Ken Fleck was 9 years old and growing up in the very nonagricultural South Side of Chicago when he decided he liked carrots so much he would try to grow his own.

His mom, who grew up in a farm town in Austria and knew about such things, told him carrots liked sandy soil. So Fleck dug all the sand from his sandbox into the hard dirt underneath, “and from a nickel pack of Burpee carrot seeds, I ended up with 27 pounds of carrots,” he said.

A few years before that, his second grade class at Sacred Heart Elementary School at 70th and May streets was visited by the church pastor, a World War II Navy chaplain wearing his white uniform, who asked the boys if they wanted to become a priest when they got older.

“Of course, everybody raised their hands,” Fleck said. “We wanted to be like the pastor and have everybody respect us.

“Twelve of us took the exam for Quigley South (Preparatory Seminary), seven of us were accepted. And two of us, 18 years later, were ordained together.”

Fleck’s classmate also became a Navy chaplain, and Fleck went on to a career in South Side and suburban Catholic parishes, staring as a deacon at St. Bride’s Church in the South Shore neighborhood and wrapping up last year after a 17-year stint as pastor of St. George Church in Tinley Park. There have been stops along the way at South Side parishes St. Felicitas, Our Lady of Peace and St. Barnabas and a short stint at St. Jude in South Holland.

He officially retired from St. George last summer, and parish leaders there wanted to celebrate his long tenure there with a Farewell Mass on Sunday, delayed because of the pandemic.

“I said let’s not call it a farewell Mass

since I’ll have been gone more than a year,” Fleck said. “Let’s call it a Mass of Thanksgiving.

“The other thing is, I’m not dead.”

Instead, he’s living in a cottage in Michigan City, Indiana, though he’s back in the south suburbs at least three times a week to play racquetball and to tend to the various flora he planted in Tinley Park over his long tenure.

In an offshoot of his own love of gardening that started with that 5 cent package of carrot seeds in the late 1950s, Fleck tried to engage students at the parish school with growing things, working with them to start seeds in the early spring and having them help with harvesting in the fall from the parish tomato and pepper plots.

Some of his efforts have been more successful than others.

“I would encourage children to work in the garden with me in the summer, and they would start out enthusiastic,” Fleck said. “The summer would wane on, and pulling weeds and the other things, I’d end up taking care of it.”

He did often get help from another source, World War II veteran Jay Surufka, now 98, who would come out to work in the parish gardens three or four mornings each week, “showing up when the sun first was up and the garden was still in the shadow of the school” and quitting when it was time to go to daily Mass.

During the school year, the parish garden became a vehicle for learning, as well as for doing good deeds.

“Each classroom grew plants from seeds starting in March, transplanted in April to one of two greenhouses, and for a donation to the food pantry parishioners could get plants for their gardens,” Fleck said, noting parishioners could choose to grow an equal number of plants for the food pantry as for their family in lieu of a donation.

“We kept track each week of the veggies we grew, and which other parishioners grew and brought to church. The last two years our totals were over 1,600 pounds,” all donated to the Tinley Park Food Pantry.

He also used plants to try to engage the school’s alumni, planting apple trees representing 10 graduating classes.

“I told them this was their tree,” Fleck said. “Let’s put it out there and see what happens.”

That was in 2009, and while a few of the trees have since died, and they never really generated the alumni engagement Fleck had hoped for, the remaining trees are producing apples, along with lessons for the current students.

“This year I went to the eighth graders and showed them a YouTube video on how to prune apple trees, then put them into teams and had them prune the trees,” he said. “They did a wonderful job.”

And that pruning resulted in a bumper crop of fruit that also was donated to the food pantry. In previous years when group activities weren’t as difficult to arrange, the seventh and eighth graders would help process the harvested apples and the sixth graders would help bake them into apple muffins and pies, once again for the food pantry.

Lately, St. George’s most notable crop has been pumpkins, a tradition that started in the parish’s youth garden in 2006. The following year, Fleck was laid up after an Achilles tendon injury and an adult parishioner asked to harvest the plot’s pumpkin blossoms for an Italian dish.

“He picked all the blossoms regularly from the same vine,” Fleck said, though one pumpkin had already set and was growing. “All the energy of that vine was channeled into the one pumpkin. It grew to be 243 pounds. We named it Baby Huey.”

The church held a contest to guess the pumpkin’s weight, raising $300 for the Tinley Park Food Pantry, and after it was done being used as an autumn decoration in front of the altar, Baby Huey was turned into 70 pumpkin pies for the pantry, an operation that took “24 volunteers and two weeks,” Fleck said.

In the years since, Fleck has tried to surpass Baby Huey, and while he’s grown some nice-sized pumpkins, they never came close to the 300-pound bench mark he’s set for success. That is, until this year, when he shifted his pumpkin operation to his Michigan City cottage. He grew two pumpkins that he had yet to weigh, but both are in that range, he believes, though he wouldn’t know for sure until one was to be weighed this weekend as part of the activities surrounding his Mass of Thanksgiving.

While growing the gourds in a new location may have helped increase their girth, that posed a new problem for Fleck.

“I had a devil of a time getting it into my car — it’s just huge,” he said of the smaller pumpkin. The larger one remains in his patch until he can figure out how to move it. “You don’t realize how big it is until you have to put it in your vehicle.”

He had help unloading it at St. George, and he’s confident it’s his largest one ever.

“It’s looking beautiful, and we’ll see what we come up with, but I think I can take that off my pumpkin list,” Fleck said.

Since his retirement from St. George, Fleck has stayed busy, returning to Tinley Park often, and filling in at other churches as needed. He’s currently helping out at St. Terrence in Alsip while the pastor there is on vacation.

And he’s done his fair share of traveling as well, hiking with his friend and fellow retired pastor Jerry Gunderson in Colorado and California, and participating in a walking pilgrimage in Spain.

The trips have given him the means to focus on his future, he said, and think about what he wants to do next. Right now, that’s advocating for the future of the Catholic Church and trying to bring people back to the institution he loves. That could include some big changes, like making celibacy optional in the priesthood, and instead of embracing a “smaller, more faithful church,” making the institution one that’s a “field hospital amid all these problems,” a place that’s “here for the sinners, where all are welcome.”

“One of the wonderful things, now that I’m an old man and I’m retired, is I can speak the truth,” he said. “What are they going to do, fire me? I’m not the pastor of a parish anymore, so you just speak the truth, but respectfully and pastorally.”

A second Mass of Thanksgiving celebrating the Rev. Ken Fleck’s 18 years as pastor of St. George Church in Tinley Park is planned for 11:30 a.m. Nov. 14.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.