Friends recall South Elgin's Rolando

SOUTH ELGIN -- Tom Rolando was remembered by friends as an old-style, small-town "mayor" who heard out villagers' problems while working at his mom-and-pop drug store and who led the fight against pollution from sanitary landfills along the village's eastern border.

Rolando, 72, died Tuesday of bone cancer. He had been village president for a record 29 years (1968-97) and was a village trustee for six years before that. For many people who grew up in South Elgin, he was the only village president they had ever known until he finally retired from office in 1997, as rapid development finally began catching up with South Elgin.

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Tom Rolando
(File)

Visitation will be from 4 to 8 p.m. today at Laird Funeral Home, 310 S. State St., Elgin. Funeral services will begin at 10 a.m. Friday in St. Thomas More Catholic Church, 1625 W. Highland Ave., Elgin.

"He was a very patient person who was always very controlled and very knowledgeable," said Nancy Rohr, who began covering South Elgin Village Board meetings in 1965 as a news reporter for WRMN-AM radio. In 1985, she was elected as a village trustee and served behind the desk with Rolando until he retired in 1997.

Rolando and the board wrestled with many issues during those three decades. But Rohr said the one that sticks in her mind the most was the fight against water pollution suspected to be coming from the Woodland Landfill. That was followed in the 1980s by a fight to keep a garbage "balefill" from being built just across the Bartlett border.

"I can remember going to his home when we were holding meetings to try to get citizens interested in the landfill issue," Rohr said. "There were papers all over the house showing all this data about groundwater flow, and he would understand it. Nobody could do this better because he was a pharmacist -- he knew the chemistry."

Rolando and his wife, Deanna, grew up in Downers Grove. He studied pharmacy science at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Chick Evans Golf Scholarship and was on the tennis team.

They moved to South Elgin after he landed a job filling prescriptions at Cook's Pharmacy on State Street, in 1959. He bought out partner Jack Cook in 1981. In 1995, like most non-chain drug stores, the pharmacy went out of business, and Rolando took a job behind the drug counter at the Elgin Target store. He continued working there until he became sick in 2006.

"Running a business right here in town did the villagers a tremendous service and did himself a tremendous disservice," Rohr said. "People would come in the door of his store and tell him 'My sewer is backing up' or 'I'm having trouble with my neighbor.' But somehow he could keep his cool, no matter what problems or arguments people came in with."

"He had no place to hide," said his son, Mike. "It was a small, close-knit town and everybody would talk to him while they were filling prescriptions."

Mike Rolando said his father was doing light yardwork two years ago when he suddenly felt excruciating pain. Doctors determined he had broken a bone in his spine. Lab tests showed the bone had grown weak because it had been invaded by cancer.

Rolando never returned to work at Target, and he and Deanna soon moved out of the classic white home they lived in along State Street to live with Mike's family in Elgin. But after several operations to mend the broken back and chemotherapy to hold the incurable cancer at bay, his father returned to near-normal health, Mike Rolando said.

"He painted the South Elgin house and started a garden with his grandchildren," said Mike, who is head varsity football coach at St. Edward Central Catholic High School.

"He was just at the St. Ed's game five weeks ago. The first thing he said to me when he found out he had cancer was, 'Don't worry. I'll be alive long enough to see your first win.' And luckily, he got to see five wins the last two years. But he started getting really sick just four or five weeks ago, and went downhill very fast. He died in a bed we had set up in our living room."

Rolando leaves behind his wife and four children besides Mike -- Dave, Jeff, Sue and Shari.

In February, the South Elgin Village Board decided to rename East Avenue Park the Thomas J. Rolando Woods in honor of Rolando's work in expanding the village park system and preserving water quality. But the modest, quiet Rolando said he didn't want that, and the idea was quietly shelved.

"He felt he didn't deserve the limelight," said today's village president, Jim Hansen.

Asked if the park renaming might go ahead now, Hansen said, "I think we need to respect his wishes, whether he's alive or not."

In 2001, South Elgin resident Judy Splinter expressed her appreciation for Rolando in a Courier News Viewpoint letter.

"Not only did Tom serve on the village board for forever, it seems, but for us old-timer South Elginites, he was the one person you could call at 2 a.m. with a sick child," Splinter wrote. "Tom would go down to Cook's Pharmacy and fill or refill a prescription and not make you feel like it was a bother.

"That is what community is all about: people helping each other and thanking them for a job well done."