Obituaries

Harry H. “Hank” Sonnemaker, Jr., of Dunlap passed away at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 21, 2015, at his residence.

Harry was born on Dec. 6, 1926, in Peoria to the late Harry Sr. and Grace (Reiferscheid) Sonnemaker. He married Dorothy Boyer on June 12, 1948, in Peoria. She survives.

Harry attended Spalding Institute. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he obtained his undergraduate education from St. Ambrose and Bradley Universities and later graduated from the University of Illinois with his law degree.

He first entered the Navy in November 1944 and served on active duty until 1946, principally in Hawaii, the Marianas and Guam. He was commissioned Ensign in 1950 and served in various line and security-intelligence billets until 1955. When the JAG Corps was established, he became a JAGC Officer, serving for over 30 years including a two-year term as the Judge Advocate General for the Navy. When he retired, he was the senior most captain in the Navy Reserve in the United States.

Harry was admitted to the Illinois State Bar in 1955. He served as the first legal aid counselor for Peoria in 1957. He was in private practice for 50 years. From 1974 to 1986, he shared his office with his son. Other attorneys that either he either shared an office with or worked for him were Judge Robert Manning, Lou Benassi, Judge Mike O’Brien, Jerry Serritella, and Judge Joe Vespa.

Don Banta gave a gift to his family and historians by writing down his vivid memories of serving in World War II, including being in the middle of Operation Varsity, the largest airborne assault in a single day in military history, when 17,000 Allied paratroopers rained down from the skies over Germany on March 24, 1945. Nearly 3,000 of them would die.

Mr. Banta made it through the hellish fighting. He lived to be 89 and went on to become a respected Chicago labor lawyer. He died at Weiss Memorial Hospital March 30 after suffering a stroke.

Daredevil war correspondent Robert Capa jumped with Mr. Banta’s 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the Army’s 17th Airborne Division. He “hit the ground very close to me. Capa calmly went on shooting pictures in the middle of all the firing,” Mr. Banta said in his memoir.

At one point, he was so close to Gen. George S. Patton, he could see the general’s famed ivory-handled revolvers. He wasn’t a fan of the pugnacious Patton. Echoing dialogue from the George C. Scott film about the commander, Mr. Banta wrote, “He is called ‘Blood and Guts’ for a reason. But it has been the regiment’s guts.”

He also recalled the marrow-freezing misery of the Battle of the Bulge.

In Germany, Mr. Banta said, the “Displaced Persons” used as Nazi slave labor rose at night, like avenging ghosts, from underground coal mines they lived in. They inflicted nocturnal retribution on their former captors by killing cows and vandalizing property.

Arthur C. Chapman, 97, of Evanston and formerly Highland Park passed away on March 10, 2015 at the Mather in Evanston. The son of Louis Chapman and Regina Giller Chapman, he was a New York native, graduated from NYU and its law school where he was on law review, served in North Africa in World War II and after the war in the reserves in the Judge Advocate Corps of the 5th Army.

Patrick D. Ertel passed away at the age of 67 on Sunday, March 15th, in his recently adopted hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, after suffering a massive heart attack.

The youngest son of Louis G. Ertel and Edith (Marks) Ertel, Patrick was born on October 21st, 1947, and was raised in Muncie, Indiana. He graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame (1970) and earned his Juris Doctor from Northwestern University (1973). He practiced intellectual property law for 42 years in Chicago, the past 16 of those years with Marshall, Gerstein & Borun, where he served as a Managing Partner.

Patrick was respected as a generous mentor, whether it was by colleagues at work or by youth on the soccer field. He held a commitment to education and not only actively pursued his own ongoing learning, but also proudly supported anyone whom he might be able to help do the same. He saw athletics as a tool to positively impact the lives of young people—especially his three daughters, as well as many of their teammates—and was a dedicated youth soccer coach who retired his whistle with a winning record.

Patrick died doing something he loved: running. He ran three days per week during most weeks, and although it had been decades since he completed the Chicago Marathon, he may have been in the best shape of his life. If there was any other activity that Patrick might have chosen as his last, it surely would have been captaining his boat, Pearl of the South, across the waterways of the Lowcountry with his wife and dog by his side.