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Reflections
Lorenzo Rank: The best friend this journalist never met : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisLorenzo Rank: The best friend this journalist never met
| by Roger Matile
| 12/29/2011
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It would have been nice to have had a chat with Lorenzo Rank.
For 40 years, Rank chronicled Oswego happenings for the Kendall County Record, inserting a bit of his interesting take on life into each of his columns. Unfortunately for me, Rank died nearly 40 years before I was born. Even so, I have gotten to know him over the past 30 years by reading every one of the columns he wrote as part of a project to record Oswego history as it appeared in the Record.
The project actually began, as did so many of the good things that have taken place in Oswego since World War II, with Ford Lippold. The former editor and publisher of the Oswego Ledger and the Oswegoland Park District's first executive director, Lippold was deeply interested in local history. As his contribution to the nation's Bicentennial in 1976, Lippold, whenever he had time, read microfilmed issues of the Record at the Oswego Public Library transcribing parts of the paper's Oswego news column that struck his fancy. Working for a few years on the project, Lippold produced about 30 pages of transcripts of Rank's Oswego news column.
The transcription proved a handy source for monthly "Yesteryear" columns when I was the editor of the Ledger-Sentinel in Oswego. But while Lippold's transcriptions were interesting, they were spotty. With an eye towards both producing more "Yesteryear" materials and creating a searchable compilation of Oswego news items, I decided to just keep adding onto what Ford had started.
Now, those 30 or so pages have expanded into, as of this month, 3,500 pages of Oswego-related news items from the Record, as well as from the Illinois Free Trader published at Ottawa, the Kendall County Courier, the Kendall County Free Press, the Oswego Ledger, and the Fox Valley Sentinel. Rank's Record columns account for more than half of the total.
Rank was born in Germany July 1, 1827. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1847 and first lived in Plainfield before moving to Plattville, where he stayed at Platt's Tavern while he pursued his trade as a tailor. By 1850, he had arrived in Oswego, first boarding at the Kendall House hotel before moving to the stately National Hotel on Main Street. With the exception of several months in 1858-1859 spent in California, in Oswego he stayed the rest of his life.
Always interested in politics, when Abraham Lincoln debated Sen. Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa in 1858, Rank headed down to take in the event. He later recalled he was smoking a cigar when the crowd suddenly surged, forcing his lighted cigar into the bare neck of the man standing in front of him. Fortunately, he said, the press was so great the angry man couldn't turn on him, and in any event was soon carried away by the river of humanity.
Rank's political views favored the new Republican Party. After Lincoln's election as President, Rank got a real political plum. In November 1861 he was appointed postmaster of Oswego, replacing Democrat John W. Chapman. For 13 years, Rank kept the post office in the stone building on the corner of Main and Jackson now occupied by the American Male & Company store (and where Chapman had kept it since November of 1855). In 1874, Rank built a frame building with a square false front in mid-block on the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson, and moved the post office there, living in a two-room apartment on the second story.
When John R. Marshall began the Kendall County Record in May 1864, his idea was to encourage local correspondents to report their neighborhood news. On Nov. 14, 1867, Rank published his first Oswego news column, becoming the Record's very first community correspondent. He was to keep writing his weekly "letters," as he referred to them, under the pseudonym U.R. Strooley, until he finally retired with his last regular column on May 27, 1908.
Rank's columns were filled with news, gossip, and observations. He reported on village government, the schools, and business happenings, while encouraging Oswego to become a better community. That included weekly commentary on the services at all Oswego churches. A confirmed amateur, he frequently mocked his own reporting skills. On Dec. 2, 1869, just a couple years into his reporting career, he noted: "I accidentally overhead a lady express her opinion concerning myself in connection with my last week's report of the Literary Association; it was something like the following: 'Whoever it is that reports for the Record from this town is very much out of place in his natural calling which doubtless is that of driving an oxen.'"
His lack of racism was notable for the time. During that era, an African-American farming community flourished southeast of Oswego, and in June 1903, Rank wrote with evident pride of the graduation of Ferdinand Smith from Oswego High School: "He holds the distinction of being the first colored graduate of a Kendall county school and the young fellow is popular with the whole class."
He was also a strong proponent of women's rights. When the Great Bloomer Controversy arose, with critics insisting women wear dresses while riding the era's new-fangled bicycles, Rank observed on Aug. 7, 1895: "According to those newspaper fellows that are commenting on bloomers, it would appear that all what makes women pretty is their dress. Don't mind those fellows."
Rank, who never married, retired as Oswego's postmaster in 1887, and devoted his time to his Record news column. He retired from the column itself in 1908, although he occasionally contributed political pieces to the Record until he died Aug. 15, 1910.
In his will, Rank left the old post office building to the Village of Oswego for use as a public library, a purpose for which it was used until 1964. Today, the building is home to the Ledger-Sentinel office.
Of his old friend's funeral, John R. Marshall, in the Aug. 17, 1910 Record, wrote: "The number at the church spoke emphatically of the respect in which this man, alone in the world, had been held by his fellow townsmen. He was a man to be copied after, an unsullied, moral, unselfish existence and one that will be missed in Oswego."
Which is about as good a eulogy as any journalist could expect.
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