Historian: Not Likely Old Pole's from Electric Park

Plainfield historian and architect Michael Lambert is siding with Plainfield Police Cmdr. Kevin Greco in the case of the .

As you may recall, Midwest Brewers Fest workers last month while cleaning up the western bank of the DuPage River, near where the grandstand once stood. Since then we've been trying to verify if it's a remnant from Plainfield’s old vacation resort of the early 1900s, as the brew fest crew postulated.

Not likely, Lambert says. The pole probably dates back to a , as Greco speculated, but Lambert places the K-9 program on the site in the early 1980s, rather than the '60s or '70s.

The flagpole, Lambert says, is likely the one that Highway Commissioner Sam Reichert donated when Melvin “Corky” Lantz, then police chief, put out a call for a donated pole to mark the K-9 training grounds. Reichert was operating a gas station at the corner of Route 59 and Ottawa Street at the time.

"Likely, it was not set too well and, probably, was blown [or dragged] into the DuPage River with the large volumes of debris that swept through the Electric Park site during the 1990 tornado," Lambert wrote in an e-mail. "The flagpole was found in the general vicinity of the training ground."

Lambert added some detail to Greco’s tale of the two police dogs buried on the river's western bank. One of them was named Luger, a Doberman pinscher and one of the first in the Plainfield K-9 Unit program.

Village officials have agreed the dogs' gravesites will not be disturbed during riverfront redevelopment because they are honored as police officers in their own right, Lambert said.

All this flap about the pole leaves us wondering about the flag that flew from it. What did it look like?

We’re waiting for Reichert to tell us what he knows about the pole.