Friends and family this week remembered former Wilmette village trustee J. Kroy Ostergaard as a man whose friendly, problem-solving attitude toward life was forged in World War II mountain combat and three quarters of a century in the scouting movement.
Mr. Ostergaard, a 59-year village resident who was elected twice to the same term during a tumultuous 1969 municipal campaign, died Nov. 20. He was 90.
Mr. Ostergaard’s son Jerry, of Oak Park, said Dec. 5 that his father loved working with his hands and actually built the family’s longtime home at 18th Street and Elmwood Avenue over the course of two years.
“It was just a little three-bedroom house on one floor, but he built it with his own hands, with the help of his own father. He always had a basement full of tools, and he was always willing to help people,” Jerry Ostergaard said.
“My mother jokingly called him ‘Good Neighbor Sam.'”
Mr. Ostergaard was born in 1924 in Portland, Ore., then moved with his family to Ashville, N.C., and then to Winnetka. He attended Greeley School in Winnetka, and was a 1943 graduate of New Trier High School.
The day after his graduation, Mr. Ostergaard enlisted in the U.S. Army, and trained at Camp Hale, Colo., to become part of the renowned 10th Mountain Division. The division fought in Italy’s Appenine Mountains during 1944 and 1945; Mr. Ostergaard was wounded in a battle near the Po River.
He left the Army in 1946 and returned home to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Navy Pier. He later began a 45-year career with Western Electric as a telephone systems engineer, staying with that company through its history as AT&T and Lucent.
He married Virginia “Ginny” Stoecker Donovan in 1950, and almost immediately began his two-year house-building project, his son said. The couple moved into the house in 1952, and the family lived there until Mr. Ostergaard moved to Mather Place in Wilmette two years ago.
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Jerry Ostergaard said his father began 75 years of scouting as a teenager. He said his father couldn’t become an Eagle Scout because he had to take over as leader of his troop, Winnetka Troop 16, when the troop’s regular scoutmaster was drafted, “but both his sons and all his grandsons became Eagle Scouts.”
He later served as an assistant scoutmaster for Wilmette Boy Scout Troop 3 at Trinity United Methodist Church. He used his summer vacations to take groups of scouts to Camp Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan in Wisconsin, and to the Philmont Scout ranch in New Mexico, Jerry Ostergaard said.
The late Ostergaard earned Scouting’s Silver Beaver Award from the Northeastern Illinois Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
“I think he always had good advice for you if you asked it. He’d always help out with a problem, and maybe point you in the right direction if you couldn’t see it,” his son said. “That was a good thing in a father and important for a scoutmaster.”
Mr. Ostergaard was also an avid sailor, who raced as a member of the Wilmette Sailing Club out of Langdon Park and, later, Gilson Park.
He and his wife also enjoyed traveling — to Europe, the Caribbean, and 49 of 50 U.S. states, missing only Delaware, his son said. Later in life he became active in the North Shore Senior Center in Northfield.
Mr. Ostergaard found himself in the middle of one of Wilmette’s most uproarious elections in 1969, when he and other members of the United Party slate won village board seats in an election marked by vitriolic arguments over the possibility of affordable housing coming to the village.
Mr. Ostergaard’s slate, whose party campaigned in part against bringing low-income housing to the village, won. However, the election had to be held a second time, after a judge ruled that thousands of Wilmette voters were unable to vote the first time around when too few polling places were open.
The slate won again in the second election, when 10,000 of the village’s 18,000 registered voters went to the polls.
During his four years as a village trustee, Mr. Ostergaard was instrumental in the call for a new village hall to replace one built in the 1920s; his name is on the plaque in the current Village Hall lobby.
Mr. Ostergaard did not win re-election after his first term. Former Wilmette village president Vernon Squires remembered Mr. Ostergaard as a political opponent with whom he forged a friendship over the latter’s World War II experience.
“He was elected to the board in 1969 and ran for re-election four years later,” Squires said Dec. 8. “I was one of the people who ran on an opposing slate, and we defeated him. He wasn’t too happy with me for a while!”
Squires said that rough start smoothed out when his interest in military history led him to doing a program on the 10th Mountain Division’s part in the Allies’ Italian campaign.
“(Mr. Ostergaard) had a very distinguished record and because of my interest in the division we became friends,” said Squires, Wimette’s village president from 1981 to 1989. “I remember him as being very warm and outgoing. He’d start off a little gruff, but then he’d warm up, particularly if he knew you were interested in something he was interested in.”
Mr. Ostergaard’s wife died in 2004. In addition to son Jerry of Oak Park, he is survived by another son, Jack, of Naperville; a daughter, Jill Jacobsen, of Prospect Heights; his sister, Lois Boyd, of Rockford; three granddaughters and three grandsons.
A memorial service is being planned for the spring. Donations in Mr. Ostergaard’s memory can be made to the North Shore Senior Center in Northfield; the Northeast Illinois Council of the Boy Scouts of America; or to Trinity United Methodist Church in Wilmette.