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Eugene Hotchkiss III was born and raised in Highland Park, IL, the son of a stock broker and the sister of George F. Kennan. He attended Dartmouth College, served in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s, and worked in student affairs at Dartmouth and at the Claremont colleges in Los Angeles. He served as Executive Dean of Chatham College, Pittsburgh, prior to becoming president of Lake Forest College in 1970. He retired in 1993. He also was active in many civic roles locally during and after his presidency of the College.

Alicia Patterson Guggenheim was the daughter of Alice Patterson (nee Higinbotham) and famed founder and editor of the New York Daily News, Joseph Medill Patterson. Patterson Guggenheim had two sisters, Josephine and Elinor, as well as a half-brother, James “Jimmy” Patterson. She grew up in Libertyville, Illinois and developed a love of hunting, horseback riding and travel at an early age. Alicia Patterson Guggenheim followed in her father’s footsteps and became a writer at both the New York Daily News and Liberty magazine in her 20s. It was during this time that Patterson Guggenheim became interested in aviation and earned her transport pilot’s license in 1934, only the tenth woman in America to do so. Patterson Guggenheim was married three times, first to James Simpson (1927-1930), then to Joseph Brooks (1931-1939) and finally to Harry Guggenheim (1939-1963), whom she was married to until her death. Along with Guggenheim, Patterson Guggenheim founded and became publisher and editor of the newspaper, Newsday, in 1940. Newsday won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Patterson Guggenheim died at age 56 in 1963 due to complications from stomach surgery.

Amanda Smith Hood (April 30, 1967-) is the daughter of Stephen Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith, former ambassador to Ireland and John F. Kennedy’s sister. She was born and raised in New York City and later graduated from Harvard College. Smith Hood holds a PhD in special education. She married tax lawyer Carter Hood in 2000; the couple have two children. Smith Hood is the editor of the book, Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, published in 2001. In 2011, she authored the book, Newspaper Titan: The infamous life and monumental times of Cissy Patterson, a biography of socialite and newspaper editor and publisher Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson.

Madeline Ashton taught Modern Languages at Lake Forest College.

Mary Reynolds Aldis, wife of Chicago developer Arthur Aldis, wrote one-act plays, poetry, and painted in watercolor. Born in Chicago and educated at St. Mary’s School in Knoxville, IL, she married her husband in 1892. After moving to Lake Forest in 1902, she occupied an estate on the southeast corner of Deerpath Rd and Green Bay Rd. She and her husband added and then converted a cottage on their property into an amateur playhouse which opened on June 11, 1911.

The Aldises were considered pioneers in amateur and community theater in Chicago. Mary’s Lake Forest summer playhouse ran full seasons until 1915 and ended by 1920. The playhouse put on plays by both amateur and professional playwrights and reflected Mary’s tastes as a writer, translator, and dramatist.

Aldis worked to support women's rights and other progressive causes. She, at times, lived independently from her husband and died in 1949 in Milwaukee.

Gordon Adamson died at the age of 71 on January 21, 1986. He was a former vice president of Baldwin-United Corp. (Cincinnati), and prior to that secretary and assistant treasurer of the Bowman Dairy Co. His spouse was Emily Norcross Adamson, daughter of Dr. Edward P. Norcross, Highland Park, and sister of Dr. Pliny Norcross, Amherst, MA. Gordon Adamson was chair of the lake Forest Symphony and on the Board of Directors in the 1980s of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society.

Lois Cesner was the Publicity Chairman and collected newspaper clippings/minutes for the Chicago North Shore City (formerly the North Shore Alumnae) Panhellenic Association from 1959-60. This was also the year that the group was admitted to the national panhellenic sorority organization as described by Cesner in an article that is among the additional loose materials at the back of the scrapbook. She lived at 1304 Isabella, Wilmette, Illinois.

Notable poet and Ragdale Foundation founder and first president Alice Judson (Ryerson) Hayes, 1922-2006, was the daughter of Clay Judson and the sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson, 1897-1978. Sylvia in turn was the second of three daughters of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, 1869-1926, and poet Frances Wells Shaw,1872-1938. Alice spent many summers as a child at her mother's parents' summer place in Lake Forest, Ragdale, designed by Howard Shaw 1897 and subsequently.

Hayes married Ned (Edward L., Jr.) Ryerson in 1941 and raised a family (Susan Moon, Nora Ryerson, Mitchell Ryerson, Francie Shaw) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She earned there a doctorate in education. In 1976, as her mother who had inherited the Shaw family Ragdale house and one-third of the grounds in 1938 prepared to retire to Philadelphia, Alice moved to Ragdale and launched the Ragdale Foundation as an artists' community on the model of Yaddo and McDowell on the east coast. A decade later she donated the house and seven acres of grounds to the City of Lake Forest, with the Ragdale Foundation and its residency programs for artists remaining a tenant. She continued as president until 1992 and on the board of trustees until 1994.

