Happy Lao New Year
I had a nice talk with Mike Alft at the Taste of Laos event at the Gail Borden Public Library Thursday evening. Mr. Alft was the mayor of Elgin in 1967 when the State Department approached the city about forming a sister city relationship with Vientiane, the capital of then-Kingdom of Laos.
You do have to wonder about how the State Department came around to picking Elgin of all the thousands of cities in America. Mr. Alft suggested that it was because they were looking for a moderately large city close enough to O’Hare to make travel convenient. I suppose also that other cities may have already had existing sister city relationships, and perhaps Elgin was one of only a few cities available. But Vientiane, at this time, was not an insignificant place. Laos was considered the keystone of Indochina (or alternatively, the “cork in the bottle”), and America was actively involved in that region.
After the sister city relationship was established, Mr. Alft went to the White House for a state dinner hosted by President Kennedy in honor of the visiting Sri Savang Vatthana, King of Laos (technically, Crown Prince at the time because he did not ascend immediately to the throne upon the death of his father in 1959, but he was in fact head of state at the time). I’ve seen pictures of the visit, and it was indeed a full state visit. The king was met at the North Portico by President Kennedy, they reviewed troops, etc. I can’t even imagine what kind of experience that must have been for Mr. Alft. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten an insider tour of the White House as an intern in Washington years ago, but a state dinner is just amazing. Most people will go their lives without even stepping foot in the White House, and there was Mr. Alft dining with President Kennedy and the king of Laos!
After my freshman year in college, I spent a summer as an intern in Laos, and during that time I visited the royal palace in Luang Prabang, which was then and now a museum. In one of the reception rooms–I think it was the queen’s reception room, there was a case or two full of all the unusual gifts that heads of state receive. I didn’t even think to look for an Elgin watch, but indeed Mr. Alft presented the king of Laos with an Elgin watch, and it may well be in that case. So please, if you go to Laos, visit the palace and see if there’s an Elgin watch in that case. If not, we’ll just assume the king was interred with it, and leave it at that.
The sister city relationship did not last long. The communists came to power, and it lapsed. I asked Mr. Alft about what kind of role the sister city relationship might have had in the large number or Laotian refugees who eventually settled in Elgin. He said it was likely little or none.
Then how did the Lao come to settle in Elgin? Well it turns out that Elgin was just full of do-gooders who through churches and other organizations sponsored planeloads of refugees. I’m sure that many of the people involved in that did, though, remember that Elgin was Vientiane’s sister city. They could, after all, have sponsored Vietnamese or Cambodian refugees, but almost all the refugees were from Laos. After the initial wave, a critical mass formed and other refugees sought to relocate near their friends and family. U-46 started offering a bilingual program, and more people came. In fact, my family moved from Chicago at this time, because my father became a U-46 teacher.
I think the large presence of Laotian refugees–later Laotian Americans as most would become citizens–was felt in Elgin for perhaps a two-decade period. Then after that, people sort of dispersed. I was talking to a Filipino American who grew up in Glendale Heights and she said the same thing happened there. There was a period where there were a lot of immigrants and then they dispersed and assimilated. When there’s a finite amount of immigration, there’s sort of a predictable pattern. I visited St. Paul, Minnesota last summer, expecting to see a significant Hmong community, and the main strip there on University Avenue turned out to be more or less a ghost town. I talked to one of the shop owners, and he said, the same thing was happening: the Hmong were moving out to suburban areas, like everybody else, in search of bigger houses and better schools.
Mr. Alft and I talked about the German immigrants who had come to Elgin many years ago. They had German newspapers, services in German, German-language schools, etc. They actually wanted to preserve their language and culture. But today, less than a hundred years later, how many of their descendants speak German? Not unless they took it in high school or college. It is of course easier for the descendants of Europeans (or Africans) to assimilate in America, but I suppose eventually the descendants of the Laotian refugees who came to Elgin in the 1970s and 1980s will go from being Laotian Americans to Americans simply.
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both my parents went to Judson College in the late 70s and taught ESL to Laotian refugees in u-46 right after college
How interesting. It’s easy to forget that there must have been a lot of Elginites in that period that were involved with refugee resettlement. I wonder what stories they have to tell. We’ve reached a point where it’s now a part of Elgin history…
Another bit of interesting trivia about Elgin Watches. According to E.C. Alft, other owners of Elgin watches included: Buffalo Bill Cody, Clyde Barrow, Warren G. Harding, William Wrigley, Walter P. Chrysler, Harvey Firestone and Babe Ruth.