There is a 19th Century gift of grandeur here.
Well-maintained homes in Queen Anne, Italianate, Georgian Revival and other architecture of earlier, more-ornamented eras grace much of this town 60 miles west of Chicago’s Loop. The DeKalb County Courthouse, dramatically restored, dominates a downtown where parking meters give 12 minutes for a penny, an hour for a nickel. Overpark, and the ticket costs a quarter.
The town of 10,000 rises as enchantingly and anachronistically as Brigadoon from surrounding cornfields that seem to form an embrace keeping the world of hustle and woe at bay.
But barely 12 miles to the east, the fields sprout tracts of cookie-cutter pastel houses, as the sprawl of Chicago’s western suburbs creeps ever closer. The local buzzword is “growth”; the local fear, heard in almost every conversation, is that Sycamore will become “just like Naperville.”
Fire hydrants, outposts of growth to come, already have sprouted at the edges of the fields along Illinois Highway 64 leading east to St. Charles and, ultimately, Chicago.
All the stores on the main street, State Street, are still locally owned; but Wal-Mart, K mart and McDonald’s lurk south of town on Illinois Highway 23 just at the northern edge of the city of DeKalb.
Sycamore’s downtown has survived the tough times pretty well; but merchants glance warily to an outlying parcel of land where a Farm and Fleet store, a low-overhead chain specializing in clothes and tools for farm families, is to be built.
“It just means we’ll have to give more service,” said Darold Hepker, owner of a 100-year-old downtown hardware store.
Sycamore senses that little by little it is losing its isolation. At the same time, it feels another sense of loss, a loss much of the rest of the country already has experienced and become accustomed to-a loss of control over its destiny.
“What’s going on in America as a whole is going on in Sycamore,” said Rev. Kirk Reed, minister of the United Methodist Church.
On Jan. 20, a new era begins as the nation gets a new president. Bill Clinton made change the watchword of his campaign, and the nation responded. Even DeKalb County, which had voted Republican in every election in its 155-year history, went Democratic this time. One Sycamore woman who voted for Clinton remembers thinking while in the booth, “What if I’m the only one?”
She wasn’t.
Although Bush won the town with a 227-vote margin in an election in which 87 percent of the registered voters participated, Clinton received 1,539 votes and Perot won 1,099, a strong mandate for change.
In a small town, even minor changes have large effects; and because Sycamore always has tried to keep change under control, that mandate is especially significant.
But Sycamore is far from “typical.” For one thing, most towns these days-at least in the Midwest-are wrestling with decay, not growth.
Sycamore is also more independent than most, perhaps a legacy of its Yankee founders. It’s more conservative, too, with a citizenry that has thought long and hard about how they might conserve the best of the past while accommodating the realities of the present and the future.
Ask a resident what he or she wants from Washington and the immediate answer almost always is “Leave us alone!”
“Sycamore is pretty self-sufficient,” said Josh Haka, a 33-year-old beer distributor. Then he added, “I love this town. You can take walks at night with your family. . . . You don’t feel like you have to lock your car door. The bottom line is, if I could keep the town the way it is, I’d be willing to pay extra.”
Sycamore already is paying to have things its way. The State of Illinois is supposed to maintain State Street because it also is two state highways-23 and 64. But if Springfield picks up the bill, it will require parallel parking along this five-block stretch of the downtown shopping area. Sycamore likes diagonal parking and pays the maintenance tab to keep it.
Many in town were asked what they would tell Bill Clinton if they had 15 minutes alone with him. The answers indicate that Sycamore deeply hopes Clinton can solve the problems of the nation-in education, health care, the economy-to create a framework within which the people of this town can solve local problems, without the direct help or interference of Washington.
School board member John Lewis: “I’d like to tell Clinton that there are communities like Sycamore that are in need of assistance for infrastructure, such as lighting and sewers. We don’t want the federal government to do a lot for us. But we may need assistance in doing things for ourselves.”
Curtis Ashley, a printer and a member of Sycamore’s small, generally thriving black community: “I’d like to see a better outlook for jobs for my kids. I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen to them.”
David Juday, the third-generation owner of Sycamore’s biggest factory: “The thing that contributes to our success is an educated work force. I find distressing our government’s inability to deal with educational issues. I find it appalling.”
Barbara Dunham, principal at North Elementary School: “I want to see a president really make education first, not just (give) lip service to the ideal.”
But then Dunham added a request that comes up in nearly every conversation. Sycamore’s people are willing to change with the times, but, please, if the government is going to make them do something expensive, it should help pay for it.
“The mandates concern us,” she said. “If they want us to do something, they have to give us the money to do it.”
