The Forest Ranger
By Susan Dart
On Oct. 19 there was a story in this paper about the Villa Turicum. Sixty years ago the Italian villa in Lake Forest was a $5 million lakefront estate built by Edith Rockefeller McCormick.
She is said never to have entered the house after it was a year old and it soon fell into ruin. It is now being turned into a 161-lot subdivision by developer Robert W. Kendler.
In the course of the story, the name Turicum was mentioned as one of the mysteries connected with the villa. Even Italian scholars were at a loss to explain it.
THEN UP POPPED the answer. It came in the form of a telephone call from one of Lake Forest��s newest residents. She is Claudine Johnstone, the wife of Allan Johnstone, who has been transferred to this area.
They and their three school-age daughters have just moved to a house on Forest Hill Rd. near Cherokee School. Another daughter is a student at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
”We are not settled yet,” Mrs. Johnstone said over the phone. “And I have at least 25 boxes still to open. But I have a book that will explain Turiucm. I am a Zurcher myself.”
A Zurcher is a citizen of Zurich. “Every Zurcher, when he comes of age, gets a book from the city fathers,” Mrs. Johnstone says. “It’s like a handbook of the city.”
CLAUDINE JOHNSTONE met her American husband over 20 years ago when he was a student at the University of Zurich. “My name is really Claude,” she says. “But when I came to the States I got a notice from the draft board; so right away I changed my name to Claudine. Otherwise I would be in Vietnam.”
Luckily the book about Zurich was not in one of the 15 unpacked boxes, and she was able to translate the following information. Turicum is the ancient name for Zurich. The original inhabitants, the handbooks says, were lake dwellers. The name Turicum dates from the Helvetian Celts and probably meant “settlement on the water.” The Romans continued to use the name, which finally became Zurich when the Germanic tribes overran the country.
But why Mrs. McCormick called her Italian villa a Swiss name still remains a mystery. The house overlooked Lake Michigan and was, if you stretch a point, a settlement on the water.
ANOTHER IDEA – a weird one – is that she chose the Swiss name by some sort of ESP. She is said to have had vibrations and to have believed that she was the reincarnation of the young bride of King Tut of ancient Egypt; so she may have been gifted with precognition. The year after she left the villa, she went to live in – of all places – Zurich.
She had been helped by the Freudian psychiatrist Carl Jung and followed him to Switzerland as his pupil and assistant. She stayed eight years.
Neither of these answers is really satisfactory, however. Maybe someday someone will come up with a better one – someone like Claudine Johnstone.
Lake Forest Library Archives
