Lester was the tenth of the eleven children in the family of Olof and Ida Eckberg. He was born on August 12, 1924 in Bureau Township, Bureau County, Illinois, in the family home on the J. Westbrook farm, which Olof was renting at the time. He attended the county schools as the family moved around and graduated from Wyanet High School in 1941.
In 1943, with World War II building in intensity, Lester was inducted into the Army on April 5, 1943, at Scott Field, Illinois. He then spent five weeks at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, getting basic training before he was then assigned to Camp Grant, Illinois. There he did clerical work connected with the German prisoners-of-war who were held at the camp. Once, while on furlough, Lester and a friend were driving around Princeton, catching the eye of a local policeman who apparently harassed them about driving up and down the streets. This led Lester and his friend to write a letter of complaint to the Princeton newspaper about the policeman bothering soldiers just driving and relaxing.
At the end of the war, the German prisoners were gradually repatriated and Lester began processing returning U.S. soldiers out of the Army. One of those soldiers was his brother, Orville, who processed out, but soon rejoined the military.
During his time at Camp Grant, Lester met Arlene Bennett, of Rockford, Illinois, who had studied railroad telegraphy and was employed by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at Camp Grant. He and Arlene were married in Rockford on March 30, 1946, shortly after Lester's discharge from the Army.
After his discharge, he and Arlene moved to Wyanet and Lester worked for a while at his brother LeeRoy's gas station. He didn't see much future in that job, so in 1948, when an opening was available at the Wyanet Post Office delivering mail and working in the office in Wyanet, he took the opportunity to change jobs. His hours were long at first; he worked eight hours a day, six days a week with two hours on Sunday. Gradually, however, because of government cutbacks, he was required to work less hours. He ended up working there for thirty years.
Lester retired from the postal service in 1979 and took up some hobbies. He and Arlene lived in rural Wyanet at their Sunny Knoll home and each year raised purple martins that returned to North America after wintering in South America.
Another hobby Lester took up was making wind chimes, but not the usual kind you see hanging from windows. Lester made massive wind chines which weighed five to six pounds and were about four to five feet long. The chimes were metal tubes which made bell-like tones as a large resin ball struck them. He and Arlene made numerous copies of their wind chimes, each one with a hand-customized tail with the new owner's initial.
Lester and Arlene lived at Sunny Knoll until 1999 when they sold their long-time home and moved to an apartment in Princeton, where they currently reside.
To read more about Lester, find him in the Genealogy section of this web site and go to the "Notes" section in his part of the family tree.
A number of pictures of Lester and Arlene are displayed in the Family Album below.
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