Warren Franklin Goodell

Warren Franklin Goodell's grandfather, Addison Goodell, had come to Illinois from Ohio in the 1850s, and had started a bank and a farm real estate and farm-management business. Addison's two sons, Warren Sellick Goodell (Warren Franklin's father) and Nathan Phillips Goodell went into business with him.

After his graduation from Harvard in 1921, Warren Franklin Goodell pined his father and uncle in the banking and farm-management business. During the Depression the bank closed, and Warren's father and uncle died soon thereafter -- within hours of each other, in 1934 - leaving Warren with the farm-management business and what was left of the bank.

"There was a big farm loan business with the bank," Warren Jr. explains. "This was why he had several trips back East in the '30s Dad would go back to New York and talk to the investors, and tell them not to foreclose because they couldn't get anything out of the foreclosure. But the land was still there.... Eventually he and the bank officers were able to pay back the bank's depositors 105 percent of their investments. He was very proud of that.

"In the mid-1940s, farmers started buying up the land, and the farmmanagement operation went out of business," Warren Jr. continues. "Warren, who was then living in Urbana, went back to school and received a master's degree in agricultural economics from Illinois in 1949. For the rest of his life, he was employed by the state of Illinois, working out of an office at the University, providing such services as advising county assessors on the evaluation of farm property.

Warren also became interested in student life at Illinois and was one of the founders and financial backers of the agriculture student cooperative fraternity IlliDell (named after Illinois and Goodell), designed for students coming from an agriculture background. The fraternity is located at 303 East Chalmers Street, Champaign. Recently an oil portrait of Warren Goodell was placed in the fraternity's main lounge. The cooperative is now affiliated with Alpha Gamma Sigma fraternity.

Warren managed all the Talbot family farms after Arthur Newell Talbot's death in 1942. Warren died at home, at 501 West Indiana, Urbana, in 1965.