Unwanted Visitor: The Cruel Case of George and Emma Klose

   It’s the story of a Mokena family. An elderly brother and sister who should’ve been living out days of peace in the sunset of their lives, when they were visited by a heinous crime, one that garnered headlines around Will County. The long timeline of our village’s history is flecked with dots of unsavoriness, which can be found if one pulls back the covers and knows just where to look. On the record of the years is the deadly 1864 riot, the 1926 murder of sheriff’s deputy Walter Fisher, and even the robbery of the Mokena post office in 1937. One that might very well join this nefarious list is the Emma and George Klose case of 1962. 

   The family at the heart of this event, the Kloses, were an old one, one that stood for all that was upright. They were rugged, hardworking farm folk; sons and daughters of the soil, who were a vital part of the social fabric of old Mokena. Patriarch Louis Klose first showed up as a middle-aged man within the borders of Frankfort Township by way of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Ours was a neighborhood were many of his fellow countrymen had already made their home, and while history has kept from us the exact date in which he first set foot here, all indications are that it occurred in the 1850s, roughly congruent with the time Mokena was born in 1852. At some point between his arrival in our neck of the woods and 1860, Louis Klose carved out a home for himself on a tract of land bisected by the new Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in the northern reaches of the township, at a place that years later was known as the southwestern corner of Route 45 and 187^th Street. 

 

   Over the years, while in the hands of subsequent generations of the Klose family, this quaint farm established by their forebear would come to encompass over 127 acres. As history would have it, by and by the geographical region in which the Klose estate found itself came to be called Summit Hill, in reference to its elevation relative to the rest of the township. In time, the large farm came into the hands of Louis Klose’s son John, who married Philipena Mast in 1871, the daughter of another long-established family. Like his father, John was a native of Bavaria, where he was born in 1850. The young Klose was brought to our environs as a four-year-old by his uncle Johann Zahn, who eventually would become an innkeeper in Mokena and no small figure in our burg’s narrative. 

 

   On his property northeast of the village, John Klose became successful raising livestock and running a dairy farm. He was an active Republican, served as a school director and was a member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church. He had a passion for horticulture, and transformed his farm into one of the most lush places in the Mokena area. He was called a “well-known, highly esteemed citizen of Frankfort Township”, while years after he passed in 1918, it would be said that “Mr. Klose had many friends in this part of the state who have the kindest recollections of him.”

 

   Any recounting of this pioneer family would be remiss not to detail the children of John and Philipena Klose. Their eldest was George, born in 1872, who never married and stayed on the family homestead. Next came Oscar in 1873, who moved to town around the turn of the 20^th century and became our village constable, sporting a dashing uniform and patrolling the streets in the early 1900s. John Philip came onto the scene in 1875, he later married and ran a 100-acre farm of his own a little east of the old Klose place. Emma rounded them out in 1881. Like her brother George, she never married, and spent her days on the homestead with him. Emma Klose was possessed of a gift for music, and sealed her place in immortality by writing and publishing her magnum opus, the jaunty Mokena March and Two Step in 1910.

The Klose farm as it appeared in 1955. Route 45 can be seen in the right foreground, with 187th Street at the top of the image. Today this piece of land is the site of Thunder Bowl on Old LaGrange Road. 

 

   The apple didn’t fall far from John Klose’s tree with his children George and Emma, who inherited his love of plants and trees. They kept up the work he started, and in 1928 alone, George planted 50 evergreens on the property, while Emma was said to “devote many hours to her large garden of flowers and plants.” While the brother and sister lived pastoral lives, they were no strangers to crime. In 1914, a horse, buggy and double set of harnesses were brazenly stolen from their brother John Philip Klose farm, just a stone’s throw from theirs. All in all though, things were generally peaceful in their patch of Midwestern earth. The idyll was shattered on July 12^th, 1962.

 

   On that terrifying, early Thursday morning, George Klose had already reached a respectable 90 years, while his younger sister Emma, was 81. The Route 45 the Kloses lived on in 1962 would be one completely unrecognizable to modern eyes. What is today a bustling suburban thoroughfare, was then a narrow road totally rural in character, rich in agricultural surroundings. Thick foliage in front of the Klose farmhouse shielded it to most passersby, which to the elderly siblings was a nice buffer from the outside world, but gave an upper hand to anyone with barbarity in his heart. 

