Kilroy Is There, and Students Hope He’ll Stay

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, the dismissal bell has just rung, and the kids at Kosciuszko Elementary School explode out the front door in a burst of pent up energy and anxious delight.

Kilroy is here.

That’s Officer Howard Kilroy, the big, smiling Chicago policeman who has planted himself reassuringly in the center of the schoolyard like a guardian angel. He’s as much a fixture in the gang-plagued, drug-infested North Side Puerto Rican neighborhood as Kosciuszko’s chipped and shopworn turn-of-the-century brown brick facade.

“Hi amigo, hi amigo,” the youngsters shout, mobbing the gray-haired man in blue, pulling on his pants legs, hugging him, kissing him, filling his arms with Christmas cards made by hand with construction paper, crayons and love. “Are you coming back?”

Maybe not. For 17 years, the mild-mannered 58-year-old Kilroy has been the soul, the conscience of Kosciuszko, a throwback to a bygone era when cops walked beats, knew everybody by name and were seen by children as role models, not objects of hate or fear.

Because of budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Kilroy has been reassigned indefinitely from his familiar foot patrol near the school to a squad car. As of next week, he will no longer be around each day to watch over the students at Kosciuszko as they head home through one of Chicago’s rougher neighborhoods.

However, the story doesn’t stop there. In a city in which police brutality charges frequently make headlines and ethnic strife can be as regular and bitter as the winter winds, a bunch of Latino kids have started a major battle on behalf of a German-Irish cop who can’t speak a word of Spanish.

“I don’t want him to leave ‘cause he’s part of the cause,” explained eighth-grader Waldy Gonzalez. “He’s straight. He’s a cool dude, bro.”

On Thursday, a delegation of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders lobbied Ronald Garcia, Kilroy’s commander at the Shakespeare District precinct house, to plead for Kilroy’s return. They’ve been promised meetings with Police Supt. Leroy Martin and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and they have gathered “keep-Kilroy” petition signatures from all 1,104 Kosciuszko students as well as 900 of their parents.

Walls in the school auditorium are plastered with hand-drawn posters of sad-faced youngsters crying, in both English and Spanish, “Where’s Kilroy?” and “We want Kilroy.” Dozens of youngsters have scrawled impassioned letters on his behalf, many illustrated with bright crayon pictures of happy stick-figure children holding hands with a smiling stick-figure policeman.

“Dear Mr. Martin,” Kateri Barreto wrote to the Chicago police superintendent. “I go to Kosciuszko school. We need Officer Kilroy to come back to our school. He keeps our school protected from gang members who come around and drug dealers. We miss him very much. Will you please bring him back to our school? The end.”

Technically, Kilroy, who has no children of his own, was only supposed to patrol nearby Pulaski Park, not the school, when he first began working the area back in 1972.

But he figured that, as long as the school was so close, he might as well check in on the kids when they got out of class. One thing led to another, and pretty soon he started to get to know the youngsters, and they him. And, then he started telling them jokes, counseling them, helping them with their homework, pressing them to excel, breaking up fights and scaring away gangs.

“Everybody knows him, it’s unbelievable,” said Jim Bailey, Kosciuszko’s principal. “It’s like something out of the past where the neighborhood policeman is a respected figure and not an object of scorn and derision.”

Kilroy, however, insists that he’s done nothing out of the ordinary. “I’ll walk the streets and these kids will say I’m their father, their grandfather, their godfather, even their mother,” he said. “They’re just starving for someone, anyone, to look up to . . . . I’ve always liked kids. I just think its our job to win friends. We have enough enemies already.”

Modest disclaimers aside, students, teachers and parents at Kosciuszko insist that Kilroy is something rare--a genuinely nice, unpretentious guy who walks kids home from school, sponsors neighborhood ball teams with money from his own pocket and stands in for Santa Claus at the school Christmas pageant.

Don Greczyk, the assistant principal at Kosciuszko, said that Kilroy is one of the few authority figures respected by local gangs and has broken up several gang fights by his mere presence.

“People that don’t even speak English know him well,” said Emma Lozano, president of the community parent-teacher council at Kosciuszko. “They respect him and feel comfortable with him around their children. He’s become sort of an institution around here.”

Kilroy’s biggest fan in the neighborhood is probably Antoinette Lamorte, these days a 22-year-old junior college student but not too many years ago a frightened teen-ager from a troubled home. When she was 16, her mother died and her father started beating her. Lamorte decided to run away. She got as far as Pulaski Park, where she found the friendly policeman she had come to know from her days at Kosciuszko.

He took the sobbing teen-ager down to the station house and stayed with her until juvenile officers found a relative she could stay with. Later, Kilroy and his wife, Mary, bought clothes for the girl.

When Lamorte was flunking classes in high school, she would take her homework down to the park and Kilroy would read with her and help her study for tests. Several times, he talked her out of dropping out, and, after she had been graduated, he pushed her to continue her schooling. He even helped get her a part-time job as a police department crossing guard.

“He’s about like the perfect father,” Lamorte explained. “I owe my life to him. After my mom died, I was just shattered. He gave me the courage to go on and stand on my own. These days he keeps on me. He doesn’t push me. He shoves.”

Garcia, the police commander, said he regretted having to move Kilroy and never realized what an uproar it would cause. But, Garcia said, the district had become so short-staffed that he had been ordered by superiors to shift officers from foot patrol to squad cars, where they can more easily respond to emergency calls.

“It’s a double-edge sword,” he said. “. . . It’s heartwarming, if nothing else, to see the children looking up to the officers instead of down at them. The negative is that I am so busy trying to cover (the district). Am I the bad guy or what?”

Kilroy, for one, doesn’t think so. He said he sympathizes with Garcia’s problem and understands the reason for the transfer. Still, Kilroy said, he can’t wait to get back on the beat, especially after all the fuss everybody at Kosciuszko has made over him.

“I’m floored, it’s like a dream,” he beamed. “It makes my 33 years on the job just great. To think that somebody cares this much is unbelievable.”

Times researcher Tracy Shryer contributed to this story.