She retained a cabin on adjacent property through her lifetime where she continued to summer with her husband after 1981 Albert Hayes, living with him in Hyde Park winters, eventually at Montgomery Place (1991 on). She also was a summer visitor annually after 1947 at Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, where in later years she loved entertaining her large family and many grandchildren. Albert Hayes was a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Alice was a member of the Friends Meeting in Lake Forest, which had been incubated in Sylvia Shaw's former studio cabin, later Alice's summer place.

Since its founding in 1976 and the donation of the Ragdale property to the City in 1986, the Ragdale Foundation has grown into the oldest midwestern artists' community, the fourth oldest nationally, and one of the largest in the region. It has hosted many young writers and artists who have become major figures, including Jane Hamilton, Jackie Michard, Alex Kotlowitz, and Audrey Niffenigger. It normally houses twelve artists and writers at a time, with five writers in the Ragdale house. The house underwent an Historic Property Report recently and is beginning in 2010 a major restoration.

This writer was told in the mid 1990s by former Ragdale Foundation director Michael Wilkerson that the quality of Hayes' poetry was high enough to have made her a major national voice if she had begun earlier in life and had built up a larger body of work. A good collection of her poems is New and Selected Poems, Spoon River Press, 1987. A decade later her Journal of the Lake: Excerpts from a Seventieth Year, Open Books, 1997, was a substantial addition to her body of work. She was a superb teacher of the art of writing poetry, with exercises that made such effort accessible to many. But her work, though represented with a smaller than normal volume of good examples, deserves to be considered a significant contribution. In her work supporting the creativity of others she did so as one who was capable of the best herself, even in the midst of a life filled with other activities.

Susan Dart McCutcheon was the wife of John T. McCutcheon, Jr., the former editor of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial page and archivist in the 1980s. After raising her family in Lake Forest, Susan Dart, the name she wrote under, produced a natural foods and cooking syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune (1976-81), and wrote a “Forest Ranger” column for the Lake Forester newspaper. She is also the author of several books published in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with advocating for healthy diets, she was active in saving from demolition the 1899 Lake Forest City Hall. She moved to North Carolina with her husband in the late 1980s and continually returned to spend many summer vacations in Lake Forest.

As she described in her partly autobiographical study of her brother, architect Edward Dart, Susan Dart was a native of New Orleans. She graduated from Connecticut College and met her husband, a young Navy officer in New Orleans in the early 1940s. They married in 1943 and moved to Lake Forest in 1947, living in a cottage on the Aldis Compound on Illinois Road called Bird Cottage, which has since been demolished.

In the 1950s, Susan Dart McCutcheon raised a family and moved into a new brick ranch style home (W. Laurel Ave., demolished) designed by her modernist architect brother, Edward Dart. She never considered herself a socialite, but she did belong to both the Onwentsia club in Lake Forest and to Chicago’s Friday Club. In 1963 she received a master’s in English from Northwestern University, and she then taught at Ferry Hall (now merged into Lake Forest Academy) and Barat College.

Her local column, “Forest Ranger,” for the local Lake Forester in the early 1970s was succeeded by her syndicated “Natural Foods” column from 1976 to 1981. In these later columns she crusaded for healthy eating based on foods not contaminated by little-understood and potentially-harmful chemicals. Through her accessible writings about practical recipes she showed the way for individuals to live better and healthier lives.

By 1980 to 1997, Sart devoted herself to writing books focusing on subjects like family, local community, architectural and organizational history that remain essential sources. These are:

Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1980).

Market Square. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1984).

Friday Club: The First Hundred Years, 1887-1987. (Chicago; the Club, 1987).

Supplement to Edward Arpee, Lake Forest, Illinois: History and Reminiscences, 1861-1961. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1991).

Edward Dart, Architect. (Evanston: Evanston Publishing, 1993).

The Old Home Place. (Louisville, KY: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1997).

The first book Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale, was also the first book published about Ragdale, a decade prior to Alice Hayes and Susan Moon, Ragdale: A History and Guide(Open Books and the Ragdale Foundation, 1990). This pamphlet preserved lore about her mother-in-law and her family and the family compound, Ragdale, by then housing the Ragdale Foundation(founded 1976 by Alice Hayes) in Shaw’s 1897 completed English Arts & Crafts summer home.

This book about the Shaw family and Ragdale led into the second book as Susan Dart delved further into the work of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and his arguably most notable project, Market Square(1916), the model for all subsequent shopping centers. For her work on Shaw she mounted a campaign to document photographically as much of Shaw’s local (Lake Forest, Chicago) work as possible and she engaged volunteer and professional photographers including Barbara Wood-Prince, Bert Congdon, Jean McMasters Grost, and others (available in Special Collections).During the period of Dart’s pursuit of material on Shaw and Market Square, she also stepped in to fight against demolition of the 1899-completed City Hall itself part of the architectural context that shaped the nearby Market Square design by Shaw.

