David Dooley

BILL PEKARA (BP): Good afternoon and welcome to Northbrook Voices, an oral history project sponsored by the Northbrook Public Library and the Northbrook Historical Society. Today is August 11th, 2025. My name is Bill Pekara and I’m pleased to welcome David Dooley, who lived in Northbrook from 1950 to 1978. What brought you to Northbrook, David?

DAVID DOOLEY (DD): My parents, when I was a baby. My parents lived for a brief time in Chicago at my grandparents’ house, my father’s parents’ house. And my great aunt and uncle lived in Northbrook and bought a piece of property for my parents to build a house on, on Maple Avenue.

And during the time while they were building the house on Maple Avenue, we were at a boarding house on Walters Avenue. It was the Berkstead family that were boarding. There were other borders besides my parents.

BP: Can you share some details about your early life and the environment you grew up in?

DD: Well, there’s quite a few. Northbrook was quite a rural town back then. I believe there were just 3,600 people or so living in Northbrook. And it was all prairie west of Western Avenue, very rugged in that sense. The street that we were building a house on was a gravel road. It was one block. At the end of it was a field. There were three other houses on that street. The street we were next to or adjacent to was Second Street, which then became Cedar Lane.

BP: What are some significant memories from your childhood that have stayed with you?

DD: Oh, many. I remember the fields, playing baseball in the baseball fields. We had a ball diamond that we got together without at Grace Lutheran Church, and it was down the field from Maple Avenue. We just walked west a few blocks. We used to have daily summer baseball pickup games there. Whoever could show up from the neighborhood played. On our street alone my mom once calculated there were 20 some boys and two or three girls on our little street alone—my sister and a girl that lived across the street. We were on a gravel road. Riding our bikes around town, we could pretty much get around town easily on bikes. It was a pretty wide open area, pretty safe, and very few cars driving around. It was different back then than it is now.

BP: Who were the influential figures in your life, and how did they impact your values and beliefs?

DD: Going back to those days, it really started back then. My parents, first of all, were influential in my life, obviously, for most of us. And in Northbrook, I had a great uncle who was born and raised in Northbrook. He went to dental school at Loyola Dental School. He graduated in 1928 before the Depression. And he was one of the first dentists in Northbrook at the time. His name was Dr. John Therrien. His wife was Florence Therrien, and basically they became my grandparents in a sense. Because they were so close. They lived off of Hillside, up in that area, in East Northbrook. And my great aunt always wanted me to be a dentist to follow in the footsteps of her husband. So, from those early days, I was sort of indoctrinated in a sense into the profession.

Obviously, being in Northbrook and a boy, you had to know how to play baseball, and that was important too. So that was a big deal growing up in Northbrook, and looking forward to the summers and the tryouts and the Little League and the Fire Guard Field and playing at Fire Guard Field and then Pony League up at the Village Green, all the way through Legion Ball. It was a long time ago.

BP: Where was Fire Guard Field?

DD: Fire Guard Field was at a Fire Guard. It was on Shermer,and it was a little bit, somewhere around where the Bank is now. But it was a field that was built on Fire Guard property, and it was made for Little League purposes. Doc O’Neil back then was the founder of Northbrook Little League. And then it became Pony League too, but he mainly was involved with the Little League program.

BP: What inspired or led you to pursue your current career or field of interest?

DD: My inspiration really was my great uncle, because he was a dentist. Some funny things about that: as a little boy, I used to see my dad and everybody else get up for work on Wednesdays, and my great uncle would go play golf. Or he and my great aunt would head over to the Arlington Park racetrack and pick up the last few races, and we’d go get a pizza later on after the races. I kind of liked the idea that, geez, I could have Wednesdays off. I liked his hours, his lifestyle, and I thought, gee, this would be something fun to follow. So that’s why I did, actually.

BP: Can you highlight a pivotal moment or experience that shaped the course of your life?

DD: Oh, yes. There were a number of them. When I was in grammar school, I had a rough time. We had like 50 to 55 kids in a classroom. There were three classes for each grade level at St. Norbert Grammar school.  I went to St. Norbert Grammer school. It was much, much bigger than it is now. I would say half of the grammar school students in Northbrook went to St. Norbert. There were over a thousand kids in that school. Considering the size of the community was growing from 3,000 to 11,000 in 1960, it was a sizable amount of the population. There were a lot of things that happened. Times that I had trouble in school with some of the nuns there. Times I had difficulties because I was a little younger than most of the kids, so trying to mature and keep up with them was difficult. I was short, so I had to kind of fight my way, literally, out of a lot of situations there too.

