By Pat Hickey

October 11, 2024

There are as many legends as there are populated areas on the planet. Wherever people communicate a legend will arise from the soil, the sand, or the concrete. In Kankakee, Illinois, on the day I moved there, the legend of Jesus hit my ears.  Jesus was an old WWII Hungarian soldier who lived under the Washington Street bridge near the dam. He came to America and lived on whatever he could forage starting in the 1950’s. In 1975, I met the strange man in the alley behind my apartment on the river. I gave him an army surplus utility jacket that John McPolin gave to me. John was my Dad’s best pal/archenemy, they both worked at Illinois Psychiatric Hospital on Polk Street and competed for the best “deal” from West Side street peddlers. John had picked up eight army utility jackets for ten bucks. My Dad bought an eight track for three bucks, but it worked only once, before the hustler put it in the box.

Dad got stuck more often than not.

John McPolin could smell a hustle.

John gave me the jacket, but I never wore it as I had never served. I gave it to Jesus, and he was delighted. Legends had Jesus as an ex-Nazi, an ex-rocket scientist, an ex-boxer, and an ex- movie idol. I knew him as a guy who lived near the Kankakee River dam.

Wherever people share words one will hear legends. I share stories and a few legends as a summer tour guide on Vic Tieri’s legendary Emita II out of Michigan City Harbor.

When school lets out for the summer I work as a tour guide.  I talk about Harriet Colfax who operated the Michigan City lighthouse for forty-three years, the two converted lake boats that the Navy fitted out as aircraft carriers and stories about Mount Baldy and the many Lake Michigan shipwrecks. One of my favorites is the back story of “The Wave”.  Legends and yarns and sea stories are wonderfully engaging. Like the works of literature that I share with my students, stories and legends must rake up parts of my life’s experience and then become my own.

During a tour on the Emita II this past summer, I was asked by a woman why I had not mentioned Diana of The Dunes.  I replied that I had no idea of this person.  That put the hook in me.  My search was on.

At the Laporte County Historical Society, I bought a meticulously researched and engagingly written book by Janet Zenke Edwards, Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray.  This is indispensable to details of the life of a talented, romantic soul who abandoned a career in scholarship for that of a recluse in the sand dunes of northwest Indiana in 1915.

I was after the legend and legends live or die by word of mouth. In LaPorte County, the legend of a Charles O. Finley continues to link generations with tales of his bribery of The Beatles to play a  concert in his Kansas City baseball stadium all the while planning to move The Athletics to Oakland, California, or his hiring of young street hustler as a baseball executive who would become MC Hammer.

Charles Oscar Finley had a massive farm on Johnson Road that ran along Interstate Highway 80. In the 1960’s, the barn was emblazoned with a bat, a glove, a baseball, and The Athletics for all travelers to see.

Charlie Finley’s insurance offices were in the Santa Fe building on Michigan Avenue, right next door to Orchestra Hall. I used to see Charlie O. in the Santa Fe grill, when sent to get the stationary engineers coffee.  A black lady from the south side, Florence, waited every day and told me that Mr. Finley duked her $10 every visit if he had coffee or a dinner, mattered not.  That was in 1969.

Twenty years later, a retired and financially beset Charlie Finley would get stabbed in the hand, while taking French fries off of my wife Mary’s plate in The Blackmith’s restaurant in Rolling Prairie, Indiana,  Mr. Finley and I were talking about his Orange Football for night games when he casually availed himself of my bride’s side-dish. The once mighty baseball mogul took a fork in the mitt from a lovely red head who did not share food gladly …. with anyone. The Finley legend continues.

Diana of the Dunes? Not so much.

Fifty-five persons in Laporte and Porter counties were asked by me, “Have You Heard of Diana of the Dunes?”   Only three people answered yes to the question. Thirty of the fifty-five people asked were on . near the dunes.  The remaining twenty-five at shops, restaurants, churches, and museums in the two counties. Not very scientific but it made me convinced that the light might be fading on this legend. If you want the facts, read Janet Zenke Edwards brilliant study of Diana of the Dunes; this is my story.  Here is how I would keep the legend alive.

Imagine a young woman of thirty-five years, a scholar with a degree from University of Chicago and a key holding member of Phi Beta Kappa stepping off   a South Shore Line train and taking refuge in a ten-by-ten shack in the Indiana Dunes.

Imagine that this young woman would live on fish caught out of Lake Michigan and roots, wild onions, and berries for the next ten years. That is not your imagination.

Alice Mabel Gray was born on March 25, 1881, in the McKinley Park neighborhood of the south side of Chicago, to eastern Yankee parents. Alice Gray was the fifth of six children to a man worked as a lamplighter and his wife. The family was always on the edge of poverty due to the breadwinner’s ill health and chronic bad luck. A very bright and able student, Alice Gray matriculated to University of Chicago, receiving an AB degree in 1903, and later taking a job with Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. as a “computer.”  Alice Gray would compute long tables of numbers like a machine all day long. This soul sucking work must have factored in the young woman’s decision to seek life among the jack pines of the dunes. Between her work with the Naval Observatory and hermitage in the sands, Alice Gray studied in Germany at University of Gottingen and enrolled as a graduate student at University of Chicago.

