Spring 2001

By Isabel S. Abrams

Ed Lace is a detective who uncovers the secrets of forest, grassland, and waterway — and the Native Americans who farmed and hunted here when Chicago was truly wild.

This tall, gray-haired great-grandfather is dressed for the outdoors. Standing next to his desk, in a plaid shirt, beige pants, and hiking boots, he indicates a jar of small stones. "I found these fossils on the Wilmette Beach," he says in his soft rough voice. "They are the skeletons of coral animals and they lived in the tropical sea that covered Chicago 400 million years ago."

While walking in the preserves, Ed carries a golf putter — a perfect snake hook and handy tool for turning things over. "If there is anything out of place in the woods, I notice it," Ed says.

At the early age of seven, Ed began his collecting career. In a vacant lot near his home in the city — what he called the prairie — he spotted what looked to be a little fish, so he took it home in a milk bottle. A few days later, he was astonished to discover a frog where the fish had been. From this wondrous discovery there was no turning back. Ed visited conservatories and persuaded scientists to give him leaves from places as far away as Madagascar. By the time he was a high school junior, Ed had almost 400 tree leaves from all over the world. He also had an assortment of snakes in his basement. Fortunately, his mother did not mind helping him feed the fox snakes, bull snakes, blue racers, and local garter snakes or even the poisonous timber, prairie, and diamondback rattlesnakes.

As a teenager, Ed became a member of the Chicago Herpetological Society and wrote an article about his snake survey of Chicago’s south side for Tap Root, a publication of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Once he joined the Boy Scouts, it was no surprise that Ed earned all the craft and nature merit badges on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout.

Ethel Schierbaum, his biology teacher, encouraged her intrepid student to seek an internship with a zoo or museum. "I accepted the exotic one — the Rangoon, Burma Zoo," Ed says, "but a war intervened." So did his need to earn a living.

After apprenticing as an electrician in Chicago’s stockyards, Ed took a job with Marshall Field’s. After 16 years, he left Marshall Field’s to become the first director of the Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center in Willow Springs, where a group of teenagers from Chicago’s inner city taught Ed an invaluable lesson. They were tough guys sent to the Little Red Schoolhouse to fulfill their community service requirement. Recognizing they had never been outside the city, Ed briefly talked about the plants and ecology of the area. Then he sent them out to gather seeds from some of the plants.

Within minutes they came running back to the nature center, absolutely terrified of the butterflies! It was almost impossible to get them back into the field because they were so frightened, not only of butterflies, but of everything. For the first time Ed recognized that for city kids who don’t have vacant-lot prairies to explore, wild nature can be frightening.

As District archeologist, Ed knows that there are about 700 Indian sites registered in Cook County. His research revealed that ancient Indians hunted mammoths and mastodons in the Chicago region 8,000 years ago; early woodland people planted gardens with sunflowers and squash more than 2,500 years ago. He learned that European explorers found Potawatomi, Chippewa, and Ottawa living together in villages along the banks of Chicago’s rivers.

Food was abundant, with enough fish to be caught and beavers, squirrels, deer, and birds to be hunted. Wild rice, garlic, cattails and "man of the earth" (the root of a big morning glory) were gathered in the swampy areas that were ultimately replaced by the city. Fortunately, many of these plants and animals still exist in our forest preserves. But Ed Lace is worried. "If we sell, give, swap any part of the forest preserve, we are going to set a precedent for everybody who wants to build a shopping mall," he says. "I am also worried that we are not taking care of what we’ve got.

"When an ecosystem breaks down, it breaks down in its smaller parts first and works its way back," he warns. "We are part of the system." It’s like the old maxim, "For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost."