Margery Frisbie to keynote Arlington Hts. mayor’s prayer breakfast

Prayer breakfasts are made for people like Margery Frisbie, who has supported cooperation among religions for more than half a century.

Frisbie, best known as an Arlington Heights historian, will speak Thursday, Feb. 2, at the Mayor’s 25th Annual Community Prayer Breakfast, at the Doubletree Hotel, 75 W. Algonquin Road.

This year’s breakfast pays homage to the village’s quasquicentennial, or 125th anniversary, being celebrated this year.

Frisbie’s writings concentrate on Catholics and the history of Arlington Heights, where she and her husband, Richard, moved their growing family in 1954. While her credentials are very strong in both fields, she’s always been a bit of a rebel, too.

Her earliest story about ecumenism starts in 1963 when she sent a small donation to Joan Jobson Grisell, a member of First Presbyterian Church who organized the community’s first interfaith dialogue.

“She called up while I was ironing in the kitchen, and when I said I was Catholic, she said excitedly that she had to get right off the phone. ‘I have to call Tom (her husband) this minute,’ she said, ‘and tell him there is a Catholic in town interested in ecumenism.’”

Frisbie has written that in the 1960s antipathy between Lutherans and Catholics was strong in the village, and across the country it was a novel idea that people of different faiths could come together.

But cooperation across any lines rarely goes completely smoothly, and one minister on the committee told the lone rabbi that he would not be allowed to participate in the interfaith Thanksgiving service.

“Why I didn’t resign that very moment and say I wouldn’t be part of anything that he (the minister) was,” Frisbie said. “But I was young.”

She celebrates that Arlington Heights and the Northwest suburbs have come so far that Jewish congregations are now an important part of Thanksgiving services.

Frisbie writes a monthly column for the Daily Herald, and her tales of midcentury days in Arlington Heights mirror those of many longtime residents — tracking mud into a new Virginia Terrace home because the family moved in before the sidewalks were installed; that only cornfields seemed to separate the backyard from Wisconsin; and that 50 kids, including the Frisbies’ eight, soon lived and played on the block.

Writing books about the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, St. James Catholic Church and the First United Methodist Church led Frisbie to tape interviews with people who had been here around the turn of the 20th Century when the village that eventually grew to more than 75,000 people was still a small farm town.

“I like stories,” Frisbie said. “I’m not big on facts and figures; it’s the humanity of it, the way people saw their lives. I love it when people are nice to each other.”

One of the first people she interviewed was Elizabeth Rajer, whose job weeding and picking onions around 1920 became more difficult when she had a baby. Incredible as it seems, Rajer crawled down the rows, balancing the baby on her calves. When her legs cramped up after half a mile, her mother took over and carried the baby for a while.

And when Rajer grew older and had difficulty getting in and out of her house, she had a carpenter put in stairs with wide steps that were only 2 inches high so she could manage them.

Al Volz, a former mayor who lived to be 100, walked by the Frisbie house on his way downtown while in his 90s. Margery regrets not writing down his every word but remembers that Volz and William Busse, a Cook County commissioner from Mount Prospect, decided to build Northwest Highway alongside the railroad tracks.

Frisbie conjures great images with her stories such as one of boys skinny dipping in a farm pond between the railroad, Wilke Road and Euclid Avenue while hobos camped under a willow and cows drank nearby.

When women finally got the vote in the early decades of the 20th century, they outvoted the “tightfisted German farmers” to build Arlington High School, she said.

“The people I talked with were what converted me to Arlington Heights,” she said. “They gave a solid basis to the town. They were solid people who wanted to do their best. They were remarkable. They built their own houses; everybody in town was a carpenter. They were so skillful,” she said.

And at age 88, Frisbie still likes trying new things. That’s why she wrote her first song,“The Ballad of William Dunton” in honor of the quasquicentennial for the village he founded.

The nine stanza song closes with these verses:

He gave our land for church and school,

And playgrounds for the tots.

He lived by that old Golden Rule

You share when you have lots

An upright man, our founding scion,

We gladly sing his praise

He led us like a gallant lion

We’re grateful, all our days.

Arlington Heights Prayer Breakfast

When: 7:15-9 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 2

Where: Doubletree Hotel, 75 W. Algonquin Road, Arlington Heights

Host: Mayor Arlene Mulder

Theme: The role of faith in celebrating the 125th anniversary of Arlington Heights

Speaker: Margery Frisbie, longtime resident, local historian, writer, editor, poet and songwriter

Tickets: $20 at Arlington Heights Chamber of Commerce, (847) 253-1703, www.arlingtonheightschamber.com or email jgain@arlingtonheightschamber.com by Monday