How did that song go again? I had it right on the tip of – oh yeah. “I hope I die before I get old.” Apparently you have a good chance to doing just that if you live in Sangamon County. A health research center at the University of Washington in Seattle recently published the […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
A double shot of urban-type feel
“Everyone wanted it to have an ‘urban’ type feel,” said one focus group participant to the State Journal-Register about the new supermarket that Niemann Foods Inc. plans to build at Second and Carpenter, “although it’s in a neighborhood.” The County Market’s potential shoppers were talking about Starbucks and a deli counter. A surer way to […]
Posted inOpinion
Topping off the tank
As I understand it, the Republican position on gasoline prices is to save drivers money by refusing to raise the excise tax on gasoline that pays the federal share of building roads and bridges. As this will cause the road network to crumble, people will have to stop driving, thus saving them hundreds a year […]
Posted inOpinion
Springfield visited
No doubt some members of the of the Springfield Diocesan Council of Catholic Women settled into their seats at the Centennial Auditorium in March 1949 looking forward to being instructed by their invited guest on the writers and converted Catholics G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Graham Greene. I suspect more of them came to learn […]
Posted inOpinion
Sputnik moments
In the fall of 1957, the then-Soviet Union put into Earth orbit the world’s first artificial satellite. The news excited me – I was a geeky 9-year-old who looked forward to the next issue of Popular Science magazine the way the young Jim Edgar must have looked forward to the next issue of the Illinois […]
Posted inOpinion
Made in the shade
I think that I shall never see a car park lovely as a tree. Not in Springfield anyway. You’d have to travel to the Gobi to see expanses of treeless terrain to match the city’s larger parking lots. At White Oaks Mall, for instance, the mall’s southwest lot boasts 13 smallish trees on the perimeter of a space that […]
Posted inOpinion
Faith, hope and statuary
The vandalism being perpetrated in Washington, D.C., it turns out, is not confined to the nation’s finances. Perhaps you read of the House subcommittee that met in March to hear arguments against the design of a proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial near the National Mall. The design is the work of architect Frank Gehry, who […]
Posted inOpinion
All aboard
I suppose the question to the Springfield City Council ought to be phrased this way: If they come, will you build it? “It” is a multimodal transit center, a nice plan for which was unveiled in February by Downtown Springfield, Inc. and the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission [See the Feb. 23 IT cover story, […]
Posted inOpinion
Going on… and on
A while back – a long while back – I undertook to write a smallish book about a large topic, the history and culture of Illinois. I was certain that after more than 30 years spent reading, thinking and writing about Illinois in most of its aspects, it was a job I could do in […]
Posted inOpinion
True unbelievers
In February, the New York Times’ Timothy Egan nominated Roger Williams as the true founding father of America’s religious freedom. It was Williams who, in 1636, established a new colony at Providence to which he invited Jews, Quakers and unbelievers. These were the sort of people whose presence had offended the Massachusetts Puritans, who had […]
Posted inOpinion
The Cadillac Queen drives again
Readers who were around back when Ronald Reagan was just another lying politician and not yet a saint will remember the Cadillac Queen. She was a Chicago welfare recipient who starred in Reagan’s stump speeches for having used 80 names, 30 addresses and 12 Social Security cards to collect benefits for four husbands who were […]
Posted inOpinion
Tag-teaming history
Another Lincoln birthday month has come and gone, and this one was busier than most. We learned that the Mary Todd Lincoln that had looked down from an oil portrait in the Executive Mansion for more than 30 years isn’t the president’s wife after all. The painting was removed as fraudulent, but I think it […]
