With Sidelines, turns out it’s a small world after all

Kind readers occasionally send emails letting us know their connections to people or events highlighted in this Sidelines column. They can be quite interesting.

In May, addressing an article about the Western Golf Association’s Evans Scholarship, Arlington Heights resident Mike Madden, 86, said he also had been an Evans Scholar.

“It is the most wonderful scholarship imaginable, and I am unbelievably grateful to the Western Golf Association for their support,” he wrote.

Reaching our own connection within the WGA, he confirmed Madden graduated from Marquette University as an Evans Scholar in 1960.

After reading about American Legion baseball’s Great Lakes Regional in Carol Stream this August, another Arlington Heights man, Frank DeRosa, wrote to say he’d played on the Arlington Heights American Legion team that in 1965 became the first Illinois team to reach the American Legion World Series.

Coach Lloyd Meyer’s club, 42-6, was comprised of players from Arlington, Forest View, St. Viator, and Wheeling high schools, DeRosa recalled.

The team included future Kansas City Royals pitching great Paul Splittorff and Mark Newman, who after playing baseball went on to work in the New York Yankees’ front office. Newman helped develop hall of fame players such as Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

Meyer, 92, lives in Arlington Heights, said DeRosa, who worked at Elk Grove High School 15 years and was its principal from 2003-07.

“It was a long time ago,” DeRosa wrote, “but in the summer of ’65, baseball was everything to us.”

That same article about American Legion baseball drew a humorous response from retired hall of fame Hinsdale Central High School football coach Ken Schreiner, a 1961 graduate of Wheaton Community High School, a predecessor of Wheaton Warrenville South.

He wrote he was pleased to see the item for two reasons:

“First, I spent a couple of enjoyable years as a WCHS student playing Legion ball,” Schreiner said. “Secondly, that field was the ‘parking’ site for my wife and me when we first started dating.”

He doesn’t figure he’ll get in trouble for that. He and Cinda have been married 59 years.

More recently, after reading about the debut of the new Real American Freestyle wrestling league Aug. 30 in Cleveland, retired Golden Apple recipient Carol Bell reported in.

She taught 32 years at West Aurora High School and chaired its physical education department 26 years. She also was well-known on the high school track and field circuit, not only helping at West Aurora but also in meet management serving as part of a three-person team that did fully automated timing.

Carol Bell and her husband, retired West Aurora and Waubonsee Community College coach John Bell, had a vested interest when they went to Cleveland for the debut of the wrestling league. One of the wrestlers on the bill, Matt Ramos of Lockport, is engaged to marry their granddaughter, Reilly Bell.

“We have been following Matt around for the past three years,” Carol Bell wrote.

It’s a small world.