Tour to Russell Military Museum September 9, 2017

By Tom O’Donnell

My daughter Maureen, her daughter, Michelle, and I drove to the Town and Country Mall in my 1940 Mercury Sedan Coupe, where we met Pat Maroney in his 1936 Fordor.  Stan Stack in his 1953 Tudor arrived next followed shortly by our President and First Lady, John and Robin Emmering, in their 1949 Custom Fordor.  Ron Blum and his guest, Glenn Johnson, 40 Fordor, Ron Dopke, modern, John Scheve, modern, Joe Serritella, 1941 coupe, Jeff Trilling, 52 Ford Pick Up and Len Vinyard, 2005 T-Bird also met us there. 

The drive to the museum was mostly on 2 lane roads with very little traffic.  Some of them had trees right up to the road and we could see that the trees were beginning to change colors.  Other 2 lane roads took us through areas where horse farms lined the road.  We did see a Lipizzaner colt as we passed the Temple Farms.  We also passed an area where there were some men standing around in the road with flags and other men sitting on tractors.  We got a thumbs up from them as we passed them on the grooved road.  The weather was perfect for the drive, with the sun shining and the temperatures in the upper 60's. 

We arrived at the museum at 10:30 where we were met by Kitty and Terry Freihage in their 1935 Coupe.  After paying our admission and getting our wrist bands, we entered the indoor portion of the museum.  Mark Sonday, the owner greeted us and started giving us a history of his collection and how it started. 

He talked about his childhood fascination with military equipment and when he heard that someone had a Sherman tank for sale, he decided to buy it and bring it home to his farm.  On the way, he was stopped by a State Trooper and asked for his permit for transporting an oversized load.  He was given a citation and when he went to court was fined more than 3 times the cost of the tank.  He thought about this for a while and decided to lower his cost basis for the tank by buying another.  This time, he bought the $15 permit before transporting the tank.  His collection continued to grow over the years and could be seen from I-94 in Wisconsin until 2007.  In 2006, the county wanted his land and would not allow him to open his museum to the public, so he moved it across the state line to Illinois.  He opened his museum to the public in 2008. 

Mark continued with describing the when, how and why of the major parts of his collection and their historic significance.  He had a WWII motorcycle that was declared surplus and never used NS Jeeps from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm.  There are several tanks and armored vehicles in the collection.  The display cases had newspapers with headlines that described military events around the times of the military equipment near it. 

Near the end of the presentation, Mark told us the story of how he obtained some space material.  He was driving along and saw this truck with what looked like a Mercury Space capsule.  He asked the driver to pull over so he could talk to him.  The truck was going to deliver the junk in the truck to a recycler, so Mark offered to pay him the scrap price for his load and transportation costs if the driver would deliver the contents to his museum.  The truck had tiles from the shuttle, a replica of a space capsule and other material that was used to educate people about our space program. 

We left the museum and continued to the Shanty Restaurant where we had a good lunch and conversation.  After lunch, we split up for the trip home.  Ron Blum, Stan Stack and I traveled together as Stan’s car was making a strange scraping sound occasionally.  We stopped at a gas station in Gurnee because my granddaughter, Michelle, saw smoke coming from the 53's right rear tire.  The right rear wheel was very hot so we pulled the drum to look at the brakes.  We did not see anything unusual, so Stan decided to have the car towed home.