 

   The first eerie red flag went up around 10 o’clock on Wednesday night, July 11^th. A rap was heard on the Kloses’ door, and when Emma answered it, she beheld a stranger in the rain, who asked to come inside and out of the elements. Rightly spooked by the man, she refused to let him in. The episode appeared to be over, until brother and sister awoke sometime around 2:00 the next morning in great shock, when they found the same man in their living room. He was rather short; they estimated he must have been about five feet, three inches tall, who wore a long white coat that hid his body type. He was young too, looking to be in his 20s, with a round face.

 

   He preceded to squirt a bulb syringe in Emma’s face, dousing her with ammonia. She defended herself by knocking the device out of the intruder’s hand, to which he responded by punching the elderly lady in the face. The same treatment was dealt out to George, who was knocked down and suffered a fractured jaw in the attack. The intruder demanded to know where the money was from the farm’s sale. He was slow on getting the news though – the farm had been sold ten years before, and the money gained from the sale had long since been invested. Even as the two protested there was no cash around, the burglar refused to take them at their word, and tied them to a pair of chairs. 

 

   The stranger began torturing George Klose, “twisting and bending” his fingers back, until in desperation, the elderly man admitted that there was some cash in an upstairs safe. The thief found the small, antique contraption and threw it down the stairs in an attempt to break it open. That having failed, he was able to find the key and make off with the money inside, about $400, which in today’s figures would equal roughly $3,700. Adding insult to, quite literally, injury, he took the keys for a car sometimes driven by Emma and left the house. Here he encountered a hitch, for when he drove out of the yard, the back wheels sunk themselves into a hole, and try as he may, the car wouldn’t budge. The brutal bandit took off on foot, disappearing into the night. 

 

   The trouble had only just begun for George and Emma. They were left tied up, and after hours of struggling, Emma got free at around 6 o’clock in the morning. After untying her brother, she made the horrifying discovery that their phone line had also been cut. The 81-year-old, after having been roughed up and bound for hours, was forced in the early morning dew to walk to the home of Paul Smith. The only problem was, that Smith was on the same party line as the Kloses, so his phone was also out. He drove into Frankfort to the intersection of Routes 30 and 45, where he called the sheriff’s department, as well as a doctor and ambulance from a service station. 

 

   The shocking brutality of this episode was front page news in Mokena’s News-Bulletin, and was also written up in the county seat’s Herald-News, with both papers screaming the news from their front pages. Investigators from the sheriff’s office said the would-be yegg had gained entrance to the farmhouse by breaking the front door. As to the suspect himself, lawmen were tight-lipped to the press, cryptically noting only that the physical description given to them by the elderly brother and sister matched an individual from the neighborhood who had recently gone missing. Whoever he was, he was familiar not only with the layout of the farm and its surroundings, but also with the fact that the Kloses kept a dozen dogs on the place, and knew that they were not to be feared. 

 

   George and Emma were taken to St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights, where staff kept press photographers away from them. As far as the historical record states, no justice was ever served in this case. George Klose lived for a further five years after the brutal attack, reaching the impressive age of 95 before he passed in 1967, when he was joined by his sister Emma two years later. Both came to repose in their family plot at St. John’s Cemetery in Mokena, a burial ground that their family had been using for 100 years by this point. The last vestige of the Klose farm, its huge dairy barn, disappeared in the early 1980s. Let us remember Emma and George Klose not for the abhorrent act endured by them in 1962, but instead for the fact that they were a peaceful Mokena family, one who tilled the soil, as did their parents and grandparents at the same spot. They helped feed America, and turned their own corner of our community into one of its most beautiful places. 

Down on the Corner

   It can be called the Times Square of Mokena. The intersection of Front and Mokena Streets is a place where countless town gatherings have been held; everyone’s been there, countless village residents pass through the intersection daily, and indeed, during the much-vaunted Christmas Fest parade, the crowd is thickest here. In the not-too-distant past, moveable letters would even be hung between opposite telephone poles here heralding the coming of big events in the village’s social calendar. Being such a prominent place in our community, it is naturally the site of no small amount of local history. A passerby’s attention is easily drawn to the old two-story Italianate house on the northeast side of the crossing, the old Blaeser building, indeed it’s been covered in depth on this page. Nevertheless, looking across the street to the southeast corner, we have another place that is rich in history. 

Steeped in local flavor, the southeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets has decades of local lore attached to it. 

