Usually, making a Top 10 list is cause for congratulation, but not when it’s Landmarks Illinois’ annual list of most endangered historic sites. In March, the preservationist group named to this year’s list the 110-year-old bridge that carries Bolivia Road from near Lanesville in Sangamon County south across the Sangamon River to the hamlet of […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Undercount
Forget one-person-one vote; we are moving toward a one election-one vote future. The turnout of registered voters in Peoria for April’s municipal elections — and remember that not all qualified voters are registered — was a bit more than 17 percent. In Chicago’s collar counties, turnout ranged from around 12 percent to 16.4 percent. In […]
Posted inOpinion
Relying on Senator Santa
The prospect of free money leaves even a Republican Chamber of Commerce stalwart like Mike Houston sounding like a spoils-oriented ward alderman. “Sen. [Dick] Durbin is a very powerful senator,” said former mayor Houston to the State Journal-Register the other day. “I think that he will eventually be able to provide the federal funds to […]
Posted inOpinion
Big deals about little games
Finally. The Springfield High girls beat Glenwood at soccer the other night, after nearly a decade during which Chatham girls played Mike Madigan to the conference’s legislative rank and file. The win was especially good news to your favorite columnist, who is a proud uncle of the goal-scorer and a nearly proud alum of SHS. […]
Posted inOpinion
‘I’m all right, Jack.’
Years ago, when I kept an office downtown, prurient curiosity caused me to drop by the PO every once in a while to check out the creeps on the FBI’s latest Ten Most Wanted list posted in the lobby. These days I look forward to the release of Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s […]
Posted inOpinion
Chicagoland, Chicagoland
While the pundits debate whether Illinois is leaning to the left or the right, the U.S. Census Bureau, deciding on better evidence supplied by the 2010 population count, has concluded that Illinois is leaning toward the northeast. Yes, some Downstaters were cheered to learn that the City of Chicago, their ancient nemesis, lost some 200,000 […]
Posted inOpinion
A school by any other name
The good people of Chatham have built themselves a second public elementary school, to give their young the skills they will need to someday leave Chatham. The usual sorts of names for the new school were submitted to the school board by townspeople and students and staff – those of local landmarks, of a local […]
Posted inOpinion
Living too high off the hog
Springfield has become to sick people what Decatur is to soybeans, a major regional processing center in which raw materials are processed by the latest in high-tech machinery into novel products such as tennis-playing octogenarians and bankers with a 60-year-old’s bank account and a 30-year-old’s heart. According to published reports, this year the local medico-insurance […]
Posted inOpinion
‘A neat and appropriate address’
When I lived on the east side in the 1980s, I often walked past the building now called the Lincoln Depot on my way to and from downtown. Many’s the time I found myself having to wait while a freight train ambled down the track, and to kill time in that pre-Kindle age I read […]
Posted inOpinion
Sacred documents
At my age, “constitutional issues” usually involve medicine, not the law, if only because the other kind are so complex that thinking about them makes my head hurt. A boyhood reading of The Great Rehearsal: The Story of Making and Ratifying the Constitution of the United States first suggested why. Author Carl Van Doren took […]
Posted inOpinion
Honorable ancestors
Thomas Schwartz has been the Illinois State Historian since 1993. Asked how he got into the racket in a 2008 interview, Mr. Schwartz recalled that he grew up surrounded by an extended family whose members like to get together, eat, drink and tell stories. “History was easier for me,” he said, “because it was transmitted in […]
Posted inOpinion
Cheap house on the prairie
Each year for nearly 20 years now, the National Association of Home Builders and the Wells Fargo Bank have boiled down national real estate data into an easy-to-digest housing affordability index. Local housing markets are judged “affordable” according to how many families earning the national median income of $64,400 can buy an average-priced house. By […]
