Referendum keeps rainwater from going everywhere

"Water, water, everywhere" was on the front pages of newspapers all summer, as many rivers, even the Mississippi, flowed over their banks. Once Arlington Heights was itself a watery spot, if not spectacularly so, rife with marshes and rivulets.

I remember Ida Harth describing the site of Olympic Pool one hundred years ago. "It was a great marsh, full of asparagus in the spring. There were so many bluegill that we took our brooms and swept the fish into pails to take home for dinner."

There was a bridge on Dunton near Oakton where a stream blocked the road. Streams were all over. One ran down from the area around the Christian Liberty Academy through what would become the Vail Jewel parking lot, east across downtown following Sigwalt Street under Arlington Heights Road to Meyer's Pond (seen in Jack Musich's drawing in the Peoples' Bank calendar this month).

Into the 1950s large areas of Arlington would flood in the kind of protracted rains we've seen this summer. Our experience was Oakton Street where we lived in a small ranch with a crawl space, one of many in the area.

At least two summers when we took our kids camping, we invited Chicago friends to use our house for a spot of time in the country. Unfortunately, we picked the rainy season. One year, it was pouring when our Chicago friends arrived with children. We could do nothing but leave, so we traded one watery spot for another, except now we were in a wet tent at the Dunes for a week.

For the second year in a row, we came home to a river running down Oakton. The guests left. The children splashed in the puddles. And we joined our neighbors in our closets, with the trapdoors to the crawl spaces open, watching the waters slowly rise until they inundated the insulation of the heating ducts. Fortunately, the rains stopped before the water flooded our floors.

It was obvious that something had to be done. We wouldn't be that lucky indefinitely. (Besides, it was not much fun for the husbands who had to muck about in the 4-foot-high crawl spaces to replace the insulation.)

The village set up a referendum for new sewers which seemed obviously needed. I didn't know then about one-time Mayor Albert Voltz who legendarily complained that every improvement he tried to make in town was fought by "those tightfisted Dutchmen" who didn't want their taxes raised.

Grateful for the improvements to come, I agreed to drive a group of my neighbor women to the polling place. To my huge surprise they turned out to be "tightfisted Dutchmen." They were going to vote against the sewer project because it would raise their taxes.

When I heard them, I wanted to stop the car and let them walk home. But that's hardly the American way. Fortunately, they didn't prevail. Most of the water that falls on Arlington today flows underground. No thanks to my neighbors, this summer we didn't see "water, water everywhere."