SILVIS, Ill. (Tribune News Service) — Hero Street is a block and a half long.

It’s found at the northern edge of this small working-class Illinois town alongside East Moline, a short drive from the Mississippi River and Davenport, Iowa. It’s situated between the base of a steep hill and a narrow strip of grass that slopes downward into a creek. It was never the most obvious or comfortable place for a family to settle.

And yet, many did. In fact, so many did that a small community flourished here, one that earned a curious distinction: Since World War II, the families of this short street have watched at least 130 sons and daughters leave for military service, most of them voluntarily. Hero Street offered so many of its children to fight its nation’s wars that, in the 1960s, the Department of Defense’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office recognized that no residential street of comparable size in the country had more veterans from WWII and the Korean War.

So, in 1968, what had been Second Street was renamed Hero Street.

Three years later, a veteran’s memorial was carved into the side of that steep hill.

And four years after that, Hero Street was finally paved.

The families who settled here in the 1930s were Mexican American. Hero Street would be the last street in Silvis to get pavement. Veterans who returned from WWII and Korea, then later Vietnam, found it unchanged since childhood. It was a muddy, gravel strip made uneven by deep ruts, so difficult to navigate even now older residents recall caskets of fallen soldiers being brought home only to have their hearses stuck in the mud. To add insult, when veterans here asked to join local VFW halls, they were turned away and told that there were so many of them white veterans would be outnumbered.

So they started their own VFW.

Despite resistance from city leaders, they built memorials. There are two official ones today, a 17-foot monument at the front of Hero Street and a veterans park just 500 feet away. Then there are stars painted onto the street in front of the homes of soldiers who never returned. And an information kiosk on the history of Hero Street. And a bench to honor Joe Terronez, the former alderman and Silvis mayor who was so inspired by the growing civil rights movement of the 1950s that he spent decades advocating that more respect be paid to the veterans and families of Hero Street. There are frequent reminders of the eight veterans who grew up here and died in combat, and inside the small wood-frame houses along Hero Street, a few veritable shrines to their lives.

But it’s been a century since Mexican immigrants first arrived here to work on the Rock Island railroad. Connections to that past are vanishing. Terronez died last year. Those stars painted onto street are fading now. The children of Hero Street’s founders are old.

Tanilo Sandoval entered the military at the end of WWII; because two of his brothers had already been killed in the war, he was stationed at Fort Sheridan in Chicago. He’s 96 now and long retired from his job as a plumber. For a time his daily routine included a short visit to Hero Street every morning. But gradually, family moved on, friends died.

He would stop by and recognize no one.

He thinks about the last time his brother Frank visited the street: Frank was on a train that coincidentally stopped in the Silvis rail yard, where the Sandovals once lived in boxcars, a block from where they built a permanent home. Frank called out the window to a friend and said, Fast, find my dad. “The guy left to find Father,” Tanilo said. “By the time they returned, the train moved on, and no one in my family ever saw Frank again.”

The Rock Island line is so close to Hero Street the clang of railroad crossings, whine of braking trains and metal groan of shuffling cars is a constant song on replay, all day and all night. Along the street itself, fences are chain-link and stoops are chipped and paint is peeling. There are American flags, POW flags and Virgin Mary statues in front-yard gardens, and the street numbers attached to at least two homes are red, white and blue. These homes are roughly half the size of a typical Chicago bungalow.

Up and down the street, said Zach Soliz, you hear the same names that have always lived here, though some of the families have changed — Gomez, Munos, Terronez.

He’s a lieutenant in the Davenport Fire Department, partly because, he said, “When you grow up on a street so recognized for service and loss of life, you feel real responsibility to continue.” His grandfather donated the land that became the memorial park, which is across Hero Street from Tony’s Grocery, which his grandfather founded 75 years ago.

Inside the grocery, his mother, Sylvia Soliz, the owner now, sits behind the counter, rubbing her ailing knees. Her home is attached to the shop, and the door to her living room is open and the TV is on. She’s 74, and the wooden shelves of the small market are mostly bare. After decades as a fixture of the street, Tony’s will close later this fall.

She wears her coat inside and zips it up against a chill.

“You grow up on this street like I did, you live with everybody, so everyone becomes your family in a way, and so when it seems you don’t know the people living there anymore, it does hurt,” she said.

But that’s not why she’s closing. She’s tired. She sick of missing out on her grandkids. The housemade Tony’s Grocery-brand tortillas, a Quad City staple, required her “to work all the time, just myself. For a long time, I didn’t see the sun much. The (state health) inspectors were just here and wrote me up — they want me to put in a grease trap. I’m like, ‘I’m selling out! Shut me down, I don’t care.’”

As if on cue, three 20-somethings emerge from the basement, where they were learning to make Tony’s tortillas. Sylvia sold the recipe and the brand name to the local farm where they work. They looked exhausted. “This will take lots of practice,” one says.

“I’m going to say prayers for you guys,” Sylvia says.

Behind her cash register are photos of family who served in the military and photos of her father making his tortillas and a crucifix and a small Our Lady of Guadalupe figurine. Sometimes Sylvia cries about closing up and leaving Hero Street. Her son reminds her that her dad would be proud she kept it going as long as she did, 26 years after he died.

