All is not well forever

Robert Fitzgerald’s youth in Springfield

All but a few members of the Springfield High School Hall of Fame are not in the least bit famous in Springfield. In the English-speaking bookish community, however, one of those anointed is celebrate

Underground movements

New solutions to the old problems of human remains

Watching TV around Halloween — when so many rotting corpses rise from the grave to threaten the unwary that it is easy to think that it is an election year — reminded me that dead people a

My life as a guide at the Lincoln law offices

I was out of school, out of work and out of ideas when the new owners of the Tinsley Building hired me. It was 1968, and they had just restored the building at Sixth and Adams, believing it prudent to

Remember to not forget

The new race riot monument and community memory

The bronze sculpture commemorating the 1908 race riots was finally dedicated this summer on Aug.

UIS, the educational city

The original vision for the campus

I complained here recently that the University of Illinois at Springfield’s recently adopted master plan will make the future UIS campus the kind of sprawly, inchoate, inefficient place that ale

The great tradition of central Illinois oratory

The political speech in all its forms — from the stump harangue to the platform oration — figures significantly in central Illinois literature.

‘Great Refrigerator Roundup’ is a bad bargain

City Water, Light & Power’s newest efficiency rebates are inefficient

Thus the “Great Refrigerator Roundup.” Under this pilot program, CWLP hopes to encourage customers to unplug up to 3,600 pre-1993 refrigerators and freezers by providing a $50 rebate for each machine retired, recycled and replaced by a machine that has earned the “Energy Star” efficiency rating.

Three into one won’t go

The new high school debate

To build or not to build, that is the question. The answer will depend not on the review of high school facilities needs underway at School District 186. It will be determined by the voters — appropriately, if you are concerned about democracy, inappropriately if you are concerned about education.

Life in the Big House

Few Illinois governors seem at home at the Executive Mansion

Now we know. The reason that Rod Blagojevich disdained the governor’s mansion in Springfield was to save his kids from, well, the mansion. “Growing up in a big governor’s mansion, surrounded by staff is not normal,” Blagojevich writes in The Governor.

Stopped by a train

Why Springfield is helpless to stop the Union Pacific

In the early 1850s, the brand new Alton & Sangamon Railroad needed a north-south track corridor through the capital city. The City of Springfield also needed a railroad, so the city council grante