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 […]
James Krohe Jr.
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
Discount-price cultural life
Back in March of 2009, Barnes & Noble signed a new five-year lease on its store in the strip mall at Wabash and Veterans where it has been doing business since it opened in 1993. The decision was a modest surprise, since word was out that the store might move to the long-vacant and larger […]
Posted inOpinion
Mad politics
I have little doubt about what we all ought to talking about after Tucson. The most pressing social issues revealed – again – by these shootings is the absence of a workable system to identify and help the many manifest loonies wandering our towns, and of a reliable way to keep guns out of their […]
Posted inOpinion
Riding into town on a rail
If you bend down and put your ear to a railroad track, you might be able to hear a faint clanging and banging. That’s the noise of far-off cities building new public transit systems that run on rails – the kind of transport that Springfield and most other U.S. cities of any size once had […]
Posted inOpinion
Death and dishonor
The motives people have for entering the public sphere often are murky. Their motives for leaving it prematurely are usually even more so. Tim Davlin is only the latest of several Illinois public men to have killed themselves recently. Four such deaths have occurred in Chicago since 2007, the latest being Phil Pagano, for 20 […]