Disappointed in the physical presentation of her first book, she took control of the production of Market Square (1984). She engaged book producer Frank Williams and also eminent book designer R. Hunter Middleton, both of Chicago, to create an appropriately respectful form for her study of Shaw’s significant 1916 first and model shopping center. She accompanied review of the project’s history and architecture with a biographical sketch of the architect. Once this was published she donated her Shaw and architecture material, along with the production and design records with Williams and Middleton, respectively, here in Special Collections, 1984. Also included were other local materials and photographs, including 1907-08 Onwentsia horse show stereo views identified by her late mother-in-law, Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon. Deposited the year after the Donnelley Library opened its first Special Collections reading room and new closed stacks in 1983, this became a major building block of the College library’s Special Collections of local materials (architect Shaw having also designed seven campus buildings).

Elliott Donnelley was a third generation Chicago printer (R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company) who lived in Lake Forest from his boyhood until his death in 1975. He had a life-long enthusiasm for trains, and after studying at Dartmouth College he went into the railroad modeling business, for amateur model makers in the early 1930s. Donnelley in 1933 took over American Model Engineers, Inc. Under the corporate identity of Scale-Models, Inc. the firm created “Scale-Craft working models,” according to an ca. 1938 brochure, and his renamed Scale-Craft brand operated in Chicago, Libertyville and Round Lake until the 1950s, when the firm was sold and moved to Michigan. The model kits came with large-scaled plans with instructions for assembly and placing custom signage.
Elliott’s parents were Laura and Thomas Elliott (T.E.) Donnelley, who built their Clinola estate and country home on Green Bay Road in 1911. Second-generation, Yale-educated T.E. Donnelley grew the family business substantially from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. He also launched in 1903 the annual holiday-time gift books, the Lakeside Classics, for clients, employees and friends. In his early adult and married years Elliott Donnelley and his spouse, Ann Steinwedell Donnelley (Hardy), lived in various small houses in Lake Forest on Wildwood and Atteridge Roads. In 1934 The Donnelleys built a home, designed by architects Frazier & Raftery, on Ridge Lane in Lake Forest, originally with a train room in the basement. Donnelley’s model train set-up later moved to the nearby basement of Lake Forest’s City Hall.

Donnelley was a trustee of Lake Forest College beginning in 1942, leading to a new commitment to the College among local estate families over the next three decades. (See “Back on Track with Elliott Donnelley” in 30 Miles North…, the College’s history, 2000, p. [145]; see also the photo on p. 135.) He served as chairman of the College’s Board of Trustees from 1967 to 1971, and played key roles in the building of two major structures on campus, the Donnelley Library (1964-65, since 2004 the expanded and renovated Donnelley and Lee Library) and the Sports Center (1968). Donnelley also donated landmark rare books to the library and also funds for such purchases on an annual basis in t he 1970s. He played a crucial role in the difficult late 1960s period in student participation on campus, and personally led face-to-face, all-hours negotiations with students to resolve issues in that dynamic environment. During the interim between College presidents in 1969-70 Donnelley was active in working with troubled students, “sentenced” to Saturday mornings working with the chairman on the trains on his estate. At the end of such work sessions where nothing was said about the occasion of the visit, Donnelley is reported to have said in his characteristic stutter, “Now, you-r-‘re g-go-ing to try harder t-to g-get along t-this w-week, aren’t y-you?” His recidivism rate was remarkably low. In the 1970s he was awarded a special honorary degree by the College, and in the last Commencement Week before his death he and Mrs. Donnelley hosted all of the graduating seniors at his home for a barbecue supper and a chance to ride the trains with himself at the engine controls.

Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946) was the grandson of both Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill and the Rev. Robert W. Patterson, long-time pastor of Chicago's Second Presbyterian Church and a founder of Lake Forest, Illinois and of educational institutions now known as Lake Forest College and Lake Foreest Academy.

Patterson attended Groton with his cousin Berty McCormick and Yale, and then both returned to Chicago by ca. 1900 and engaged in civic affairs, Patterson adopting Socialism as a cause for equalizing economic distribution while Berty led the committee that built Chicago's Sanitary canal, reversing the flow of the Chicago River to the Mississippi River system. Patterson also wrote articles on his reformist views, attacking treatment of department store women workers (his father in law was affiliated with Marshall Field & Co.), and by 1906 pointing out the enormity of Marshall Field's will. By 1908 he was publishing a novel, Little Brother of the Rich, in the same vein, while living with his growing family on a farm west of Lake Forest (now Vernon Hills), with his spouse Alice Higinbotham Patterson. His writing on early film (Saturday Evening Post, 1907) is among the earliest critical efforts on the medium. He wrote one-act and full-length plays, the Fifth Estate being one of the latter. H.L. Menchen in 1917 listed him among the writers of Chicago Literary Renaissance.

