Some team history.
April 20, 1986|By Wes Smith, Chicago Tribune.
1772
GOOFY RIDGE, ILL. It used to be that the people of this backwater town had no trouble with their neighbors and little damnable interference from outsiders. They enjoyed the simple life along unpaved streets of sand, fishing out the back door, hunting out the front.
But the town has had a run of bad doings in the last few years, and it`s getting harder and harder to keep up the good, but odd, name of Goofy Ridge.
``What school district wants an English teacher from a town that is supposed to be full of rapists, murderers and thieves?`` said Ridge resident Sarah Bohm, 23, who happens to be an English teacher in need of work.
``Over the last few years a great effort has been made to clean up the Ridge,`` Bohm said. ``Admittedly we are not finished, but a noticeable difference has occurred.``
Cleaning up Goofy Ridge entirely would call for a thorough scrubbing of its history, Bohm conceded. Born in the days of Prohibition as a bootlegger hideaway 200 miles southwest of Chicago, ``the Ridge`` has evolved in more recent years into a sort of Dogpatch treatment of Miami Beach, an Illinois River resort community for the unrich and occasionally infamous.
``It did have a not-so-reputable beginning as a bootlegger town, but so did Havana and Quiver Beach (both nearby) and a lot of other places,`` said Bohm. ``There are some here who get rowdy and use drugs, but they stay to themselves and don`t bother the good people.``
Evidence in aggravation and mitigation is offered, however, by Chief Detective Leland Keith of the Mason County Sheriff`s Department, which is charged with keeping things sane on Goofy Ridge.
Keith, a student of the history of the Old West, likens the Ridge to a
``hole-in-the-wall`` hideout for modern Jesse Jameses. ``It`s a place to get away for people who are not necessarily running from the law; they just don`t want to be hassled by the law,`` he said.
``There are more than one or two bad apples there, but I don`t think we are out to get everyone on the Ridge. There are good folks there, I`m willing to concede that,`` the detective said. ``Hell, there are people there I don`t even know--and that is good for them.``
Mason County lawmen spend an inordinate amount of time working on the Ridge as opposed to other areas of the county, said the detective, who is careful not to picnic there on his free time. ``I`ve been told that they are out to get me and that I should walk softly around there, but I don`t get too worried,`` he said.
At one point in recent years, 70 percent of the criminal complaints in the county, which encompasses 544 square miles, were generated out of a five square mile area that included Goofy Ridge, Keith said.
In the last five years there have been at least five homicides in the county, which has a population of 20,000 people, and in three of them either the plot, the weapon or the villain came off the Ridge, he said.
``They have more incidents there and when they have them everybody is pretty close-mouthed,`` said Keith.
Tight lips are a tradition along the Ridge, where the community, good and bad, prides itself on looking after its own.
During Prohibition, when the area was a haven for bootleggers and a favorite haunt of Chicago mobsters, the local speakeasy operated aboard a converted houseboat anchored on Lake Chautauqua just outside the Ridge. Whenever the flash of a badge was spied near the joint`s mooring, the bartenders/boat pilots simply battened the bottle caps and hoisted anchor, chugging out of handcuff range.
When the no-booze laws were struck down, the liquor trade moved upstream to Pekin and Peoria. The Ridge then began to attract a less seedy, but still private, sort of settler. They were mostly retired blue collars from mines and millworks, who came for the cheap housing, good fishing and hunting, and blessed isolation at the edge of the Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.
The unincorporated settlement of about 350 folks, and half again as many yard dogs, is fairly hidden beneath pine, jack oak and hickory trees and tucked along a remote sand ridge in Quiver Township, about eight miles from Buzztown or Havana.
It is the sort of place that smells of burning firewood even in summertime and the sort of town that intimidates city people because it notices them. They are not accustomed to being noticed unless they ask for it. Those who have come to stay the Ridge in the last 30 years generally rolled off the hard road with camper trailers behind them. The trailers served as foundations for additions of brick and lumber, and even today the rounded ends of old campers protrude from these facades in many houses. The result is an out-of-kilter town that, to the outsider, looks as if it was once struck by a barrage of Airstreams.