Also in high school, I had some difficulties and worked hard to overcome those as far as grades and things like that. All of a sudden, while I was in college, I took a class at Harper Junior College between my sophomore and junior year, and it was in chemistry. I was having a difficult time in college. I went to a college called St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin—no relation to St. Norbert in Northbrook—but I was having a difficult time getting through general chemistry. I took chemistry class twice up there, but couldn’t get through it with a good grade. I was thinking of dropping my major from biology and doing something else, and I decided that summer to take a full year of chemistry at Harper College. I got an instructor at Harper for the chemistry class that made all the difference in the world to me, and I aced the entire year. Got A’s both semesters and moved on from there. From then on, I never got a grade lower than a B, mostly A’s in my classes in college. That was instrumental and that was overcoming that. And we were always concerned back in those days of getting drafted, so we had to make sure we stayed in school.

BP: How would you describe your educational background and its influences on your personal growth?

DD: Again, it helped me learn how to be persistent, not give up, hang in there when things get tough, and ask questions. Over time, it just blossomed that way, so it helped.

BP: Could you provide insights into your family structure and the role it has played in your life?

DD: My family structure was very traditional. My mom stayed home with us. My dad worked for Illinois Bell Telephone Company, and he was located in the Northbrook office, which happened to be two blocks away from our house. He would walk to lunch, or walk home from lunch sometimes. Most of the time, he went with some of the guys from the telephone company and they would walk over to the Cypress Inn and have lunch. Beer wasn’t involved, but they had lunch. My dad and mom had a very traditional structure. My mom didn’t drive then. We had one car. Neighbors helped drive us around. My great aunt and uncle who lived in Northbrook really acted as our grandparents, and they helped us quite a bit as children. We had a very traditional, structured family and supported each other well. I was the oldest, so I naturally had to blaze a trail for my brother and sister.

BP: You had talked earlier about your dad building your house? Did you want to talk a little bit about the house or the location of it?

DD: Sure. In the 1950s, I was born and going by the timing of things I remember I know that on the sidewalk at that house, it had written 1951. So obviously the sidewalk was poured in 1951. I’m guessing the house was nearing completion, probably late 1951 or ’52, and they probably moved into it. My dad built the house by hand, himself, with my grandfather and with another person I saw in pictures. My dad had a lot of stories about that. He remembers being there when it was freezing out and working inside the house, putting things up and putting things together. But he built it from scratch. Fortunately, it’s still standing today. We added onto the house in 1960. The intention was to have my grandfather—my grandmother just passed away—move in with us, but unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to get there. So it ended up being a second-floor addition for my brother and sister and I to live in.

BP: So what was it like growing up in Northbrook in the 1950s?

DD: Northbrook in the 1950s was much different than Northbrook in the 1970s. It was a very small rural community. We used to get excited when we heard our name on the news, even if it was bad news. We used to get excited that somebody actually recognized the community. What was happening in Northbrook at the time was that it was growing. For me, in my experience, it was a lot to do with the sports. Growing up as a young boy adoring the Cubs, even though they had a terrible record, we loved the Cubs. I grew up as a Cub fan. One of my best friends grew up as a White Sox fan.

But growing up in Northbrook in the 1950s we spent a lot of time hanging out at the ball diamonds. In downtown Northbrook, there was Melzer’s, which had both a grocery store and a hardware store, and they sponsored a Little League team. Across the street on Shermer was Land Wears, sort of a dry goods store. Next to Land Wears was a hotel, my parents used to call it the Heart Break Hotel. It was up against the railroad tracks, now kind of where the train station is. On the east side of Shermer was Adams Drugstore. They sponsored a Little League team. And then there was the Cypress Inn, and a lot of little places. There was a shoe store. There was Lorenzo’s Garage. Everybody walking home from St. Norbert would stop by Lorenzo’s Garage in the warm weather and pick up a soda out of their machine. You’d put the money in and slide the bottle out, and it’d pop up. Pop bottles. That was kind of what it was like back then. We could ride our bikes all over town. I used to walk to school from my house. There was a lot of incidents. I can remember the creek being one of them, where once in a while a student would accidentally end up in the creek.