Medill had two daughters, one of whom (Elinor) married Robert W. Patterson, Jr., who became after Medill's death publisher of the Chicago Tribune. When the younger Patterson died in 1910, J. M. Patterson and his cousin, Robert R.(Berty) McCormick (a son of the other Medill daughter), took over directing the Tribune Company. They split the duties (one on one month, and the other the next, etc.). Patterson also went off on reporting trips (Pancho Villa, 1915, war-town western Europe in 1915, etc.)., and then both served in the U.S. Army after this country entered the hostilities formally in April 1917.

Returning in 1919 J. M. Patterson had been taken with the idea of the tabloid paper in London, created by Lord Beaverbrook, and the two decided that Patterson should go to New York to launch the new venture.

By 1930 Patterson was living on a new estate in Ossining, NY, on the Hudson, having separated informally from his spouse. Until then he went back and forth from Chicago to New York.

Starting in the 1910s Patterson was a pioneer in the creation of newspaper comic strips. He nurtured the creators, critiqued their work, etc. His own earlier literary and dramatic work helped him understand communicating with an audience to convey a story or story line.

Patterson worked to distribute the strips by the Tribune Syndicate, and they became major forces for selling newspapers in a highly competitive, even cut-throat, field at that time. This sub-collection documents some of rich participation in a major American genre that was a precursor of later innovations.

Edward Arpee (1899-1979), the brother of Armenian historian and theologian Leon Arpee, taught at Lake Forest Academy for 35 years beginning in 1929. He was the spouse of Katherine Trowbridge Arpee (granddaughter of Chicago wholesale grocer and later Lake Forest resident Calvin Durand), and father of Harriet Sherman of Lake Bluff. Arpee graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote various notable books, including "History of Lake Forest Academy" (Chicago: Alderbrink Press, 1944) and "From Frigates to Flat Tops" (1953).

The Arpees lived at 383 N. Washington Road, less than a block from the Academy, and about a block south of Mrs. Arpee's parents' home on College Road. According to the Arpee's, the home was once a summer rental property for Onwentsia residents when it was owned by Van Weganen Alling. One of the past renters was Adlai Stevenson, who later built his farm in Libertyville.

Sources:

"Senior master Publishes an Historical Documentary," Spectator [Lake Forest Academy], April 20, 1964, 1.

Biographical Details gathered by, Arthur H. Miller Archivist & Librarian for Special Collections

George Raimes Beach, Jr. was the son of the Montclair attorney, entrepreneur and corporate official George Raimes Beach (b. 1875) originally from Jersey City, N.J. and profiled in Who's Who in Commerce and Industry. Beach, Sr., married Lucy McBride on April 30, 1901, and George, Jr., was the first of two children, the other was Katherine L. George Jr. was a 1926 graduate of Princeton University. He made his career in chemicals, with Dupont, and retired in 1965 having been Midwest regional manager of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. electrochemicals division.

Mr. Beach lived in Lake Forest for many years, served as an alderman, a term as mayor from 1960 to 1963, and was also a trustee of Lake Forest College acting as board chair from 1971 to 1974.

Between the time of his retirement in 1965 and 1980 he traveled extensively and wrote, for private distribution to his friends, several travel narratives. His later writings after 1975 also featured his second spouse, Mary, who sometimes did the writing in the early 1970s. He also had a home -- Charduar -- in western Virginia, at Bacova (zip 24412), not far from Hot Springs, where he died, having given up by then his Lake Forest house.
Sources:

Who's Who in Commerce and Industry, 10th interrnational ed. Chicago: Marquis, 1957, 75.

Chicago Tribune obituary, August 28, 1990

Mrs. Bentley was the daughter of Frederic Norross and the granddaughter of John H. Wrenn, Chicago broker/banker and book collector. On December 9, 1922 she married Richard Bentley, 1894-1970, a 1917 Yale graduate and 1921 Northwestern Law graduate -- son of Cyrus Bentley Jr., Chicago attorney (clients included Anita McCormick Blaine). Her grandfather was the late John H. Wrenn, long prominent in Chicago brokerage circles and also a noted book and art collector, owning a valuable private library and collection of etchings. Mr. and Mrs. Bentley have three children, Cyrus III, Alice Wrenn and Barbara. ("ILLINOIS, The Heart of the Nation" by Hon. Edward F. Dunne, Volume IV, 1933, Transcribed by Kim Torp) http://genealogytrails.com/ill/cook/chicagobios3.html . Wren is best known for his collection of T. J. Wise forgeries--discovered by Pollard and Redgrave ca. 1930. But in 1938 the Bentleys added a library to their 1928 David Adler home (addition by Ambrose Cramer) to house familiy books, etc.