School young Orson Welles attended faces the wrecking ball
October 4th, 2008 by Scott Marks
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Young Orson attending the Tood School c.1930
A historic dorm for boys in Woodstock, IL once attended by prep school student Orson Welles is marked for demolition.
The Chicago Tribune reports, “the two-story residence hall was the center of campus life for Welles and hundreds of other students at Todd School for Boys, which operated from 1848 to 1954. It now serves as offices for Woodstock Christian Life Services, which wants to raze the 88-year-old building to make room for independent-living duplexes for seniors.”
“As a young fellow, Orson Welles would sit in the living room of Grace Hall and enthrall other students with his impromptu storytelling,” said Caryl Lemanski, 67, who was raised in the building, where her parents served as resident faculty.
“He would write scripts for radio shows in a basement sound studio.”
My friend and LaSalle Theatre successor Matt Hoffman has been keeping EC abreast of the situation. He writes that it looks pretty bleak for that Todds school and that there will be a vote on it Tuesday. He also enclosed portions of a letter detailing a Thursday night meeting which his friend Jerry attended with his wife, Patty. (The names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
As for our meeting, it was great at the beginning as they have made concessions to our criticisms, but it got bad when Patty decided to bring up what they were planning to do with the historic building. There were only six of us neighbors there, in this little conference room at the nursing home these guys run, so that was a little awkward anyway. When Patty started questioning why they were in such a hurry to do this, and started getting a little heated at the way they weren’t answering her questions, two of our old-lady neighbors started whispering to her that “you’re on a different mission”, and, “this isn’t the place for this”; then the HR guy from the home who was there started raising his voice about how Patty was being hypocritical because we had earlier agreed that our main concerns about their plans had to do with aesthetics, safety and privacy, and now she was bringing up this separate issue. Patty apologized and said that she hadn’t realized this wasn’t the appropriate venue for this issue and sat down, and I could tell she was steaming. The lawyer didn’t help things by saying that if we got the building designated a landmark, and nobody else purchased it, they would just let it sit there and rot. Great, thanks.
At the end of the meeting we all got up and the president of WCLS said that he couldn’t remember my name. I told him and he said, “Anybody ever tell you you look like that guy in ‘Fargo’? What’s his name?” That just sent ice through ice through my veins, as I’m quite sick of people telling me I look like Wm. H. Macy. But that was small water. On our walk home, V was crying, saying she felt betrayed by our older neighbors—they seemed more interested in getting WCLS to offer them money for their houses, then in defending the neighborhood.
We’re trying to get some info we gleaned from the discussion about it last night out to some of the more passionate defenders of the building, and we’ll see how that goes. I still haven’t heard back from Jonathon Rosenbaum, so I’m going to try him again today via Facebook. I’ll let you know how that goes. And, weirdly, John Sobol, our monitor, told us that he thought that the director John Hughes lives out near Woodstock. So, I’m searching for ways to contact him and see if he’d lend his support—morally and financially—to the plan to purchase a piece of land behind the building and then pay to move it there. That seems the only way to save it, alas.
John Hughes…I might have known…
Read The Chicago Tribune story here.
Tags: historic building, illinois, Orson Welles, orson welles school, orson wells, orsonwelles, todds school, WoodstockShare: 
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What ultimately happened to the building? I was a student at Todd in the third grade in the late 1940’s. One of my roommates was Rostislav (Rusty) Romanov of the Russian royal family. He later became the head of a major bank in Chicago and married into the Armour (meat packing) family. He has since died in England. Somewhere I have a photo of eight of us who were roommates.