C. D. Stelzer

Untitled Document “You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” says Joshua “Illinois” Shapiro, “and for 25 years there were no Indiana Jones films with crystal skulls. Sometimes I actually have had to take on a job. . . . but my love, my passion is the crystal skulls, because I know […]

Untitled Document Do you feel the love?” asks Bill Homann. He is sitting in an easy chair in the living room of his modest suburban tract home in Valparaiso, Ind. On a nearby coffee table, the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull is resting on a towel. The skull appears strangely luminous, reflecting a piercing blue-white light from […]

Untitled Document The last time John Larry Ray visited New York City was in 1965. He was between jobs, collecting unemployment benefits. While there, he remembers, Malcolm X was murdered. When he visits the Big Apple this week, he will be discussing the assassination of another black leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who […]

Untitled Document The contents of 77 boxes shelved in the special-collections department of the Brookens Library at the University of Illinois at Springfield tell a love story, a love story that gave rise to one of the most curious chapters in modern American literature. The documents, including diaries, journals, manuscripts, and approximately 2,000 letters, chronicle […]

Untitled Document Helen Howe’s audience on this bone-chillingly cold day is an English class of about two-dozen seniors sequestered in the library of Robinson High School in eastern Illinois. To get their attention, the snowy-haired octogenarian pulls a well-preserved issue of the now-defunct Saturday Evening Post from her valise and holds it up. The page she […]

Untitled Document When Thomas J. Wood began working at then-Sangamon State University, in late 1986, the files of Lowney Handy, James Jones’ mentor, were still in disarray. “Apparently when they emptied her files they just dumped them into boxes,” says Wood, curator of the Handy Writers’ Colony Collection at the University of Illinois at Springfield. […]

Untitled Document I play guitar — or, at least, I like to think I do — but I never have learned any Christmas carols, though I’ve attempted to fingerpick “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” with little success. In a more secular vein, I’ve also tried to memorize the lyrics to a song by Woody Guthrie […]

John Larry Ray has been pitching this story for nearly a decade — but until now few have been willing to listen. On March 30, 1998, Ray says, less than a month before his brother died, he wrote a letter to Janet Reno. The then-U.S. attorney general gave him no consideration. Then the brother of […]

Untitled Document The lone robber entered the Farmers Bank of Liberty at 9:10 a.m. on Friday May 30, 1980. He didn’t bark any demands, and he didn’t hand the teller a note. The gun in his left hand spoke for itself. He placed a crumpled plastic bag on the counter. As the teller stuffed cash […]

Untitled Document It’s a languid August evening in Cobden, a former stop on the old Illinois Central line about 10 miles south of Carbondale. At one time, the surrounding orchard country supplied cities to the north, including Springfield, with fresh produce by way of the railroad. Freight trains, belonging to Canadian National, still chug through […]

Untitled Document Bill Warner never knew how close he came to dying. After clocking out at the Mount Olive, Ill., waterworks around midnight, he decided to walk home by way of the Union Miners Cemetery. Entering the graveyard, he ambled past the tombstones, pausing to gaze from afar at the silhouette of a shrouded monument. […]