The Last Word

First Presbyterian Preschool staff plants a hackberry tree in Lake Forest to commemorate beloved teacher Sue Peecher’s nearly three-decade tenure at the school. Kids say the funniest things. Longtime First Presbyterian (Lake Forest) Pre-school teacher Sue Peecher has hilarious proof. “One day, in our playground, I asked a 3-year-old girl, ‘How are you, my friend?’”

Lake Forest Place’s gregarious green thumb and garden committee chair, Patrick Cosgrove, now tends to his eight garden plots—up from four last year— at the senior living community. Any gardener worth their soil likes to get dirty—literally, not verbally. Lake Forest Place (LFP) resident Patrick Cosgrove was 3 and living near Wrigley Field when he

Go ahead, call Andy Rick a hero. The 17-year veteran of the Lake Forest Fire Department will thank you but he’ll also kindly disagree with you. “Some calls turned into cool stories,” recalls Rick, sworn in as chief of the department in January after serving it as a firefighter/paramedic, lieutenant, battalion chief, and deputy chief.

You’re on the phone with the one and only Michaele McDonnell, and she just got back from Istanbul and Cappadocia in Turkey, one of 16 countries she’s visited on global gallivants that have taken her from North America to Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Give this vivacious docent, art consultant, and community volunteer a

“Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world,” American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter in 1940, just six months before his death. “Maybe it was.” There is a palpable angst in that statement, a sense of longing that lingered decades after the author famously met and