“What did I know about restoring old buildings when I started out? Absolutely nothing,” recalls Carolyn Oxtoby, who is often called “the patron saint of downtown Springfield” f]]> One day while she was a professor at what was then Sangamon State University, Dr. Caryl Moy came upon a woman standing in front of a frosty window. The woman had cleared a space and was gazing out at ]]> Mbanna Kantako is on a roll.From his rental house just off North Grand Avenue in Enos Park, the 54-year-old blind man talks about the advent of spring and the need to till the soil. He speaks of pollu]]> The office of Bishop Thomas John Paprocki is a veritable shrine to hockey.On a table sits a miniature Stanley Cup, next to a photo of him posing on the ice with members of his beloved Chicago Blackhaw]]> Jacqueline Jackson still tends a herd of cows but nowadays they’re figurines on her mantle.Raised on the Dougan Guernsey Dairy Farm near Beloit, Wis., in the 1930s and 40s, Jackie decided at age]]> William “Bill” Shea’s wheelchair sits in the corner of his basement. It is both a reminder of the past and a foreshadowing of the future. At 59, Shea embodies the qualities of an Oly]]> Brad Jones doesn’t stand out amid 100 or so vendors at HorrorHound Weekend in Indianapolis earlier this month.He is a diminutive, bearded, 30-year-old guy from Springfield in baseball cap and gl]]> To call Tom Irwin a fixture on the Springfield music scene would be something of an understatement. Beginning in the mid-1970s as a bass player and eventual frontman for various local rock bands, stra]]> From the Women’s Suffrage March of 1913 to serving in Congress, the women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., have served both their communities and their nation. The group, formed in 1913 by 2]]> A man in a fedora walks into an empty classroom on the second floor of a building on Washington University’s campus and waits in the darkened room. He has never been here before – not to t]]> The spirit of Vachel Lindsay was alive and well in Springfield Nov. 5 in the form of his granddaughter, Louisa Lindsay-Sprouse. She was visiting from Eugene, Ore., to promote creative writing in Sprin]]> “I believe in luck, fate and destiny,” says Christopher Trudeau.So when Trudeau, 27, and his bride-to-be, Joann Durbin, 24, realized that this Sunday comes up 10-10-10 on the calendar, the]]> Of the estimated 400 to 500 people who showed up to a Columbus Day rally in Charleston for state senator and Republican governor hopeful Bill Brady of Bloomington, most were Republican voters angry wi]]> He’s lived in Springfield for nearly 70 years – most of it with his wife, Midge, and their 13 children in a rambling white clapboard house at the corner of Whittier and Laurel Ave.But at a]]>