A photo of John Gach during his Coast Guard boot camp days.
Courtesy of John Gach
For several months in 1976, John Gach had a unique job.
“I’m the only person I know that has ever been a lighthouse keeper,” says Gach, who is now 70 and lives in Woodstock, Illinois.
Park Ridge resident Wayne Barton, 88, was also a part of the exclusive club more than a decade earlier in the late 1950s. He says people called them “wickies,” because in the early days, lighthouse keepers relied on oil lamps to produce a sustainable glow, requiring them to routinely trim the lamps’ wicks.
But Barton and Gach aren’t that old. By the time the Coast Guard posted them at the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse, it was more a flick of the switch. The structure was electrified in the 1920s.
Still, Barton says between duties like light maintenance, weather monitoring and night shifts, the role was serious and deliberate.
“You always had a routine. If you weren’t fixing this, you were checking that,” he says. “You can’t make mistakes.”
While Gach says his posting had creature comforts that his much earlier predecessors could have never dreamed of, like a small color television, there was one major downside: the foghorn. Try sleeping through that for 96 hours straight in bad weather.
A portrait of Wayne Barton when he served in the Coast Guard in the 1950s.
Courtesy of Wayne Barton
“I don’t remember the frequency of how many times it rang per hour…. You start to fall asleep, there it is again,” Gach says. “It was tough, but it had to be done.”
There was a real sense of responsibility — mariners and boaters still relied on them, after all.
Neither foresaw their positions eventually becoming obsolete, but Barton and Gach were among the last generations to man lighthouses. Chicago Harbor’s signal was automated in 1979.
As navigational technology continued to progress, the singular role of the lighthouse shifted, and the accompanying stations that humans once sustained became redundant
