By Mike Sula
This trellis and many of the young, densely plotted trees and flowering bushes are surrounded by sections of chicken wire fencing. Other trees are supported by wood stakes set in the earth and bound to their trunks by pieces of wire coat hanger insulated by lengths of garden hose. The center of this plot is a patch of ground, roped off by clothesline, where more roses bloom around a large, branching weed with a knotty, fibrous stalk. A pair of blueberry bushes struggle from the dirt in one corner of the patch, and strawberry plants send out runners among the tangles of grass growing with abandon here.
Wendell, who was born and raised in the country and knows how to bring life from land, had a series of meetings with 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell and Horner Park supervisor Terry Sweeney. He wanted to create a park within the park–turning up the bad earth and planting grass and trees. “Jesus, they welcomed me with open arms,” he recalls. But there was the question of who would pay for the plan. “I said ‘You let me worry about it. It’s an eyesore. I just live across the street and I’ll fix it up.’”
Wendell, who has a keen sense of thrift, bought most of his plants at greenhouses or Home Depot, always with a sharp eye for bargains but never at the expense of quality. He figures he’s spent thousands of dollars on the park, which only adds to his outrage at the public’s failure to appreciate it.
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It doesn’t take long to see that Wendell is a wild man living in a foreign wilderness. “I realize I’m in a different world here,” he says. His spine is remarkably straight for a fellow his age (which he doesn’t give) and for the kind of work he’s done in his lifetime (which he’s also cagey about at times). But his hands are scarred by purple scratches and bites from his roommate–an orphaned raccoon named Fuzzy–and his head is full of fond but frequently violent memories of life on his family’s cattle ranch in Michigan.
In the mid-20s, a few years before Wendell was born, his father, Chandler Wendell, a Chicago real estate broker and banker, decided to scotch his life in the city. He traded some property for a 3,000-acre ranch in Michigan’s Pere Marquette River valley, 20 miles east of Lake Michigan, with the thought of opening a summer resort. The land was remote but not inaccessible, nine miles northeast of the little town of Walkerville, a short train ride from the port at Ludington, and a 75-mile drive north from Grand Rapids.
Though born to city folk, Wendell and his younger brother Forrester grew up country, and didn’t have to learn how to live it from books. He can still tell you how to castrate calves, breed a registered bull to the right heifer, birth piglets, pickle cucumbers, thrash beans, run a fence line, and stop cow bloat. “They get a stomach full of alfalfa, then drink water, they blow up and die,” he explains. “Stomach goes up around its back. We’ve had partial bloat but always used to take an ice pick and go right in along near the spine and put a little hole in. Psssssssss! Boy that air stinks like hell. Your underwear will go up your back like a window shade.”
