Born in Freeport, Illinois

William Dole Eckert
William Eckert was born in Freeport on January 20, 1909. Sometime before he reached high school, his parents moved to Indiana. He enlisted in the Indiana National Guard in 1924. In 1926, he entered the U. S. Military Academy, graduating in 1930. He entered the Air Corps and became a pilot. In 1937 he became a flying instructor. In 1938 he entered Harvard's graduate school and earned his Masters of Business Administration.

In March of 1944, Colonel Eckert became Commander of the 452nd Bomb Group in Europe. His decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star Medal, Air Medal, and foreign medals. He was rated a command pilot and technical observer.

In November of 1947, he was assigned to the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. On April 14, 1948, he was promoted to Brigadier General.

In February of 1960, Eckert became Comptroller of the Air Force. He retired in 1961 with the rank of Lieutenant General of the United States Air Force.

On November 17, 1965, Eckert was elected baseball's fourth Commissioner by a unanimous vote of all twenty Major League club owners. He served for three years and is widely credited with using his business credentials to establish a more efficient office, streamlining business practices, and overseeing the funding and construction of bigger stadiums with long-term leases.

William Eckert died April 1, 1971, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Callista Flockhart
Callista Flockhart, a television actress, the star of Ally McBeal, was born November 11, 1964, in Freeport, Illinois. She was nominated for an Emmy Award and has won a Golden Globe. Her parents are Ronald Flockhart, an executive for Kraft Foods, and Kay Calista, an English teacher.

While she reportedly considers Freeport her hometown, Callista lived in other states, graduating from high school in New Jersey. She graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1988. She acted in the TV soap opera Guiding Light and had a roles in the films Quiz Show and The Bird Cage.

Calista won the 1998 Golden Globe Award for Best Comedy Actress in her role as Ally McBeal. She earned good reviews for her performance in Tennessee Williams' stage play, The Glass Menagerie.

Edmund Heller
Edmund Heller was born in Freeport on May 21, 1875. In 1888 his parents moved to Riverside, California. As a boy, he spent a lot of time collecting birds and their eggs. After moving to California, he was often joined in his collecting by Harvey Hall, who later became a noted botanist.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1901.

Heller was Curator of Mammals at Chicago's Field Museum from 1926-1928, Director of the Washington Park Zoo in Milwaukee from 1928 to 1935, and was Director of San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoo from 1935 until his death in 1939.

He led specimen collection expeditions for the Smithsonian, the Field Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History. He co-authored a book with Theodore Roosevelt.

Heller went to the Galapagos Islands with the Hopkins-Stanford Expedition in 1898 and spent seven months on the islands collecting specimens.

In 1900, the United States Biological Survey hired Heller as assistant to zoologist Wilfred Osgood in his Alaskan research.

Following his graduation in 1901, Heller became the field collector for the Field Columbian Museum, working in California, Oregon, Mexico and Guatemala.

In 1907, Heller went on the Field Museum's African expedition with Carl Akeley, the master taxidermist.

After returning from Africa, Heller was appointed curator of mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California. He went on the 1908 Alexander Alaskan expedition and made the report on the mammals collected.

From 1909 to 1912 he went with the Smithsonian-Roosevelt and the Rainey African Expeditions. The trip resulted in the book, Life Histories of African Game Animals, co-authored with Theodore Roosevelt (1914).

In 1914, Heller accompanied the Lincoln Ellsworth expedition to the Dease River-Telegraph Creek area of British Columbia and later to Alberta. The United States Biological Survey was conducting field investigations to secure information concerning the habits and distribution of large game mammals.

Heller supervised the collection of 891 mammal specimens, 695 birds, and about 200 fish, reptiles and amphibians with the National Geographic Society and Yale University expedition to Peru in 1915. He explored the newly discovered ruins of an Incan civilization at Machu Picchu.

In 1916, Heller went to China with Roy Chapman Andrews (the naturalist often called the real life Indiana Jones) and Chapman's wife, Yvette Borup Andrews on the American Museum of Natural History Expedition. The book Camps and Trails in China recorded their experiences in China. (Chapman was from Beloit!)

Paul J. Rainey, who had accompanied Heller to Africa, was appointed official photographer for the Czech army in Siberia. He invited Heller to accompany him to Russia. From the summer of 1918 until the end of World War I, they traveled by rail across Siberia to the Ural Mountains and back to their starting point.

In 1919, Heller led the Smithsonian Cape-to-Cairo Expedition the entire length of Africa, south to north.

He worked for the Roosevelt Wild Life Experimental Station and made a field study of large game animals in Yellowstone National Park.

He was appointed assistant curator of mammals at the Field Museum under Wilfred Hudson Osgood. During his six years there, Heller made trips to Peru in 1922-1923, and to Africa from 1923-1926.

Heller's trip to Africa was his last collecting effort.

After his return, he resigned his position at the Field Museum and became director of the Milwaukee Zoological Garden, a position that he held from 1928 to 1935.

