Chicago Heights’ Lincoln statue beardless and smiling

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

The popular statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago Heights almost didn’t exist, and its light-hearted image was created deliberately to contrast with most of the statues of Honest Abe.

And sculptor John Bucci learned something else during the 2009 bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birthday in Springfield — the date had special meaning in his life because Bucci had landed in New York exactly 50 years earlier on Feb. 12, 1959.

He had escaped a few years earlier from his hometown of Trieste in northeastern Italy, which at the time was partially under communist rule from Yugoslavia, he said.

“I thought there was no future in that country for me, and I escaped,” Bucci, 76, said.

After reaching the Italian side, Bucci received a degree in electrical engineering and worked in the Italian immigration office until getting permission to emigrate to the United States in 1959. He settled in Chicago, where he began working for Sun Electronics making test equipment for cars.

“At the time, it was very hard to emigrate to the United States, but I was very fortunate,” he said.

While working at Sun, Bucci began designing custom cars, including a fiberglass sports car that was displayed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Sculpting car bodies led to other types of sculpting and design, including creating replicas of the famous Trevi Fountain in Rome.

Angelo Ciambrone, then mayor of Chicago Heights, had seen one of those replicas and suggested that Bucci be contacted about the Lincoln statue that was being planned.

After being selected for the job, Bucci went to Springfield and New Salem to learn more about Lincoln and to get a sense of what kind of paintings and statues depicting the 16th president were there. He decided quickly that he wanted to do something different with his sculpture.

“Usually Lincoln is portrayed as serious, a little bit on the sad side. I didn’t want to copy the same thing because I learned in (New) Salem and Springfield that he did have from time to time a sense of humor,” Bucci said.

So Bucci’s life-size Lincoln at Dixie and Lincoln highways in Chicago Heights, which was erected in 2003, is smiling as a little girl hands him a bouquet of flowers.

The statue, entitled “On the Road to Greatness,” portrays Lincoln on a path from the log cabin where he was born to the White House. The two little girls he meets on the way were based on Ciambrone’s granddaughters, now in their teens.

“No one knows or would care who they are,” Ciambrone said from his law office in Chicago Heights. “They’re just two young girls looking at the 16th president of the United States.”

Ciambrone said it was Bucci’s idea to use his granddaughter as a model after seeing her photograph in the mayor’s office. Bucci added the other little girl so the second granddaughter would not be left out.

Ciambrone helped make the project a reality by spearheading the drive to obtain private donations for it. He initially wanted to mark the crossroads of the two national highways with a much-smaller version of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, but it did not fit into the intersection. So Lincoln it was, and Ciambrone said he’s glad about that because the statue has become a popular local landmark.

“I think it’s great. It’s one of the few Lincoln statues without a beard,” he said.