Friday, May 13, 2005
Chicago Tribune
by Annemarie Mannion

Comments from young visitors to Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center are enough to give a crow a complex.

Jackie Wenderski, 4, went nose-to-beak with a black-feathered bird, identified as nothing more uncommon than an American crow, as it flapped its wings and cawed loudly.

"Can't you just be quiet?" Jackie asked as she and 17 classmates from Little People's Country Daycare Center in La Grange recently spent a morning darting in every direction over the creaky wooden floor of the one-room former schoolhouse in Willow Springs.

"Silly bird," chimed in Frank Jilek, 4, as he paused in front of the bird cage on a visit with his brother Nickie, 2, and grandfather, Don Jilek of Homer Glen.

The bird's home is celebrating its 50th anniversary Sunday. Perched on a grassy hill overlooking a body of water called Long John Slough, wetlands and several miles of wooded land and walking trails, the one-room structure is the focal point of the Cook County Forest Preserve District nature center that was considered innovative when it was founded in 1955.

"It was a different concept. We wanted to avoid it being like a museum," said Roland Eisenbeis, 87, of Brookfield. As former director of the Forest Preserve District's Conservation Department, he oversaw the center's development.

Nature museums tended to be static, said director Julie Vandervort, describing animals that had been stuffed and identified by cards.

"Zoos were all about exotic animals. They wanted this to be interactive and to be about local species and nature," she said.

Eisenbeis knew that nature and live animals, including a great horned owl and a red-tail hawk in outdoor cages, would interest children. He discovered the one-room schoolhouse being used for storage at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

"I was taken aback. There were canoes stacked inside it," he recalled.

Eisenbeis believed visitors would be drawn to the simple building that was constructed in 1886. The district bought it for $600 and moved it to the site.

"I think if you look in children's books, you see the one-room schoolhouse. People grow up with [that image]. It's Americana," he said.

Eisenbeis' hunch was right. The nature center now has about 500,000 visitors a year, Vandervort said.

Kim Mikolite of Brookfield, who chaperoned the day-care children as they explored the nature center and then walked a nearby path, explained its appeal.

"It's rustic. I like that fact that you can walk the nature trails. It give kids the chance to see things they wouldn't normally and to touch things they wouldn't normally," she said.

The children clamored to see the crow, peered into aquariums populated with live turtles, snakes and fish, watched a thousand or so bees hover over a cross-section of a hive and reached tentatively into another exhibit to touch a rough piece of raccoon fur or the smooth antler of a deer.

Vandervort said the wooden displays, cages and signs have a handmade look to them.

"They aren't the most professional. They're not the most high-tech. But there is a lot of heart in them," she said.

"There are a lot of people who have emotional ties to this place. They visited it when they were in school. They like the fact that this is a place that hasn't changed."

Amy Dvorak of Tinley Park, strolling the walking path with her husband, Rob, and daughter Peyton, 2, said she remembers visits to the nature center when she was a child and reaching her hand into the exhibit with the raccoon fur and antler.