More Top Picks Best Pickleball Paddles
Ald. Ray Puentes, who was born in Cuba and owns a water-softening business, tells how Sycamore recently had to spend $2,000 to get new washers and dryers for the Fire Department because the federal government, reacting to the AIDS crisis, demanded that firefighters wash up and change clothes immediately after a fire.
“We all know we have to do things like this,” Puentes said, “but it all costs money.”
Mayor Bernard McMillan put it bluntly.
“All this mandated stuff has got to stop,” he said. “These people sit around these desks in Washington, D.C., and Springfield, and they dream up all these ideas, but all it really does is put a bigger burden on small towns.
“The city never wins on any of this because the city has to pass it on to the taxpayers, and they don’t like it. . . . What it all boils down to is that you are better off doing it on your own.”
Sycamore likes to be left to its own devices for reasons beyond financial ones. The town likes to feel that it controls its fortunes.
“Are we looking for any handouts?” asked Robert Boey, a wire factory owner who created the town’s industrial park. “No. We don’t want any, and we don’t want the ties that go with them.”
Realtor Bob Wildenradt quoted Will Rogers, “We can’t afford any more government.”
Sycamore’s independence is bred in the bone.
The first settlers, nearly 160 years ago, were Yankees from New York state and New England, drawn by soil that would turn out to be some of the best in the world. Corn became an emblematic crop for DeKalb County, although Sycamore’s primary claim to fame is its annual October Pumpkin Festival.
Sycamore was chosen as county seat in 1837. Local lore says this was part of a swap in which the town of DeKalb, now much the larger place, got the teachers college that has become Northern Illinois University.
Sycamore was a stop on the underground railroad that sheltered runaway slaves, most of them on their way to Canada. Several homes around town still have the hiding rooms built by residents who put principle ahead of the law.
When Sycamore wanted something done, it turned not to government but to its citizens. In the 1850s the Chicago and Galena Union Railroad was supposed to pass through town. It missed, arriving instead at Courtland 4 miles away. The movers and shakers of town raised $75,000 to build a spur line, the Courtland and Chicago Railroad. Although that spur is idle now, most of the industry that propels Sycamore’s economy today came to be near the trains.
The history of this town might well reveal something to the new president in that it is a record of solving problems largely without government assistance or debt.
There were 4,000 people in 1926 when a young banker, Clifford Danielson, arrived from North Dakota. He is still in town, still putting in a full day as chairman of the National Bank & Trust Co. At 93, he is the town’s leading citizen.
There were 7,000 residents in 1950 and 9,844 in 1990, although Mayor McMillan insists that, if you add the unincorporated housing tracts north of town, a true count is more than 10,000.
So there was growth, but nothing that Sycamore couldn’t cope with on its own. Coping usually involved a chat with Red Johnson.
Harold “Red” Johnson, a furniture store owner, auctioneer and former bouncer, was elected mayor of Sycamore in 1957, two years after Richard J. Daley became mayor of Chicago. Until his death in September 1991, Johnson, like Daley, ran his town on a personal, let’s-make-a-deal basis, dispensing coffee and decisions in the back of his store.
Usually, these decisions involved Cliff Danielson, whose bank financed Sycamore. Johnson and Danielson cut deals for new businesses, helped build a splendid hotel downtown, brought in a movie theater, helped young lawyers and doctors hang their shingles.
For all their power, Johnson and Danielson stirred remarkably little resentment. Virtually everyone agrees the two men loved Sycamore and used their influence to improve the town while not saddling it with debt or with obligations to outsiders.
Robert Boey’s experience is typical.
For 54 years, Anaconda Co.’s wire mill on the northern edge of Sycamore had been an industrial anchor. It once employed nearly 1,000 people but its work force had shrunk to only 200 in 1983 when the company, hit by the recession of the early 1980s, closed the plant.
This closing distressed the town in general and Boey in particular.
Boey, who was born in Singapore and raised in Hong Kong, was Anaconda’s chief copper engineer and had been transferred to the plant from the New York City suburbs in 1981.
In two years, Boey and his wife, also Chinese, came to love Sycamore. When the plant closed, he went to Johnson and Danielson with an idea-to set up his own copper wire company in part of the old Anaconda mill and turn the rest into an industrial park, luring in other small businesses to create jobs.
“Red said he’d help any way he could,” Boey said. “He said he’d cut the red tape. Processes that take a month were cut down to one week for me.
“Then I sat down with Cliff, and he took a chance on me,” lending the money to get the ventures off the ground. “I owe a lot to him,” Boey said.