   Cutting through the fog of ages, it can be seen that this corner has been part of the village since its earliest days, being charted as part of founding father Allen Denny’s first addition to Mokena in the first years of the 1850s. This lot, along with the few adjoining to the east, were spoken for at an early date by James Ducker, an Englishman who in 1853 established a general store in Mokena, it proudly counting itself as one of the first business enterprises in our newly born town. He came to prosper in our midst, and even though he moved his business to Joliet in 1874, the Ducker family still retained ownership of this property until just after the turn of the twentieth century. 

 

   Emerging through the blur of the past, a young man named Herman Jacobus is the first known entrepreneur to run a business on this corner. The earliest blip on the historic radar is an advertisement bearing the date September 4^th, 1875 that appeared in an issue of the Mokena Advertiser that announced his opening a meat market here. The purveyor of “a general assortment of fresh and salt meats”, another insert from Jacobus appeared nearly a year later in the August 1^st, 1876 issue of the same paper that further elaborated on his business, it talking of “smoked ham, bacon and summer sausage” while also promising cash paid for hides and tallow. 

 

An 1875 advertisement from Herman Jacobus,

 

  Before opening his doors here, the Prussian-born Herman Jacobus married Julia Scheer, a member of a well-known local family, in November 1873 at the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church, with whom he came to raise a family. Business hummed along here for Jacobus, and he found himself cited by the incipient Mokena Board of Health in the summer of 1883 for having excessive manure adjoining the hog pen near his slaughterhouse. Time has given us precious few details about life on this corner during Herman Jacobus’ tenure, and all signs indicate that he and his family packed up and left town at some juncture. 

 

   Painting a vivid picture of 19^th century existence in Mokena is fraught with hurdles due to a lack of comprehensive records and thorough journalistic coverage, and as such the hazy early half of the history of this corner has left us with a mostly empty void until April 25^th, 1892, when a disastrous fire, the scourge of our forefathers, struck the site. At the time, the building on the property housed the meat market of a Mr. Kennedy, and in reporting the blaze, the Joliet Weekly News bluntly stated that the fire was a “really bad thing for the village.” Having started between 3:00 and 4:00am, the conflagration began in the one-story property on the corner, and not only was it totally destroyed, but the flames jumped to a two-story frame building to the east, gutting it as well. The News described how “the whole town was quickly aroused” and that Mokena’s hand engine and a bucket brigade valiantly fought the fires and were able to save the rest of the village. 

   No one ever got to the bottom of what caused the fire, as was so often the case in those days, but most town folk figured it must have been the work of an ember from the funnel of a coal-fed locomotive. The loss of both buildings was heavy, and both were considered old landmarks at the time. The now vacant corner lot became something of a headache to the village dads, who in December 1894 notified Jeannette Ducker at her Joliet home that the hole where the building stood needed to be filled in, or at least fenced off. 

 

   The turn of the 20^th century is remembered as a dark time in the annals of Mokena’s past. Various economical factors, such as the calamitous Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis in our country’s history up to that point, had caused an exodus of local businesses and people, with a meager 281 residents being counted within the village gates in 1900. A rebound slowly took hold, beginning first in 1907 with the construction of Bowman Dairy’s milk bottling plant on today’s Wolf Road, along with the opening of Mokena State Bank two years later. An integral part of this bounce back was Dr. John J. Coady, who overturned a new leaf in the life of this corner in March 1911, when he had a cozy one-story building constructed on it. Measuring in at 16 by 32 feet, it contained the doctor’s office and a drug store. 

 

Looking southwest around 1909, this view shows the corner of Front and Mokena Streets shortly before Dr. Coady built his practice and drug store here. 

 

   A 37-year-old physician late of Iowa, Dr. Coady studied medicine at the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons, and upon his graduation in 1907, settled in Mokena. He was a medicine man of the old school, and made house calls to his patients by horse and buggy, which he often rented from the livery stable of Henry Stellwagen, further up Front Street. A reminiscence written years later said that “snowstorms, rain or blazing heat did not stop Dr. Coady when the sick needed his aid.” In the days after New Years 1910, he was so busy with measles cases that he couldn’t even stop to eat. 

