Charlie Tucker: Brush Pile Badger
by Nancy Maes

n several chilly fall weekends in 1999, while other teenagers were sleeping late, Charles Tucker was piling on lots of layers of clothing and putting on sturdy shoes and work gloves. He was headed from his home in Wheaton to Mayslake Forest Preserve in Oak Brook to work on a prairie restoration project in order to qualify to become an Eagle Scout.

Tucker, who was 14 at the time, isn’t the first teen to venture out to Mayslake, but the others had a different goal: ghostbusting. In 1919 the property was purchased by a wealthy coal magnate, Francis Peabody. He built a 39-room mansion there and called the estate Mayslake in honor of his wife and daughter who both bore the name. Peabody died suddenly in 1922 and the property was eventually sold to Franciscan monks. A legend grew up that Peabody’s ghost still haunted his former estate. "I can’t tell you how many volunteers at the site have told me that they snuck in here when they were 16 or 17 because they had heard that the body of Peabody was floating in a glass casket on the pond," says preserve steward Conrad Fialkowski. "But the trick was that you had to get past four seven-foot tall monks that guarded the coffin."

The previous summer, Tucker fell in love with the prairie when Fialkowski took him on a walk through Mayslake. "I saw the pretty flowers in all different colors," recalls Tucker, "and the little bugs on the underside of their leaves and the butterflies, and I knew that I wanted to allow the prairie to expand so that other people could see how it used to be."

Forget the ghosts. Tucker now would tackle another kind of villain. When the monks stopped planting corn, buckthorn moved in.

Tucker was undaunted by the task even though some of the buckthorns had trunks that were 10 to 12 inches in diameter. But Tucker wasn’t alone in seeking to eliminate the enemy. Scout requirements meant that he had to organize a team of people who would spend 100 hours working on the project. Tucker himself was only allowed to do 25 hours of the work.

He recruited family and friends, including a lot of Scouts. As a result, about one-half an acre of land was cleared so that native seeds could be planted. "I learned that some nature has to be sacrificed to allow other plants to grow," says Tucker. "It’s pretty hard to cut down a lot of trees just so that some little plants can grow, but it’s worth it." In a ceremony on Memorial Day weekend, Tucker was named an Eagle Scout.