BP: Northbrook Days?

DD: Northbrook Days is at the Village Green. It was a smaller get-together. I also wanted to talk about the Legion Hall and Friday night fish fries at the Legion Hall. Northbrook Days was always something everybody kind of looked forward to, it was at the Village Green and It was sort of like the last part of summer before school started. You knew school was going to start soon after Northbrook Days occurred. One good memory I have in Northbrook Days was I went to day camp at Greenbrier School and we used to wear these yellow shirts. We used to have outings once in a while, we’d go to Libertyville to a Hawthorne Melody farm. I remember on a bus ride coming back, it was near Northbrook Days, and they had a freckle contest. I had a lot of freckles back then. Because I got third in the freckle contest, I was able to have three rides to go on three free rides at Northbrook Days. That was fun.

BP: The Legion Hall, they had their own thing there too, didn’t they? 

DD: They had Roundup Days, I believe that was earlier in the summer. That was next door to the Legion Hall. The Legion Hall was really a great meeting facility in town. Back when I was growing up, if you think of the 1950s, we were only five years away from World War II. A lot of the fellows that belonged to the American Legion were veterans of World War II. And they never talked about their war. They just talked about what they were doing now.  I never heard them talk about their experiences in combat, or many of them probably weren’t in combat, but I never heard them talk about that.  I’d hear them talk about things going on now.   Raising their families, trying to make a better life for themselves in the suburbs. A lot of them came from the city of Chicago or other cities, and they picked Northbrook because they could build a house and raise a family here.

Northbrook Legion Hall had Friday fish fries—I think it was once a month. The members of the Legion Hall would volunteer their time and make the fish fry. That’s where people would gather. We’d see each other, see friends, we’d get to chat and talk. Back then in Northbrook, you’d drive down the street and you knew just about everybody, and everybody would wave and say hi. It was nice, we used to call it—some of my high school friends from Glenbrook used to call it Mayberry in a way. We had the barber, we had the police officer everybody knew. We had a volunteer fire department back then. The volunteer fire department every day at 6:30 would let their alarm go, just to test it out. And that’s when you knew when the Little League game was going to start, because it always started at 6:30 when the fire alarm went off.

The Legion Hall was a place for—there was bingo there. It was a big building. We once had a family reunion there. People probably had weddings there. It was a fairly large facility. I’m disappointed it’s gone. It was even a meeting place when I played American Legion Baseball. The American Legion team right before me, two years before me, and the year before me, went to the World Series, both those years. They came in fifth in 1966 and in 1967, they came in second, and they lost to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one to nothing. Ken Kozel, who pitched for the Northbrook American Legion team, pitched a one hitter or two hitter, I believe, and lost the game one to nothing on a squeeze play. Northbrook had quite a reputation. The following year, we were invited to go down to Memphis, Tennessee to play against Tuscaloosa’s Legion team because Memphis Tennessee was where the World Series was held. The Legion didn’t want to come up with the money for that. They decided for us to play other tournaments, other places that season.

Some of the really influential people involved with the baseball in Northbrook were Doc O’Neill who started it. In my mind, it was Art Kundy, who was probably one of the great mentors and teachers of the game of baseball. He coached me for Pony League and Legion Ball, and he was coach of those Legion teams that went to the World Series. And as far as Glenbrook North goes that same team that went to the World Series twice, also won the state championship in baseball in Northbrook in 1966. Same pitcher, Ken Kozel. They had a tremendous team. Unfortunately, my age group always followed right behind those guys. I used to joke with those guys later in life and said you guys always set the tone for everybody to come after us the following year and they were gunning us because they had beat them so badly.

BP: What position did you play?

I played second base at Glenbrook North and for the Legion team as well. And I played in college as well, too.

BP: You had talked a little bit about the skating rinks in Northbrook.

Yes. The Meadow Hill rink wasn’t there right away. Ed Rudolph was still putting together the velodrome, or what we used to call the bike track back then, where any of us could ride a bike over to and try our luck out. There were two skating rinks back then. One was in the Village Green, right now where the Historical Society has their facility across from St. Norbert. Your mom might know this too, because during recess at St. Norbert, if you were a junior, seventh, or eighth grade, you were able to bring your skates and go over to the skating rink and skate at lunchtime. And then there was another one right here where the library is, the Tower Rink we used to call it. It was a big, big rink. I believe they chose those locations because they could pump the water out of the creek to flood those rinks. A lot of time was spent at those rinks during the winter months. Great times.

