Hammond family has its own ties to Vietnam Memorial

On Veteran's Day this past week, the most visited memorial in the nation may have been the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, which has a direct link to the Calumet Region.

When she was 8, Bernice Dahl visited Riverview Park near her home in Chicago.There she tried what I always found to be the scariest "ride" in the park; the parachute drop. Unfortunately, Bernice dropped only halfway. Frantic men tried to persuade the terrified girl to grab onto rescue ropes they swung toward her, but skeptical Bernice declined to be a monkey, waiting instead for mechanics to fix the equipment. She dangled for a half-hour.

But that was not the worst experience of her young life. One day she went to school while her mother, despite being sapped by the flu, did the weekly washing at home. When Bernice returned home, she found her mother had fainted and fallen headfirst over a washboard into a tub. Her mother drowned.

Because her father was not able to care for his children, Bernice's Swedish relatives decided to farm the kids out to a Lutheran orphanage, a setting right out of Little Orphan Annie. When the kids became teen-agers, however, the orphanage sent them out into the world as servants and helpers. The recipient of orphan labor had only to feed, clothe, and house the orphan, and generally treat her/him as a member of the family, which meant seeing that they attended school. Bernice's first job was to tend a Will County woman with a broken hip, which did little for her education. Her second job was in a Jewish home in Joliet that wanted a nanny.

Bernice continued to work with families until she was 18, when the orphanage automatically cut inmates loose. Being a good worker, Bernice had no trouble finding a job, and in 1940, she married Irish Bob Rogan, an engineer with the EJ&E Railroad. Alas, her liberating girlhood dreams of a big church wedding vanished when the priest said that because hers was a "mixed marriage" (Lutheran and Catholic) she would have to be wed in the chapel and then only after signing papers binding her to raise her children as Catholics. While Bernice carried out her part of the bargain, forever after she rejected organized religion.

Meanwhile, Bob's job was such that EJ&E could call him out at all hours, but could also bump him if an older (more senior) man became available. One day, while walking dejectedly home after having been bumped at 3 a.m., her decided he would cut stone in his off-hours for the nearby Wonderlich (granite) Company. Wonderlich hired him not as a stone cutter, but as a commission salesman. It was blind luck. In no time, Bob became the company's top salesman, which inspired the company to move him around to its various offices. Naturally, less productive salesmen resented him, moving his superiors to solve the problem by making Bob disappear.

"Look, Bob, we need help in Hammond at our Calumet Monument Company, which opened in 1926," his boss said to him one day, "A one-room Sears pre-fab house goes with the deal." At first, Bob turned down the offer, in part because long, slow trains in Hammond paralyzed traffic. But, after thinking about the free house, he finally agreed to the offer and made the business an incredible success. By 1945, Bob was ready to strike out on his own, so a Wonderlich boss, realizing this, enticed him into buying the Hammond property, complete with everything on it. At least the super salesman would not be competing with the company in Joliet.

Bernice, who became the chief administrator of the Rogan enterprise, figured out a way for the Rogans to borrow $15,000, a fortune, to start their own business. But for a brief moment she almost regretted her own astuteness. On the night after she and Bob signed the papers, Bernice awoke to the sound of a chain falling. She thought little about it, but in the morning, she found that the Wonderlich boss had removed all the gravestones, apparently with the idea of bankrupting the Rogans. This ticked off Bob so thoroughly that he went to the Olson Company in Joliet, a competitor, and bought stones with misspellings and other mistakes on them. This at least would give him samples to show Hammond customers.

Over the years, Bernice took care of the books and, until his death in 1968, Bob sold. She also took in all her orphaned siblings, whose husbands entered the Rogan Monument Company. When sons Jim and Tom were old enough, they, too, entered the business as carvers, setters and hammerers of stone, learning everything by trial and error. At a time when stones had become almost standardized, Bernice's sons carved out their own special niche: designer monuments.

With Tom and Jim in the saddle, the Rogans also expanded to a number of plants, seven retail stores, and 150 dealers, but the real turning point in the business occurred in 1976. To achieve the economies of scale, Tom and Jim took on government orders - mass-produced markers for military graves in states as Far West as Colorado. That government business took them down an unexpected path. In 1980, a Chinese co-ed at Yale, an architectural student, won a design contest among 3,000 entrants for the proposed Vietnam War Memorial. She specified it be built of black marble, which derived mainly from Scandinavian countries and South Africa. The hitch was that Scandinavian stone came in small blocks, while South Africa was a political problem. The Rogans had a solution. They tapped a source of black marble in Inda and hooked up with a fabricating partner in Vermont. And that's how Bernice and her sons became involved in one of the most remarkable memorial monuments in the world.

ROOTNOTE: Despite failing eyesight, Bernice Rogan continued to keep the company's books until the day she died in 1995.