By Ben Joravsky
Casey was a working-class kid, born and raised in Chicago. His father, a police officer, died in 1977. His mother moved her family of five from one congested north-side neighborhood to another. “I joined the Boy Scouts but we never got to see nature,” he says. “We camped out in a big industrial garage on Broadway. One time we went to a forest preserve. It was in the winter and under two feet of snow. We looked at the snow and froze and then went back home. That was my outdoor experience.”
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Casey camped in the jungles of Venezuela and in snow caves above the arctic circle. “The army exposed me to the wilderness and I learned to love it. I was supposed to be doing raids and ambushes and I was listening to birdcalls. I heard the whippoorwill’s song and fell in love with nature.”
Casey had moved near one of the city’s last great patches of undeveloped land, a giant square of cemeteries, forest, and former farmland bordered by Bryn Mawr and Foster on the north and south and by Central Park and Cicero on the east and west. Years earlier, the county had bought up the forest just west of the cemeteries and turned it into a preserve, La Bagh Woods. Old-timers figured the area would remain undeveloped forever. After all, no one could build in the forest preserve, and who would want to live among graveyards?
Casey’s concerns are off base, county officials contend. There is, they say, no plan to sell any part of La Bagh, even though developers have long lusted to build a road through its eastern edge. And there’s nothing to be read into the name change. “It’s still La Bagh Woods,” says a County Board spokesman. “It’s the Irene Hernandez Family Picnic Area. That’s just a portion of La Bagh. That’s all, nothing more to it.”
He slips from the woods into a new backyard and it’s as though he’s magically materialized in Schaumburg. He walks across the lawn, down a driveway, and past a basketball hoop to a newly asphalted street. These are the Residences of Sauganash: 81 neo-Victorian homes, some occupied, others under construction.
He comes to a makeshift campsite. “It must have been a big fire,” he says, fingering the remains. “It was hot enough to burn metal.”