 

   Dr. John J. Coady married Mokena girl Mildred Brinckerhoff in April 1908, and after having endeared himself to the rest of the town, the Coadys moved to Minooka in 1912, leaving behind the little building on the corner as their legacy. Before leaving our community, Dr. Coady opened an ice cream parlor in the drug store, which in time would come to be a popular meeting place for the players of Mokena’s crack baseball team. Before the doctor left town for good, he disposed of his practice and the drug store to another physician, Dr. Frank W. Searles of New Lenox. Even though Dr. Searles sold the building itself to Mokena State Bank cashier Frank Liess and local auctioneer Charles Moriarty in the spring of 1912, he kept up the pharmacy business here. It was by all means a modern one, as the physician had the place wired for electricity within a year, and had the honor of having a 240-watt lamp on the premises, which at the time, was the most powerful light fixture in town. 

 

   In the years between the world wars, this corner was home to various enterprises. One was the upholstering business of Albert Hellmuth, who counted no small part of his trade in the finishing of auto roofs, while others were a shoe repair shop by Fred Leonhardt in the 1920s, a small grocery store run by Burt Gillette, and the barber shop of Amos Bruns. In May of 1936, while hair was being cut here, John Yunker undertook some remodeling work on the building, having the place raised up and a concrete block foundation built under it, while an addition was tacked onto the structure’s east side, which was used as an apartment by the Bruns family. While all of these concerns were relatively short lived, Mr. Bruns would later establish a well-known and long-lasting restaurant in neighboring New Lenox. 

 

   After the long and rough years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, normalcy returned in 1945, and with that, another boom to Mokena. The village experienced an uptick in population, along with some new construction on Front Street. The old adage says that history repeats itself, and it did just that on the corner, for a new drug store opened in early 1946. However, before the first customer came, a new building was constructed. And thus, the modest old building from Dr. Coady’s day, at least the second to have stood at this spot, disappeared from the landscape. A local news report from November 1945 indicated that the old structure was moved slightly on the lot and incorporated into the new building, but in the same breath, Mokena’s most time-honored citizens remember the old edifice simply being torn down. 

 

   For the blink of an eye, Allan Cavett of Tinley Park kept shop in the new brick building on the corner, until Henry B. and Lillian Boleman bought the store in May 1947. Lately of Chicago, where he owned a drug store on the south side of the city, the 48-year-old Boleman was a native of Indiana and had learned his trade at Valparaiso pharmacy school. The Bolemans were perfect matches for our village, as were their daughters, Jeanne, Marilyn and Pat. The drug store on the corner was a very much a family affair, and every member had their time working there. The Bolemans resided in living quarters within the building, which housed a typical pharmacy for its time and place, which also included a soda fountain with the booths on the west side of the building. The pharmacy also boasted of a pay phone, one of only very few in Mokena in this era. Due to the drug store’s close proximity to the Rock Island tracks, it wasn’t uncommon for Mokenians to call the Bolemans to ask if a certain train had come through, but the family quickly got so used to hearing rumbling trains, so that they barely even noticed them. 

 

   After Henry Boleman’s untimely passing in May 1957, the pharmacy was still kept up by his family, with Pat Boleman bringing prescriptions to Allan Cavett in Tinley Park and then back to Mokena, all the while learning to drive along the way. The local business was sold on contract by the Bolemans to a pharmacist named William Geisler on December 1^st, 1957, however he wasn’t in business here too terribly long, as he too passed in 1959. At this point Dan Kurber came onto the scene, and paid off the rest of the contract to Lillian Boleman in February 1960. Kurber found success on the corner, before moving further west down Front Street in 1966 to a brand-new building where he (and later his son) flourished for years. 

 

  Onward the timeline marched, and the red brick building underwent another transformation, this time from drug store to restaurant. In the 1960s, Ival (known affectionately as Doc) and Ruth White opened an eatery here, who will be fondly remembered by Mokenians of a certain age. In time the building would come to house a series of watering holes, counting gents such as Marty Clegg, Mr. Speedwell and Mel Weidner as proprietors, while in years later housing bars known as The Depot and St. Anthony’s Pub. 

 

  Meanwhile, in 2002, the building on the corner received a profound facelift, in which the entire structure was gutted, a new peaked roof raised up, and the old brick walls of Boleman’s pharmacy were sandwiched in fresh clapboard siding. In a masterstroke of reuse, the old place was given a new lease on life, and continues to stand triumphant today. Time has gifted modern Mokenians with 145 years of history here, and as the tides of time pass us by, we’ll have 145 more.