The Oswegoland Park District will mark its 75th birthday this month

On April 11, 1950, voters in Oswego Township went to the polls and voted 2-1 to establish a new unit of local government. The Oswego Park District was created by a vote of 263-137.

Both the village of Oswego and the surrounding, almost entirely rural, Oswego Township were beginning to grow after the stresses of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the trauma of World War II that consumed so much of the 1940s. And that growth meant more children were being born to veterans who’d returned from their war service – the Baby Boom – as well as those in families starting to move to the community as post-war economic growth started to accelerate.

Oswego native Ford Lippold, who became the new park district’s first executive director, recalled that the park district’s roots extended back a couple years before the vote was held.

“The Oswegoland Park District dates back to a symposium on community recreation held at the March 1948 meeting of the Oswego Parent-Teacher Association,” he wrote almost 30 years after the event. “At that time, a committee, composed of one representative from each community organization was formed to discuss the need of planned recreation in Oswego. At the first meeting of this committee, held on March 15, 1948. Al Shuler was appointed chairman and Mrs. Gerald DuSell, Secretary.”

The group formed subsequent to that meeting got right to work with the goal of establishing a summer recreation program for the community’s young people. A house-to-house canvass was made for funds, and more than $1,100 was raised to fund a 10-week summer playground program. The program offered supervised recreation for youngsters at Oswego’s two grade schools, the Red Brick School and the Little White School. Also established was a softball league.

But the real roots of recreational programming for youngsters in Oswego actually went back nearly a decade and a half before voters approved the park district’s formation and more than a decade before that first planning group got to work. It was during those economic dark times of the Great Depression that some in the Oswego community first recognized a need for supervised youth recreation.

On Feb. 20, 1935, Oswego area officials called a public meeting at the old village hall at 113 South Main Street to discuss two subjects: providing better fire protection both in and outside of village limits, and the need for a community center.

A committee was established to examine buying a fire truck suitable for rural use to supplement the village’s existing Model A Ford chemical fire truck. That initiative eventually led to the creation, a year later, of the Oswego Fire Protection District.

As for the community center idea, the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent reported that “Each one present was of the belief that the community needed someplace where anyone could go for recreation. [Oswego attorney] Oliver Burkhart explained ways and means by which the place could be financed through taxation and PWA funds. A motion was made and carried that a committee be appointed to investigate the needs and approximate cost.”

And that’s about as far as the community center idea got. But the idea of recreational programming apparently got people thinking. The “PWA” Oswego attorney Oliver Burkhart was talking about was the Public Works Administration, one of those “Alphabet Agencies” created by Franklin Roosevelt to fight the Great Depression that were pumping millions of dollars into Kendall County farms, businesses and municipalities. While nothing apparently came of the PWA idea, another agency, the WPA – the Works Progress Administration – was tapped to provide funding for an Oswego recreational program.

As the Record reported on July 1, 1936, “The WPA recreation program will continue for the summer months at the Oswego grade school [today’s Little White School Museum] under the supervision of Mrs. Helen Jennings and Martin Peterson.”

Oswego wasn’t the only local community receiving federal recreation funds, either. On June 10 that same year, the Record had reported, “Plano residents, young and old, will greatly enjoy their new park, constructed by WPA labor just east of Plano. … There are picnic tables, a ball ground, fine shady spots that will be cool in summer…A steam shovel is digging out a swimming and wading pool, which will soon be available.”

Fast-forwarding to the spring of 1950, and it wasn’t coincidental that Lippold was appointed the new Oswego Park District’s first superintendent. Lippold just happened to be a young man with an apparent lifelong interest in recreation for young people that began when those WPA programs were created. He was a 1933 graduate of Oswego High School where he excelled in sports. Lippold had been interested in Boy Scouting to the extent he and his cousin served as Scoutmasters of Oswego Troop 31 in the 1940s. In the late ‘40s he worked as a camp counselor at Pilgrim Park Camp in Princeton, Illinois.

Lippold shepherded the park district through its next several decades and saw it grow from a small summer-only program with a budget of less than $2,000 and no parks of its own to a sprawling network of parks and natural areas with programs serving thousands of youngsters and adults at sites all over the fast-growing Oswegoland area. In February 1966, in recognition that two-thirds of its residents lived outside the village of Oswego, the district changed its name to the Oswegoland Park District.

By the time Lippold retired in the summer of 1980, the park district had acquired its first parks, community center, swimming pools, biking and walking trails, playing fields, nature parks and golf course.

Assistant superintendent Robert “Bert” Gray, who began working at the park district while still in high school, took over for Lippold in June 1980 and guided the district through a period of astonishing population growth. In 2003, Gray moved on to head the Champaign County Forest Preserve District. The park district’s board of commissioners hired Bill McAdam to replace him. He was, in turn, replaced by Rich Zielke. Upon Zielke’s retirement last year, long-time park district employee Tom Betsinger took over the district’s leadership, only the fifth executive director in the Oswegoland Park District’s remarkably stable 75-year history.

In June the Little White School Museum will mount a special exhibit on park district history to celebrate 75 years of providing the breadth of community recreation programs that would no doubt astonish those who enjoyed those first recreational opportunities during the depths of the Great Depression.

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