There was good news from the March 10 EF3 tornado that rampaged through Kankakee Elks Country Club. Nobody at the course was killed or injured.
That was the end of the good news. In Aroma Park, to the west across the Kankakee River, one person was killed and nine injured. Dozens of homes were destroyed. And at the Elks, the 150-mph winds acted like a buzz saw, taking down perhaps 250 trees in a 200-yard-wide path, destroying the maintenance shed, the cart barn, most of the course equipment and carts, and damaging the clubhouse roof via six-inch hail.
“I cried, because it’s overwhelming,” Barb Riesebeck of Manteno said of her first view of the damage. “I expected it, but pictures don’t do it justice.”
She and husband Clarence, members for four years, pulled all-day shifts to help out.
“The people here are really friendly, and the course is hard,” Clarence Riesebeck said.
Amazingly, by April 10, a month after the twister rudely played through, that hard course was open for play for its 100th season, a testament to the more than 200 volunteers, many of them the friendly members and regular players Clarence Riesebeck referred to, who banded together 11 and 12 days after the tornado to clean the course of debris. While paid crews did the heaviest lifting, including clearing felled trees from fairways and golf carts from ponds, the volunteer corps, bringing their own equipment, repaired greens, piled small debris on the edges of fairways, and looked to the future of the acclaimed 1927 Langford and Moreau design.
“It was a weird green color, and I said, ‘Is that birds flying around, or debris?’” General Manager Jim Weber said.
It was the latter. Weber and his partner sprinted for his basement-less home on the property, hiding in the bathroom as it sustained heavy damage from what he estimated was a 10-minute pounding, including windows broken from the hail.
“Long term, I think we’ll be alright,” Weber said of the course’s future. In the last two years, both membership and non-member play has increased as the course, almost untouched architecturally since it was designed, was rediscovered. Coincidentally, the first day of the volunteer cleanup was the first day the rebuilt fifth green, on the site of the original, was mowed.
“Devastating,” said former superintendent Michael Boudreau of the damage. Boudreau oversaw the course for 25 years and first played it in 1968. “Just absolutely awful, but it pales in comparison to the poor people in Aroma Park.”
“We’re so thankful to have all these volunteers,” said Elks member Matt Olszewski of Kankakee, whose house is a quarter mile north of the tornado’s path. “We had guys come out here the next day in the snow.”
Oak Springs, Shamrock, and Aspen Ridge golf courses lent equipment to the Elks to aid in getting the course back in shape. A GoFundMe page sponsored by the Langford and Moreau Society, which the club joined last year, had raised nearly $1,000 by June.
Oddly, Kankakee Elks may play more like Langford originally intended.
“When he built it, we didn’t have all these trees,” Olszewski said. “It’s still got some teeth with the bunkering and the green complexes.”
—Tim Cronin