BP: Are there any other areas you’d like to talk about in Northbrook or memories?

DD: Some of my experience at Glenbrook North. The one thing that stood out to me at Glenbrook North was our freshman year and one talk given by a Dr. Payne, who was a counselor. I think she was the head counselor at the time I went to high school, Glenbrook South was just being finished and they had originally had the sophomore, junior and senior classes from Glenview at Glenbrook South. Glenbrook North, we had the freshman class from Glenview merge with our class. We had almost a thousand kids in our class. Dr. Payne was speaking to us about how to set your future, how to set goals for yourself. She said, “For your future, always have a goal in mind. You can always change that goal, but always have a goal in mind.” I took that away over the years, and that’s how it motivated me to stick with the dental concept, because that was my goal to become a dentist and I stuck with that.  I always remember her with that lecture in freshman year, that was sort of an orientation lecture, early in the year.  But that was an important key point that I remember during those years.  I had great teachers at Glenbrook. Glenbrook was a great school. One of my classmates was John Hughes. I had some other classmates too that were pretty significant. One was involved with Let Us Entertain You restaurants, Bill Higgins, one of the founders. There were a number of classmates that were extremely successful in life.  As the years have gone by I’ve become quite proud of the fact that our little class and our little community of 11,000 was able to have such an influence on the world.

BP: And you’re still connected with some of them, too.

DD: Yes. I still get together now with some of my classmates from high school. Fortunately, too many of them have passed away. But I still get together with them. I still get together with classmates from dental school as well. That was influential in my life as well.

BP: What was your class year from GBN?

DD: 1968. Class of ’68.

BP: Would you like to speak a little bit about some of your family’s background in Northbrook?

DD: Sure. My great uncle was born here. He was a Therrien. That family goes way back to the early days of Northbrook in the early 1900s, probably late 1800s. My great uncle was a dentist in town. My aunt got involved with a sewing bee. They sewed a quilt, which had all the names of what I believe were the Northbrook founding families.  I shouldn’t say that as to that’s my speculation but it was families that lived in Northbrook back then and it probably came from the 1930s. We donated that to the Historical Society, to Judy Hughes. They have that in the archives at the Historical Society.  My great uncle’s family had a farm here, I believe, and he used to hunt a lot. He used to hunt off of Techny Road and off of Willow Road for pheasant. I remember him coming home with a pheasant or two. Then they would invite us over for dinner.

BP: Do you know where their farm was at?

DD: I don’t know where their farm was at. I think the Historical Society probably would know about it because the Therrien name is in the records at the Historical Society.   I believe his father was involved with the volunteer fire department here at the time. That was another thing too. The volunteer Fire Department in Northbrook was another thing.  If there was a fire in town, when the siren would go off, the whole town would hear it. It would just blast through the whole town. You knew somebody was in the volunteer fire department because they would go racing down the street with their lights flashing on their car. You knew you had to get out of their way because they were heading to the fire department, which is now the Civic building. That building’s still there, right off of Walters Avenue. That’s where the fire trucks were.  My great aunt and uncle were quite involved here in town. I know that they played a lot of golf. They played at Mission Hills, which is where the Mission Hills is now, but it was just a golf course called Mission Hills. I played it when I was in my twenties before it was developed by Gene Corley into condos and a golf course. It was a beautiful, watered golf course, one of the only few ones around here. They also played at Sportsman’s. There was another golf course my great aunt told me about at the corner of Willow and Waukegan, it’s not there now it’s where the Willow Festival shopping center is now and it  was called Techny Fields. The only thing I remember of it when I was a little boy driving down Willow was that you could see glimpses of like a parking lot back then.

BP: I’ve heard there’s some really old pictures online from the thirties, like hickory golfers out there.

DD: Yes, that was Techny Fields. Across the street obviously was the Techny Farm. My dad was friends with a bunch of the brothers there that worked at the farm. He helped out with the telephone equipment there because he was working in the Northbrook office as a telephone company. Another memory is that if there was a storm in town, my dad was the first one to get called because back then, if your telephone went out, that was an emergency. The telephone company had to get on it. My dad would go over to the Northbrook office, and there’d be somebody in the field he’d be talking to that would be finding out where the line was down and helping him fix it. My mom would be a little nervous with the tornadoes, and he’d sneak us over there. They had literally a bomb shelter in the basement of the telephone company building then.