Edmund Heller's Resume

There were two species were named after Heller, the Taita Thrush (Turdus helleri) and the Puna Thistletail (Schizoeaca helleri).

Heller wrote an article called "Nature's Most Amazing Animal (Elephant)" for National Geographic Magazine, published in June 1934. The article was about elephants of Africa and India, including taming, caring, as tourist attractions, and roles in mythology.

Heller died on July 18, 1939 in the cottage of the Fleishhacker Zoo where he lived.

John Maher
John W. Maher was born June 10, 1866, in Freeport, Illinois. In 1873 he moved with his family to the Dakota Territory.

Maher taught himself veterinary medicine and passed the exam to practice. He built an animal hospital near his home and developed a line of veterinary medicines that were widely used. He developed a reputation as a top veterinarian.

In 1912 Maher was elected as a member of the South Dakota House of Representatives.

He died May 10, 1917.

Louella Parsons
Louella Parsons, a Hollywood movie columnist was born Louella Rose Oettinger in Freeport, Illinois, on August 6, 1881.

At age ten she composed a short story entitled The Flower Girl of New York. She reportedly showed the story to the editor of the Freeport Journal-Standard; he read it but turned down the story. After her father died in 1890, her mother remarried and took her to live in Dixon, Illinois, where she graduated from high school.

She married John Parsons, and moved to Burlington, Iowa. She was lonely, unhappy and hated small-town life. She became pregnant with her only child, Harriet.

When her marriage broke up, she moved to Chicago and began writing movie scripts. Harriet was billed as "Baby Parsons" in several movies, including a movie that Louella wrote, The Magic Wand (1912).

In 1914, she began writing the first movie gossip column in the United States for the Chicago Record-Herald. In 1915, she wrote a book, How to Write for the Movies.

In 1925, Parsons contracted tuberculosis and was given six months to live. She moved to Arizona for the change in climate, then to Los Angeles.

When the disease went into remission, Parsons wrote a syndicated Hollywood column for William Randolph Hearst that appeared in over 600 newspapers around the world, and had over 20 million readers! Parsons became one of the most powerful voices in the movie business. She was known for her ability to scoop her competitors with the hottest stories. She knew everyone's secrets, and often wrote about them.

Parsons wrote the story for the movie Isle of Forgotten Women (1927).

Starting in 1928, she hosted a weekly radio program featuring movie star interviews.

Actors, directors, everyone in the movie business turned first to her column. She wielded enormous power. The studios feared getting bad reviews from her.

In 1937, Hedda Hopper was hired to be a gossip columnist by a rival newspaper. Parsons and Hopper became rivals and had a long feud.

Parsons also appeared in movies, including Hollywood Hotel (1938), Without Reservations (1946) and Starlift (1951).

In 1944, she published her best-selling memoirs, The Gay Illiterate. She wrote a second autobiography in 1961, Tell It To Louella.

She officially stopped writing her column in December 1965.

Louella Parsons has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies and one for radio.

She was married three times, to John Parsons from 1905 to 1914, to John McCaffrey, Jr. from 1915 until their divorce, and to Henry Martin from 1926 until he died in 1964. Louella Parsons died December 9, 1972.

Ted Snyder
Ted Snyder, Songwriters Hall of Fame lyricist and composer. Born August 15, 1881 in Freeport, Illinois, he grew up in Boscobel, Wisconsin. He played piano in a Chicago cafe, then took a job with a music publishing company.

In 1907, the company first published one of his musical compositions. In 1908, he founded his own music publishing business in New York City, and that year one of his songs was used in the Broadway musical Funabashi.

He hired an unknown songwriter in 1909, and Irving Berlin was so good that the two became business partners. They sang their music and performed in the 1910 musical Up and Down Broadway. A list of Ted Snyder musicals is here.

In 1914, Ted Snyder helped found ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a nonprofit organization that collects from performers and pays its members whenever their music is played publicly.

Snyder's songs include The Sheik of Araby (1921), recorded by Benny Goodman in 1937 and The Beatles in 1962; and Who's Sorry Now? (1923), a #1 hit on the UK singles chart for Connie Francis in 1958 and #4 on the American Billboard charts. In 2000, it was named one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Other songs Ted Snyder composed include Moonlight on the Rhine, In the Land of Harmony, The Ghost of the Violin, How’d You Like to Be My Daddy, I Wonder If You Still Care For Me, My Guitar, Piano Man, I Want to Be in Dixie, Dreams, Just Dreams, My Dream of the USA and Under the Moon. A list of 60 of his songs is available here.

In 1924 Snyder composed the music for the Broadway musical Fashions of 1924.

In 1930, Snyder moved to California and opened a Hollywood nightclub.

Ted Snyder died July 16, 1965 in Woodland Hills, California. In 1970, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

At least 22 motion pictures have used his songs, including the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca (1946) . A list of movies that used his songs can be found here.

Home