The water tower above the old mill still carries the Anaconda name, but beneath it now are 10 companies, including Boey’s American Bare Conductor Co. Together the companies employ 300 people and are locally owned.
No government money was spent.
Boey also noted that he has never felt any discrimination because he is Asian. Race relations have generally been easygoing in Sycamore. St. Mary’s Catholic Church has a Sunday mass in Spanish to serve the 200 or so Hispanic residents.
There are about 300 blacks in town, nearly 3 percent of the population. Many, like Curtis Ashley, were drawn to the town by ties to the Israel of God Church, which has its national headquarters in town. Both whites and blacks say there has always been racial peace in Sycamore.
“Sycamore was a decent place to live (for blacks) even when other places were not,” said Ashley, who has lived in town 19 years.
The importance of community shows up everywhere.
When electrical products manufacturer Ideal Industries, the town’s biggest employer with 400 workers, announced it would be expanding into some vacant land near its plant, nearby residents screamed. But no one sued. Instead, they sat down with Ideal officials. Four months of quiet talks led to a compromise under which Ideal will expand, but behind a buffer of park land and an earth berm, plus space for a new school.
“They bent over backward to help us,” says Dr. Edward Hirsch, one of the residents. “Everybody won.”
But the way things have been done in the past might not work in a town in the process of change.
“The reality is that we’re growing, and we’ll be a suburb (of Chicago) soon,” says Hirsch, a family doctor. “Five years from now, we’ll be like Geneva or St. Charles.”
Hirsch’s prediction-if taken literally-is probably too dire. Most of DeKalb County is still rural. Officials expect growth of about 3 percent per year, which means a further 5,000, maybe 10,000 people in the county in the foreseeable future.
But when people in Sycamore talk about growth, they’re not really talking about numbers. What they mean is the threat that Chicago-or rather, its western suburbs-will reach out and overwhelm them, wrapping them in a suburban sprawl of shopping malls, traffic jams, housing developments and strangers.
New housing developments are rising on the edges of town. Charles Payne, co-developer of one of them, Fox Pointe, says half the buyers of the $150,000 to $180,000 homes are trading up from smaller homes in Sycamore and the other half are moving in from the suburbs to the east.
More Top Picks Best Professional Metal Detectors For Relic Hunting
The new families are young, putting new pressures on schools and sending property taxes soaring. High school enrollment, now 720, is expected to reach 1,000 in five years.
Although there is a lot of grumbling about rising property taxes, Sycamore has supported its schools, backing the efforts of educators like elementary school principal Dunham, who recently bet the 420 children of her school that they could not read 4,000 books in one month. The students read 4,892 and so, a few weeks before Christmas, Dunham donned a Mrs. Santa Claus suit and paid off the bet by spending a cold day on the school roof, waving to the delighted children below and listening to music on her boom box.
Dunham said she hopes Clinton brings the same push for early intervention programs to national education that he used in Arkansas, and that he emphasizes the importance of parent participation in education.
While many here wouldn’t mind federal help in funding the schools, they don’t want to be overserved.
“I would strongly recommend changes in the educational system,” said city Treasurer Ken Mundy, “but I’d also tell Clinton that it has got to be funded.”
Schools Supt. Robert Hammon said that “maybe a lot of people look at the Clinton administration as the last hope. If things don’t come through for us (in education), that cynicism we have had for a period of time, it is just going to close the door, slam it shut.”
Sycamore is used to seeing many of its residents drive south each morning to DeKalb to jobs at NIU, the county’s biggest employer. But more and more, people here drive through DeKalb to the East-West Tollway and a job an hour away in Oak Brook or Lombard.
Many people-including much of Sycamore’s business community-think the town now needs long-range planning instead of the casual, case-by-case management of Mayor Johnson’s era.
“Years ago,” says Ald. Puentes, “when growth was lower, city government could be conducted with a handshake, a smile and a sales pitch. You can’t do that now. You have to run it like a business.”
Sylvia Lee-Thompson runs the county’s Big Brother and Big Sister program. Every day, she sees the social problems of the town-the difficulty that poor people have in getting good health care, the long waiting list for public housing.
If she had a chance to talk to Clinton, Lee-Thompson said, she would tell him that impoverished parents need help.
“People are really trying to make a good life for their families, but they are really struggling, and they are really frustrated,” she said. “Those who are able and interested can’t find jobs that make it worth getting off public aid.”
Instead of issuing orders from Washington, she says, the Clinton administration should “think about the people who are really out there. Go and see what their lives are like and realize the impact of your decisions and that we can’t forget the need for human services.”
Whatever happens in Washington, Sycamore will keep doing things its own way.