Back In The Day: When Winnetka’s best-known restaurant was part of a national story

This article originally appeared in the April 30, 2018 issue of the Winnetka Current as Back In The Day: When Winnetka’s best-known restaurant was part of a national story

By Peter Butler

During the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, Harvey and Clara Klingeman opened the Indian Trail Restaurant on Chestnut Street, where the recently closed Taste on Chestnut restaurant was located.

Some thought it was a sign that the economy was improving because they signed a three-year lease. When they opened the restaurant, it had 30 seats. A dinner of steak, potatoes, spiced pears, rolls and two fresh veggies could be had for $1.

For 54 years until its closing in 1988, the family-owned restaurant mastered outstanding and elegant comfort food highlighted by fresh, hot rolls and very rich desserts. They often shared their recipes with their customers. It grew to a seating capacity of 300 and served 320,000 meals annually by the 1970s. Rock Hudson and Charlton Heston, both of whom lived on the North Shore, were regulars, and Colonel Sanders became good friends with the Klingemans.

For most of its life, the restaurant was really the only true dinner option in Winnetka.

In 1986, the film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” brought national attention to the restaurant by prominently displaying its exterior as the movie traversed much of Winnetka.

A darker story that brought the restaurant national attention takes us back to 1967, when unbeknownst to Indian Trail, the future killer of Martin Luther King Jr., James Earl Ray, spent almost two months as an employee at the restaurant. This was also just two years after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the Village Green before a crowd of 10,000.

The FBI’s investigation and subsequent interrogation of Ray created an itinerary of James Earl Ray’s days preceding and following King’s death. After escaping from a Missouri prison, Ray arrived in Chicago by bus, and on May 3, 1967, he took a job at Indian Trail as a dishwasher under his assumed name, John L. Rayns. His salary was $103 a week. Although the Klingemans considered him to be quiet and preoccupied, they were pleased with his work and promoted him to become a food server with a $117 weekly salary.

He was living on North Sheffield Avenue in Chicago but moved to Lunt Street on Chicago’s northwest side on June 17. He left the Indian Trail job during the week of June 19. From Chicago, his stops included far ranging places such as Mexico, California and Canada, before heading to Alabama and eventually Memphis, where he took King’s life on April 4, 1968.

Following the shooting, Ray fled to Atlanta, then Toronto, and finally London before he was caught on July 19, more than three months after the shooting. Although he initially pleaded guilty, he spent much of his life trying to reverse his sentence, and his motives remain something of a mystery. As he was approaching his death in 1998, Martin Luther King’s son, Dexter, visited Ray in prison and actually suggested he believed Ray and that he should be released.

After learning of Ray’s identity, the Klingemans felt terrible about having brought an accused murderer into the restaurant to work side by side with other valued employees. They said at the time, “If this man had been given proper guidance and some kindness and concern, instead of kicks and rebuffs from the time he was a child, who knows? Our country may have been spared the irreparable loss of Dr. King.”

The Winnetka Historical Society promotes awareness of Winnetka’s heritage through artifact preservation, public access to their museum and Schmidt-Burnham Log House, and enlightening programs, exhibits and publications.

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12 Responses to “Back In The Day: When Winnetka’s best-known restaurant was part of a national story”

  1. February 14, 2021 at 11:56 AM #

    I remember having wonderful dinners here on “dry” Sundays with my mother and aunt. I don’t know if they served liquor on other days but all of Winnetka was dry on Sundays. The food was delicious. This was in the 1960s.

  2. April 15, 2021 at 1:09 PM #

    Is there any record Charlton Heston lived in Winnetka? I always thought he lived on Maple in Wilmette.

  3. April 15, 2021 at 1:19 PM #

    You are correct – the Hestons indeed lived on Maple in Wilmette. We have edited the article accordingly. Thank you for pointing out this typo!

  4. David M Schmidt September 21, 2021 at 11:56 AM #

    my best friend and business partner was Paul Klingeman ..my mother worked there as a waitress in the mid 40’s when my father was in the war ..Paul and I started a little shop in the old car sales business location ..basically a run down garage in Winnetka . our store was called Spectacle ..then we moved it to Evanston and later opened a second store called Khaki that was successful and we sold both stores and moved to Aspen CO and opened a very successful clothing store called Tom Mix …which we operated for 22 years ..Paul died of cancer about 10 years ago …I sure miss him …I am David Schmidt . now age 79 ..

  5. October 13, 2021 at 11:13 PM #

    I am cleaning out my grandmother’s papers. She kept a lot. She lived in Plainfield and would have been 97 this year. I’m coming across many restaurant receipts and having fun looking up if any of them are still around. So far, no luck. She sure liked to travel around to eat. This receipt is from August 1976. Thanks for the history lesson from this article. I am sure she is happy that I got a history lesson today 😊

  6. Dan Sweeney May 26, 2022 at 11:02 AM #

    David, My name is Dan Sweeney , I am also 79. Did you know John Kilngeman? I went to school at MSU and roomed with him and we used to get care packages from his dad (Steaks) who owned the restaurant. I was wondering if he was still alive and how to contact him.
    Regards

  7. June 28, 2022 at 12:18 AM #

    Dan – Contact me on Facebook and I will connect you with John.

  8. Herbert Maye August 8, 2023 at 6:11 PM #

    To the winnetkahistory.org webmaster, Thanks for the great post!

  9. August 14, 2023 at 2:22 PM #

    You’re welcome

  10. August 31, 2023 at 9:17 AM #

    What about the “pressed ham incident?”
    That time that 6 boys dropped trou and pressed their bare asses up against the Indian Trail picture windows on the north side of the building? Patrons were observed to jump in their seats, spilling the soup into their lap. Several diners, outraged, chased the perpetrators down the street before the guys were observed to speed away in a big turquoise Cadillac.
    Landmark event at the Indian Trail. I always liked the inventive name of the restaurant but would never eat its bland ‘crutch and cane’ food.

  11. August 31, 2023 at 1:44 PM #

    Heston was in Boy Scout Toop 2, [Wilmette] along with my father, who lived nearby at 1317 Elmwood, just east of the tracks.

  12. February 2, 2024 at 11:30 AM #

    I am looking into some family history and my brother and I were reminiscing about my mother working at The Indians Trail restaurant in the early 50’s. Does anyone have photos?

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