From the rare scraps of diary entries collected by her biographer, it appears that Alice Mabel Gray had a love affair of sorts. Those scraps indicate that the love was unrequited and in 1915, Alice Gray became “Diana of the Dunes. “

Taking shelter in a ten-by-ten shack abandoned by some dune recluse, Alice Mabel Gray began her legendary career as the “nymph of the dunes” when fishermen off the shore saw the lady skinny dip and cavort on the shore to dry herself.  Word spread of this 20^th Century Diana (Roman goddess of the forest) and soon the name became familiar to duneland people from Michigan City to Gary. Reporters from local newspapers swarmed the dunes to get a feature and a few words from this lady. In no time people embellished her history.

As Diana of the Dunes took hold of the imaginations of people from Michigan City to Gary, unfettered industrial capitalism took hold of the dunes of northwest Indiana from Whiting to Gary. Rockefeller’s oil refineries, Carnegie, Inland and US Steel corporations established foundations deep into the limestone. Dune residents of Chesterton, Furnessville, Beverly Shores and Ogden Dunes began to agitate to save the dunes.

With her education steeped in Latin and Greek and her experience as a naturalist, Diana of the Dunes lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago on the need to preserve the natural beauty of the magnificent Indiana shoreline. Her words were published by the Chicago Prairie Club and became attributed to actions of the Save the Dunes club that eventually did just that.

At this point, Alice Mabel Gray became the common law partner of a giant of a man from Michigan City, Paul Wilson. Wilson was estranged from his German Methodist family, served in the army in Texas and worked as boatwright. Gray and Wilson moved from the tiny “Driftwood” shack near Chesterton, to Dune Acres farther to east. They subsisted on fish and “tree chicken” or whatever Paul Wilson could steal. Wilson would rob campsites and then appear to his victims with a promise to stop the thief who may have robbed them. He knew who the thief might just happen to be. In 1923, the body of medical student was found near their new shelter “The Wren’s Nest” on property owned by real estate developer Samuel Reck. A deputy sheriff accused Paul Wilson of the murder, and a struggle ensued with Paul being shot in the foot and Diana of the Dunes getting her head stove-in by the pistol-whipping deputy. Paul was jailed and Diana hospitalized.

When Paul Wilson was released from jail and Diana of the Dunes recovered from a hospital in Gary, the couple determined to sail a boat away from “Wren’s Nest” down the Mississippi river to Texas, where Paul Wilson had done his military service. Only a few months later the couple returned to Dune Acres and again squatted on the land owned by Samuel Reck. This land mogul acted more like a patron of the bohemian couple than a landlord. Alice and Paul planned to sue the American Newspaper in Chicago, but Diana of the Dunes succumbed to renal failure and died of uremic poisoning in 1925.

Alice Mable Gray asked that she be cremated and have her ashes cast out over the dunes she loved.  Samuel Reck and members of the Gray family arranged for a funeral and burial in Gary, Indiana. Paul Wilson was wild with grief and threatened to violently stop the proceedings. He was detained in a Gary police station. Paul Wilson drifted to California and is buried in a Potter’s Field near Bakersfield.

People have reported sightings of a naked woman roaming the dunes between Michigan City and Gary. Some hear her voice while taking the Three Dune Challenge at the National Park in Chesterton. Others go to the Ogden Dunes Historical Society, hear the words of historian Richard Meister and if they are incredibly lucky get directed to the dune near Pollywog Pond West and see the last site occupied by Diana of the Dunes.

Tell this story in your own way and keep the legend alive.

All photos and images are represented here with the permission of Ogden Dunes Historical Society.

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Born November 8, 1952 in Englewood Hospital, Chicago Illinois, Pat Hickey attended Chicago Catholic grammar and high schools, received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Loyola University in 1974, began teaching English and coaching sports at Bishop McNamara High School in Kankakee, IL in 1975, married Mary Cleary in 1983, received a Master of Arts in English Literature from Loyola in 1987, taught at La Lumiere School in Indiana from 1988-1994, took a position as Director of Development with Bishop Noll

 Institute in Hammond, IN and then Leo High School in Chicago in 1996.  His wife Mary died in 1998 and Hickey returned with his three children to Chicago’s south side. From 1998 until 2019, it became obvious that Illinois and Chicago turned like Stilton cheese on a humid countertop. In that time, he wrote a couple of books and many columns for Irish American News. When the kids became independent and vital adults, he moved to Michigan City, Indiana, Hickey substitute teaches K-12 for Westville, Indiana schools and works as a tour guide/deckhand on the Emita II tour boat. He walks to the Michigan City Lighthouse every chance he gets.