There was a touch of tension in the air when Springfield’s new police chief Don Kliment approached the podium of Unity for Our Community in the fellowship hall of an Eastside church last Saturday morning. This event marked the first meeting between Kliment and the increasingly influential group born a year ago in the living […]
Dusty Rhodes
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Aldermania
It’s a good thing erstwhile fire chief-turned-alderman Frank Edwards didn’t pull his usual shtick and get all persnickity about city regs last Tuesday night, because the horde jammed into the City Council chambers definitely exceeded the fire code. Ernie Slottag, the city’s director of communications, says it was the biggest crowd he remembers seeing at […]
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The other ball game
The bat meets the ball with a hollow thwack. On the home team’s bench, a cheer goes up as the grounder skips past the visiting players’ outstretched hands and across the field’s outer boundary line. If you close your eyes, you could almost imagine yourself at a baseball game. But then comes a sound you […]
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Aldermania
Forty minutes is an eternity in Springfield City Council time. That’s how long aldermen spent Tuesday night quarreling over the first item on the evening’s debate agenda, which involved awarding a contract for residential sidewalk construction. Some aldermen wanted the contract to go to the lowest bidder (John Chernis Concrete Contractors at $126,255.25) while others […]
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Right time for the wrong man
Eric Zorn, the Chicago Tribune columnist who made his reputation writing about wrongly convicted prisoners, also made a hobby of coming up with different phrases to describe Debra Rienbolt. When he first wrote about her in 1998, Zorn called Rienbolt “about as useless as a witness can get, no matter what you want to prove.” […]
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Counting Crimes
Last week, Sangamon County Sheriff Neil Williamson amended his agency’s crime statistics report for 2002 to include the murder of Dan DeFraties, a Springfield man who last March was robbed, abducted from the gas station where he worked, and brutally beaten to death by the side of a road. The fact that this particular roadside […]
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Ack! This coffee is burned!
For most people, coffee is a friendly acquaintance to be greeted each morning like the office receptionist. Hello, how are you, just a cup or two, and they’re ready to get on with their day. For me, coffee represents the longest intimate relationship of my life. I love the smell, I love the taste, and […]
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True blue
Last week, in the hours leading up to a City Council meeting with no feature attraction on the agenda, a rumor percolated through the Springfield Police Department that Mayor Tim Davlin would announce his pick for police chief that night. This rumor was so persistent that then-Sergeant Don Kliment found himself feeling downright dejected. “The […]
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Something right happens for the “Wrong Man”
Twenty-two years in prison is a long time, but a single weekend could be even longer when you’re waiting to see whether Governor George Ryan might pardon you on his way out the office door. Keith Harris, who appeared on our October 3 cover under the headline “The Wrong Man,” spent the past weekend “just […]
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Absentee landlords
The new Springfield Medical District Board isn’t following the usual prescription for master planning. For starters, the swearing-in ceremony scheduled to take place at the board’s first meeting this coming Wednesday will not include the four board members appointed by Governor Rod Blagojevich–he hasn’t appointed them yet, and has no immediate plans to do so. […]
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Ahead of his time?
It’s one thing to say that the whole concept of race is a phony social invention. But making this statement when your job, your livelihood, and indeed your career have been built on this very concept–well, that takes a special brand of backbone. Yet Lawrence C. Johnson did just that last week when he declared […]
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One for the union
The end is in sight for what is said to be the longest ever arbitration between the City of Springfield and the police union. Starting with a 1997 decision to cut back on the overtime pay that officers earn for showing up at traffic court, the negotiations have stalled and broken down so many times […]