Remember, she says, her father was born in the Rock Island rail yard.

As were many of the children of Hero Street. Silvis began in 1903 as a railroad town, built around the Rock Island line. Its growth coincided with not only a labor shortage brought on by World War I, but the Mexican Revolution, which, though it ended in 1920, left threads of violence for years. Families looking to escape arrived in Texas to work the railroads, then eventually came to the western Illinois town of Silvis, where Rock Island had a major locomotive repair facility in need of cheap labor. These families were offered one housing option: boxcars, with no electricity, heat or plumbing. Wash basins needed to be chipped free of ice in the winter. Often children who were born and raised in the yard were not welcome in Silvis public schools, and when local Catholic churches turned them away, several immigrants built Our Lady of Guadalupe, using two boxcars.

As the Great Depression deepened in the early 1930s, an even more cruel twist was coming: White residents of Silvis complained that the Mexicans living in the rail yard didn’t have to pay property taxes on their boxcar homes. They wanted the families evicted. But they also didn’t want them living in neighborhoods full of white residents.

With the help of the railroad, a wooded area not far from the tracks was cleared and several families towed their boxcars onto what would become Second Street. Homes were built around boxcars (at least one of which is still standing today). Families also helped families construct more traditional houses. At the top of the hill were apple trees, an incline so steep families let their goats graze there. So it became Billy Goat Hill.

By the end of the 1930s, almost two dozen families were living on Second Street. But unable to get white craftsmen to service the new neighborhood, electricity and plumbing remained spotty on the street for years. Residents also stayed poor, but the community flourished. Driven together by heritage and circumstance, families became close knit. Mandolins came out on hot nights. Children dove into surrounding woods for adventure.

When WWII arrived, many enlisted.

“That generation, the first raised on this street, they knew this country would be their homes, not Mexico,” said Richard Munos, who grew up here and whose mother, Nellie, now 99, still lives on the street. She watched her brother Johnny come home in a casket from Korea. “That generation felt they had to serve the country and could also get an education and send money home — there was a patriotic economics to it, you know?”

A car honks.

Munos waves. Cousin, he explains.

A woman walks by. They wave. Niece, he says.

His father grew up across the street. An aunt lives two doors down. His sister Mary lives next door. Mary Munos served for 20 years in the Air Force. The mud on this street could be so thick it was basically quicksand, she says. People wonder why so many here would serve the military of a nation so disrespectful. But it’s obvious, she says. “They saw what their parents went through and honored that by serving. We still do.”

At the top of Hero Street, there is a restaurant named Porkies and across from it, a somber monument to all veterans from Silvis. It’s a compromise, dedicated in 2007 after more than a decade of fundraising and debate about the cost and who was being honored. An American eagle statue soars atop a more specific foundation, shaped like a Mayan temple.

“Still, now, years later, it’s a monument for the right reasons,” said Brian Munos, Richard and Mary’s nephew and a Navy vet who grew up on the street. Beneath the eagle are portraits of Hero Street veterans killed in combat, their bronze likenesses suggesting soldiers far older than the 21- and 22-year-olds they were when they died.

The Sons of Billy Goat Hill were killed in Burma.

In Germany.

In Korea.

In Holland.

During the Battle of the Bulge.

In the tail-gunner seat of a bomber over Italy.

They were a sliver of the estimated 500,000 Mexican Americans who served in WWII alone. Which is why Ald. Joe Terronez fought so hard to not only get a memorial park built, but the street itself paved, said Brian Munos, who was also a nephew of Terronez. “He became tireless.”

According to Moline Dispatch coverage from the 1960s, Terronez — who eventually became mayor after 26 years as an alderman — was not popular with the Silvis City Council; he watched repeatedly as the city dragged its heels for years on nearly anything having to do with Hero Street, from renaming the street to pavement. He charged discrimination. Indeed, most of City Council did not support a memorial park dedicated solely to Mexican American soldiers. So Terronez worked contacts, pressed Washington, securing help from Illinois Rep. Thomas Railsback and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which agreed to pay for half of the $88,000 project.

After he died last year at 91, residents of Hero Street had to get used to having a Memorial Day celebration without Joe Terronez. That feeling hasn’t faded in a year.

But then, the celebration itself is smaller and more formal now than the street festivals that used to mark Memorial Day here. Even the railway yard where their ancestors first settled is going away: Earlier this year a Minneapolis nonprofit purchased the land with the aim of transforming it into a locomotive museum and hub for train preservation.

But then there’s always a sense here that things have changed, Brian Munos said.

That’s just time. He’s going to go ahead and celebrate Memorial Day as usual. He’ll speak at a ceremony in the memorial park and retell the story of the soldiers and families who lived here. He’ll talk about watching his grandfather march with a newly formed VFW, and how, when Brian later joined the Navy, he didn’t tell his family.

He just did it.

“The first families recognized this was their new home. They knew to give. They had to represent. That’s what they felt. That’s how I felt, and I didn’t grow up in a boxcar. I didn’t go through what they went through. So after I traveled the world (in the military) for 20 years, when my time was up, I returned. That pride, it grows from the bottom up.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

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