Fun and games at Roosevelt Park

Greetings from sunny California:

I've been enjoying your Special 150th Anniversary Editions of The Waukegan News-Sun! They have brought back many pleasant memories of my youth in Waukegan.

I grew up on the south side. I think that I was the only Hungarian kid north of 10th Street, and all my friends were Polish, Croatian, Lithuanian or Slovenian. Many happy hours were spent listening to Frankie Yankovic and dancing at the SNPJ Hall. I lived there until the Marine Corps took me, in 1950, to California, Korea, and back to California.

My happiest memory is of Roosevelt Park, on McAlister Avenue. During the "Great Depression" in the '30s, the WPA (Works Project Administration), a federal agency, gave people employment with various local construction activities. In Waukegan, a big one was the converting of a large section of the creek bed south of Belvedere Street and west of McAlister Avenue into a beautiful park named after President Roosevelt.

At that time, I was living at 542 McAlister Ave., and was 7 or 8 years old. The park attracted kids from all around it, and we would spend hour after hour playing cowboys and Indians, and hide and seek in the lush vegetation and trees. When we grew tired of those activities, we would spend a few more hours "crabbing" for "crawdads" in the strikingly beautiful pond. Sometimes, even a bluegill would be caught. If you were lucky, a fisherman would buy the crayfish to use for bait in bass fishing in one of the nearby lakes. Summer vacation from school was three months of endless fun!

I returned to Waukegan in 1988 for the 40th reunion of my WTHS graduation class. Times had changed. My wonderful Roosevelt Park had been allowed to revert to its original state. All that remained of the WPA construction and work was the creek and overgrown vegetation. Even the ice skating "warming house" and bridge over the pond were gone. Such is life. However, I will always remember Roosevelt Park as a wonderful part of growing up in Waukegan.

Allen J. Repashy

La Jolla, California