Great Scot: The Highland Games are moving to Wheaton
As is his custom, Gus Noble stepped up to a microphone to introduce a ceremonial assembly of kilt-clad pipe bands at the finale of last year’s Highland Games.
This time, a lump rose in his throat. The closing melody — bagpipers and drummers playing “Amazing Grace” — came four days after his father died.
“To be there with my sons, remembering my father, I felt connected to him through the music,” Noble said.
The Highland Games — convening this June at a new arena in Wheaton — celebrates cherished strands of Scottish culture: clan tartans, song, dance, food and brawn. Athletes heave tree trunks as tall as telephone poles in the caber toss, a test of accuracy. But the Games also showcase the power of family and fellowship.
“It transcends the ocean,” said Noble, a Robert Burns-quoting Scotsman. “It connects people to their roots in Scotland and to the generations that come during that moment of massed bands.”
Noble’s ancestry is “Scottish to the end.” He also considers himself Scottish “by inclination.”
“I believe there are some values that are shared by all Scottish identities,” he said. “And those are a belief in equality and freedom, a belief in education and critical thinking and the belief in enterprise and entrepreneurialism and a sense of fun.”
The Highland Games are staged the Scottish way, by and for the Chicago Scots, formerly known as the Illinois St. Andrew Society. It’s hailed as the state’s longest-running not-for-profit organization.
“For 179 years, we've brought something of Scotland, of home, to Chicago,” said Noble, the group’s president.
The Games also welcome people who have never set foot in Scotland. Organizers expect somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people to converge on the DuPage County Fairgrounds over the two-day event starting June 14.
“If somebody hasn’t even been to Scotland, never mind have heritage or been born there, but they … like whisky (the Scottish spelling) or Sean Connery or golf or whatever it is, we want to honor that and celebrate it,” Noble said. “So, you become Scottish by inclination.”
Speaking of the best Bond, a classic British car show will cruise into the fairgrounds on June 15. Laddies will be judged for their stage presence in the “Men in Kilts” — or to purists, the “knobbly knees” — contest.
“People really get a chance to stick out their chest with pride and strut their stuff in the kilts,” Noble said.
Local Scots have had a home for the Games in Oak Brook and Hamilton Lakes in Itasca. The business park’s development left organizers with a smaller parcel of land at the same time the event was expanding. During a county fairgrounds tour, it became clear that the venue was a “great opportunity to put down roots in Wheaton,” Noble said.
For his contributions to Scottish culture in the United States, Noble was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He accepted his OBE medal from King Charles last year, less than a month after his father, Robert, died.
“My father was there in my heart, and he was sitting on my shoulder,” Noble said.
He has a photo of that day up in his office. It’s next to one of Robert Noble with his MBE medal, awarded to him by then-Prince Charles for his services to Scottish agriculture.
“When the foot-and-mouth crisis hit in the UK, my father was one of the first to say we’re all in this together,” Noble said.
That became a rallying cry as Noble fought to keep COVID-19 out of Caledonia Senior Living & Memory Care. The Chicago Scots own and run the North Riverside campus. All proceeds from the Games support its operations.
“I realized that there are some things we had to continue to do despite COVID,” said Noble, who moved into Caledonia during lockdown and led a virtual Games. “And that was to deliver life's most important things, and those are home and family and love.”
He felt those familial ties as the pipers and drummers marched in unison on a field at the Games.
“My goodness me,” he said, “the sight and sound of 46 pipe bands was quite staggering last year.”