Just like nearly every kid who takes part in an organized activity, Tyrone Haymore had to hit the streets in Robbins as a young teenager, selling stuff door to door.
For Haymore, it was candy or peanuts he had to hawk to raise funds for his Boy’s Club chapter. On one such outing, he hoofed it over to Kedzie Avenue, where he’d watched an elaborate building go up.
It was the late 1950s, and the building was so fancy, he figured it was going to be a Robert Hall department store. Later, he found out it was an opulent mansion.
“I found out these were wealthy Black people who built this house, so I knocked on the door,” he said.
Lestine Fuller opened the door and invited him in. Years earlier, she married a man who amassed a fortune after starting off selling items door to door.
“She went to a strange desk near the kitchen,” Haymore said. “It was her money drawer. The only way to get in it was to put a code in, and the green light would blink and the drawer would blink. I said, ‘Wow, this house is neat!’ I looked around, saw the fireplace. It was gorgeous.”
Mrs. Fuller ended up buying him out of candy. So he made it a point to start all of his future fundraising efforts at the Kedzie Avenue mansion.
“Whenever she bought something, if it was peanuts, she’d buy 10 or 20 bags of peanuts,” he said. “I got to be a regular there.”
Decades passed. Haymore went to college and started a career with the Chicago Transit Authority, but he stayed in his hometown and got to know the Fuller family. S.B. Fuller, who had the Prairie style mansion built in 1958 at Kedzie and 135th Street after earning a fortune as a beauty products entrepreneur, died in 1988. Lestine died about 10 years later, and family members who inherited the place weren’t able to keep it maintained. Eventually, in the 2000s, it was abandoned.
A few years after that, another entrepreneur purchased the building, intending to make it the headquarters for a limestone mining operation in Robbins. But residents rejected that plan, and the degraded mansion was donated as a tax write-off to Haymore’s Robbins History Museum.
Haymore, 75, who’d spent a lifetime in Robbins getting to know its people and collecting its artifacts, was now in charge, “reluctantly,” of his hometown’s most notable building.
It no longer was the opulent, gorgeous home he remembered.
“It’s in pretty bad shape,” he said. “I think that’s why they gave it to me. Nobody wanted it anymore because it had been vandalized so badly.
“That house has six bathrooms and they pulled the plumbing out of all six of them. All the electric wiring has been pulled out. When people left out of there, they left it wide-open, and the vandals did their job.”
By the time he was approached to accept ownership of the house, he said it wasn’t an easy decision. It had been abandoned for more than a decade, he said, and it was, as they say, a lot of house.
“I knew the Fuller family well, and I knew the financial responsibility to deal with it is tremendous,” Haymore said. “The maintenance and upkeep is incredible. I don’t know how Mrs. Fuller dealt with it.
“There’d been three owners since the original owners, and nobody had been able to do anything with it, including the Fuller family themselves.”
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So his first thought: “I had no desire to have that house.”
Haymore had become interested in Robbins history as a young man after he learned the village was once home to an airport where Black pilots could train and fly unburdened by racist policies prevalent at other facilities.
It was only around for a few years in the 1930s before being destroyed in a windstorm and eventually replaced by a residential subdivision, but it left a lasting mark. Several pilots who trained in Robbins became Tuskegee Airmen, and pioneering Black women pilots Willa Brown and Janet Harmon-Bragg were affiliated with the airport as well.
“When I heard about the Robbins airport, I was blown away,” Haymore said.
The Robbins Historical Society was being organized in 1980 by a woman named Eddie Lou Allen, and Haymore got involved early on so he could learn more.
“She died four or five years after that. Another person took over and then she died. The whole older generation was getting ready to die. I decided I would keep it going,” he said. “So that’s what I did. I kept it going.”
He sought out funding sources, but found grants for historical societies to be scarce. There was money out there, however, for museums.
“I said, ‘Guess what, guys, we’re going to become a museum,’ and I reorganized it,” Haymore said.
He set up in an old storefront along 139th Street, just a block away from the site of the Robbins Airport hangar, where he offers free admission to anyone interested in viewing items associated with Robbins’ storied history.
As time went by, it became obvious the Robbins History Museum had outgrown its current home, and when the Fuller Mansion offer came in 2015, despite his reservations, Haymore accepted.
“The Fuller home is five times larger than our current building,” he said. “And we do need to preserve Mr. Fuller’s history as well. Taking on the responsibility of that house was something we really had to think about, but we really didn’t have a choice. So we reluctantly accepted it.”
Haymore acted quickly to board up the broken glass doors where vandals had gained access, and “since we’ve had it, there hasn’t been a single attempt to vandalize it,” he said. “Maybe they think they’ve gotten all they can get out of there.”
But that’s all they were able to do, until last year, when they received a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. An initial $10,000 paid for assessment studies to see what needs to be done, and then last summer the rest of a $80,000 grant was awarded to fix the Fuller Mansion’s sagging and leaking roof.
“We have our first chance now,” Haymore said.
That initial study indicated the structure needs about $300,000 in repair work altogether, so Haymore still has some fundraising to do. He’s working on another National Trust grant application that’s due this month, and he’s conducting a crowdfunding campaign as well, though that’s “going slowly,” he said.
By the time he died, S.B. Fuller had amassed a fortune, lost millions, gained some of it back, and helped a lot of other Black owned businesses along the way. At his funeral, attended by Haymore as well as luminaries such as Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, Gov. Jim Thompson and even Donald Rumsfeld representing the White House, Johnson Publishing Co. founder John H. Johnson “got up and said ‘if it hadn’t been for this man here, I wouldn’t be the man I am today,'” Haymore said. “A lot of wealthy Black men know they owe everything to Mr. Fuller. He was incredible.”
As Haymore was getting to know Fuller late in his life, the businessman told of his humble beginnings in Louisiana and his inspiration for success.
“He said he asked his mother ‘Why did God make us poor?’ She slapped him in the face and said don’t you ever blame God for us being poor. Blame your father, because he never had a desire to be rich,” Haymore said.
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Haymore doesn’t really have a desire to be rich, either, but he does want a better home to showcase the stories of S.B. Fuller and other Robbins residents, like pioneering Black aviator Cornelius Coffey and Star Trek star Nichelle Nichols.
Like Fuller, who donated firetrucks to Robbins and helped the village acquire its iconic water tower, Haymore’s efforts are a way to give back to a place he loves.
“I wouldn’t trade anything for my growing-up years in Robbins,” he said. “It was just wonderful.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].