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Jim O'Donnell: A small quiet park in Arlington Heights where spirits forever bound with honor

ALMOST ALL DAYS ARE QUIET at Memorial Park in Arlington Heights.

That's probably the way it should be.

A visitor has to know the compact tract is there.

It's a triangular one-third of an acre, tucked into a residential neighborhood about three blocks northwest of the train station.

By bedroom suburb standards, it has been there forever. A local physician - Dr. John Best - donated the land in 1883 to honor "the boys of Dunton" who had fought in the Civil War. ("Dunton" was the original name of Arlington Heights.)

Monday morning, its spirits will once again bound with honor when village Mayor Tom Hayes (West Point, Class of '78) leads the laying of 58 commemorative wreaths to remember area brave who have died fighting for America.

Within each wreath lies a story, tales that include lost fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, sons.

Empty chairs at family dinner tables. Framed photographs atop holiday mantelpieces, the faces forever young. Too many prime years of life and love lost in the wicked fog of war.

THERE IS ALSO A SECTION at the park with commemorative bricks. They honor both the dead and those blessed enough to get through their military segments alive.

On a recent day, a visitor paused to peruse many of the bricks.

The sports radar was on.

The bricks include far too many marked "KIA" - killed in action.

One honored Lt. Douglas Vaughan, USN.

He was once a star athlete at Prospect High when the school was new.

Its athletic programs boasted such other marquee names as Bill Zadel and George Pomey and Fred Lussow.

Pomey went on to Michigan and started alongside Cazzie Russell when the Wolverines lost the 1965 NCAA championship game to John Wooden, Gail Goodrich and UCLA.

Vaughan lettered in four varsity sports at Prospect.

His power alley was wrestling, where he made it to the state championship in the 133-pound division as a senior.

He lost, 29-27, a wild score that underpins remarkable aggressiveness and determination by both finalists.

VAUGHAN, AN HONORS STUDENT, was class president his first three years and the president of student council as a senior.

Independently, he studied Russian and went on to focus on Russian studies at the Naval Academy.

An assistant principal at Prospect later said, "Doug was a dream student who should have lived a dream life."

Instead, he graduated from Annapolis (Class of '66) and by 1968, was aboard the USS Radford off the coast of Vietnam.

While attending meetings shoreside outside Saigon, a jeep he was riding in was ambushed. He fought for life for close to a month in a field hospital before dying in May 1969.

Doug Vaughan was 25 years old.

He was buried at sea.

NOT FAR FROM HIS BRICK at Memorial Park are two that honor Lance Cpl. James Bray Stack, USMC.

To read the "KIA" alongside the years of his life - 1990-2010 - suggests an unfairness that might demand a commission of inquiry above the highest cloud guarding the heavens.

Young Stack was home-schooled under curriculum of the Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights. His father - Robert Stack - was on faculty at the academy.

Through that association, James played on the CLA soccer team and was MVP of the track team in his senior year - 2008.

He was also a champion marksman. A crowning achievement in that compartment came when he won a gold medal in a national Junior Olympics.

Months after graduating, he enlisted in the Marines. He also married his high school sweetheart Katie. In 2009, their daughter Mikalya was born.

In 2010, his unit was deployed to Afghanistan. Family lore says that he "won" a rock-paper-scissors competition on the morning of Nov. 10 for the distinction of being able to man the point on a risky patrol.

A sniper's bullet quickly ended his life.

A week later, more than 2,000 people - including Gov. Pat Quinn - attended his funeral service at the Prospect High field house.

Less than a year after that, the gymnasium at the Christian Liberty Academy was renamed in his honor.

James Stack was 20 years old.

THE VISITOR TO MEMORIAL PARK couldn't leave without looking for one name that would otherwise be lost to the ages.

The fellow's name was Jim Kalter and he graduated from St. Viator in 1965.

That was a spring of vibrant and unique energy at the school.

Tuition was $325 - less than 3% of what it is now.

The Viatorians were graduating their first four-year class. (The school opened in 1961 on land initially purchased by the Archdiocese of Chicago to be a massive Catholic cemetery.)

In late winter, an inspired young English teacher named James O'Neill decided that the all-male St. Viator should have its first - and in the end, only - senior class play.

He dug deep to come up with a suitable work. He settled on "Stalag 17," a comedy-drama about captured U.S. airmen in a World War II German POW camp who think there is an informant in their ranks.

The play had a solid Broadway run a decade before. It gained even greater fame when Billy Wilder cast William Holden in the lead role of Sefton for a successful Hollywood production.

Kalter was much more into cars than anything else.

His older brother Bill Kalter was a mechanic at the old Morton Pontiac on Northwest Highway. He was also a greaser/gear head who could have been the prototype for Paul Le Mat's John Milner in "American Graffiti."

But playing against family type, the younger Kalter took on the role of McCarthy in "Stalag 17."

THREE MONTHS LATER, he was among those cheering when the Lions varsity baseball team made a supremely miraculous run to the state championship game in Peoria.

Len Sparacino did a great job as head coach. But it was the golden pitching arms of two sophomores - righty Jerry Donahue and southpaw Bob Stevens - who pushed the team to the improbable finale.

Only a prep superstar named Al Smith, pitching in relief on zero days' rest for Peoria Manual, ended the St. Viator dream.

Manual won the title game, 4-2.

Smith would later go on to be one of the great playmaking guards in the wide-open early years of the American Basketball Association.

Kalter had little interest in college and soon after graduation was classified 1-A by the U.S. Selective Service.

With Vietnam still in ascent and mainstream United States having little idea of the body county yet to come, that was not widely perceived as a rendezvous with death.

For Kalter, sadly, it proved to be.

HE WAS DRAFTED in 1967. In March 1969, while on perimeter guard duty at a base in Tay Ninh province, he was hit by enemy fire.

He lingered for two days before dying.

Jim Kalter was 21 years old.

Lt. Vaughan, Lance Cpl. Stack and Pfc. Kalter will be among the 58 given special tribute on Memorial Day 2021.

By dusk, Memorial Park will probably be back to its encompassing peace.

But in the quiet, as it is most every day and night, all of its spirits can forever bound with honor.

• Jim O'Donnell's Sports & Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.

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