had lost a son in Vietnam."

The scoreboard was purchased with memorial donations Landon's father gave to the village to improve the park, recalled Kathleen Landon, who was 13 when her brother died.

The family moved to Chicago in 1979, and sometime in the 1980s the scoreboard at the park was removed. It had become worn, Kathleen Landon said.

The memorial to the fallen Marine was forgotten by the village until a local resident attended a park board meeting in 2007 and asked that the scoreboard and memorial be replaced.

Village records indicate no one at the meeting remembered who the scoreboard had honored, but research led to Landon's story and the push to honor him again.

"I think it's long overdue," said Blomberg, who served in the Navy in the 1970s but didn't go to Vietnam. "It just seems to be the right thing to do."

Kathleen Landon, who thinks about her brother when she occasionally drives past the park, is thrilled about the new tribute.

"My heard just is swelling over this," she said. "My parents, both of whom are gone, would be so happy."