BP:  It’s still there to probably right?

DD:  Yes, it probably still is.

BP: Do you have any memories of when Northbrook started to get some notoriety to its name?

DD: This is my own opinion, and it comes from living here and seeing it and being involved in things around town.  But I believe it really started with the success of the baseball teams throughout the communities here. I remember working at a relative’s bike shop in Winnetka, and I remember them saying if I was going to raise a family and move in this area, I would pick Northbrook. This was in the mid-1960s. Northbrook was becoming the, the Park District was blossoming. The baseball teams were extremely successful thanks to the volunteering and the help of all the fathers who really liked the game.

And then came the speed skating. I think Northbrook’s had a speed skater in every Olympics, and I think this came from the historical society actually, since the 1950s. Ed Rudolph started the whole thing. His two sons, Gordy and Eddie, were speed skaters, and they built the Northbrook speed skating team. I remember it was kind of an elite deal. They wore red jackets, and you knew who they were in the wintertime. Then along came the Rudolphs, the Blatchfords, the Poulos, and then Anne Henning, and then Dianne Holum and her sister, who was in our grammar school class. They were all speed skaters. They started to get notoriety when Northbrook won a number of medals in 1972, I believe. There were a number of members of the Northbrook speed skating team on that Olympic team. Northbrook had a placard that was called the “Speed Skating Capital of the World.” I still have that at home. One of the speed skaters was on the cover of Sports Illustrated back then. I think it started to blossom at that point in time, because the population just exploded from 1960 to 1970.

BP: Would you like to talk a little bit about the Anetsberger properties?

DD: Sure. Anetsberger’s property was a little golf course with prairie land all around it. The Isaac Walton League was also there; I think they had an office there.  I know that Anetsberger’s was involved with that. I do remember the lake they had there.  We used to go swimming there for a picnic or something. We used to play golf on the little nine-hole course. I believe he made it for his employees so they could play golf after work. It was a short course, basically a par three. It was out in the fields. There were the Techney corn fields east and south of it. It was very rural, very much a farmland. Our St. Norbert Parish used to have picnics there in the summer. Everybody volunteered to do things and help out. Everybody knew each other and helped out. It was a total community involvement and that’s what I remember of the Anetsberger property.

I also remember at one time when I was young, a cow escaped from the Techny farm. Every once in a while, something really terrible would happen on the railroad tracks. A car would get hit or somebody would get killed. It happened enough. My best friend’s mother was killed on the railroad tracks in downtown on Shermer Road. She helped push somebody off the railroad track. She was going to church and there was a big backup going into the parking lot and her car stalled out as she tried to push someone off tracks and she tried to get it started again, because back then they didn’t have auto they had stick, didn’t start, and along came a Hiawatha at 90 miles an hour hit her car, and she passed. But what happened one day when we were at church and all of a sudden the train siren started, and it stopped. They thought they hit a pedestrian on the tracks, and it turned out it had hit a cow, everyone for about an hour so thought someone was killed, but it was a cow that got away from the Techney farm. That’s how rural Northbrook was back then.

BP: And the farm was pretty far down from that?

DD:  Pretty far away from that correct, right.

BP: Anything else about the trains that you remember coming up town?

DD: I have a memory when I was three years old. This occurred when I was three. We were standing at the Northbrook station. My grandmother was getting on a train to go to Arizona to meet some friends and it was 1953 because unfortunately she was killed in a car crash there, but I remember at the time my great aunts I was with and my mom said, “Close your eyes, Davey, you don’t want to get a cinder in your eye.” Apparently, that was something that was commonplace around the railroad tracks back then because of the coal burning locomotives. I still believe there probably were some steam engine or some coal burning locomotives that were still running through there periodically. That’s one thing I can remember about that. The Anetsberger property, and the cow, and having picnics over there.

BP: Is there anything else that you’d like to add, David, for today?

DD: I’m good, I think.

BP: Well, thank you so much for participating in Northbrook Voices. Your memories of life in Northbrook are going to add a very unique and personal perspective about the history of our town. Thank you for coming today.

DD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having the opportunity here.