New bike tour showcases Wheaton's little-known ties to World War I

Nancy Flannery will play the role of docent for a new bike tour of historic places in Wheaton, but she's really more of a storyteller who doesn't get bogged down by facts and figures.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. involvement in World War I, the bike tour will focus on Wheaton's ties to the Great War - the young men who died in battle, the city's memorials to their lives and the war effort at home.

The city's historic commission chairwoman, Flannery has discovered a number of fascinating tales in her research for the 6 ½-mile tour that begins Saturday afternoon. To the casual observer, the sites along the route are everyday places until you hear Flannery retell stories long faded from public memory.

"I'm always talking about how we need to preserve our past," Flannery said. "Well, when you look at some of these houses, and you put a story and you put maybe a face to it, it makes it personal. History becomes alive, I think, and people become more motivated to pay attention to history and to preservation."

Several themes emerged as Flannery scoured old newspaper articles and looked up WWI registration cards.

"The whole town was so involved in the war effort. So many of the women sewed and put up bandages and put up food. The women of Wheaton really organized to help," she said. "The Red Cross effort was huge in this town. It was just amazing. The city engineer quit his job, so he could go over and fight. It was really something."

Flannery has a way of fleshing out the details to make the stories more personal, more vivid. She will recount the big send-off for the city engineer before he volunteered to fight. She recalls the letters - written from soldiers to their families - reprinted in local newspapers. And she remembers the casualties, the faces she uncovered in old photographs.

"The people who died from Wheaton - half died in the pandemic (flu) - but the ones who died overseas, the violence of the fighting was so intense that some of them the bodies were never recovered," she said. "One was George Kull, who was in the La Fayette Escadrille flight group in France because apparently the U.S. did not have an Air Force at that time. He died over in France in a dogfight. He was killed by a German ace. They were so young. Some of them I have photos of them. They were just so young. "

Wheaton lost 13 men in WWI - their names inscribed on bronze plaques on the WWI Obelisk in Northside Park, a recently restored monument featured as the second stop on the tour. The plaques list the names of all 500 men from the Wheaton area who enlisted from 1917 to 1919. The markers originally were made in 1922 for a memorial placed at the Warren L. Wheaton home at Roosevelt and Naperville Roads. Five hundred ash trees also were planted along Roosevelt Road leading up to that memorial for Wheaton's version of a "Road of Remembrance."

"I was surprised at the range of people who enlisted ... There was just this wide range," said Flannery, noting that they signed up at the former DuPage County courthouse on Reber Street, another tour stop. "You had a Carlson who was a first-generation immigrant. You had the son of a mayor, LaVerne Perrottet. You had an African American who died, who had been working in Wheaton, living in Wheaton, who was an assistant at a local barber shop, and he died from the flu. It just really kind of grabbed my attention."

Perrottet was the first Wheatonite killed in WWI. The bike tour will visit the former residence of his father, Arthur Perrottet, whose mayoral term began in 1915. Today, it's a family home at 615 N. Wheaton Ave., one of the sites on the tour that isn't a designated landmark.

History lessons also emerged as Flannery learned about Perrottet and the other families of the fallen.

"These were very dedicated people. These were people who were willing to make the kind of sacrifices that nowadays it seems as though we're kind of pulling apart and not working together as a group in the nation," she said. "And I think it inspires me when I read about them."