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 […]
James Krohe Jr.
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
‘Honey, where’s the snowshoes?’
Every winter, when the snowflakes begin to fall, I would love to bring tidings of good cheer to my fellow townspeople but I can’t, because so many of their sidewalks are buried under snow. As the city of Ann Arbor, Mich., reminds its citizens, “Clearing snow and ice from sidewalks should simply be looked upon […]
Posted inOpinion
Stay with me
After 40 years, area tourism promoters still don’t have a compelling answer to the central question of their trade, which is, How ya gonnna bed ’em down in Springfield, after they’ve seen the Tomb? As I noted back in April (“The Presidential museum turns five,” April 29), attendance at the Presidential museum even in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Markable authors
On Oct. 12, on what would have been the subject’s 100th birthday, a marker was unveiled at Second and Jackson streets, noting the once-presence nearby of the boyhood home of Robert S. Fitzgerald, the noted poet, teacher, and translator of the classics. (See “All is not well forever,” Nov. 19, 2009) Robert Fitzgerald was arguably […]
Posted inOpinion
Toward a farm-fresh food system
Readers of the brand new Illinois Times might not have learned learn much about who controlled the Illinois House, but we reported so diligently where they could buy farm-fresh eggs that it became a standing joke around the office. It was 1975. Anti-corporatism, pesticide paranoia and food faddism had come back into vogue. We joined […]
Posted inOpinion
Warrior days
It’s that time of year again, when youth gangs dressed improbably in bloomers and armed with basketballs rumble at the gym to defend the honor of the Red and Black or the Green and White – or, as in my case, the Blue and the Gold. In the mid-1960s I proudly, if ineptly, represented Washington […]
Posted inOpinion
Monument to a dead building
What, I wonder, is the overdue fine on a library lintel that was lost for 36 years? The carved stone lintel that stood atop the main entrance to the old library building had been salvaged when the building was demolished in 1974 and trucked to a storage yard at the state fairgrounds. There it sat […]
Posted inOpinion
The new Know Nothings
The late Daniel Moynihan, who represented New York in the upper chamber of Congress in the days when the U.S. still had senators, once observed that while everyone is entitled to his opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts. Nothing – not the bow ties, not the Ivy League education, not the erudition […]
Posted inOpinion
Dim reflections
It is always a relief to turn off the TV set and pick up a good book, and never more than after a political campaign season such as that just finished in Illinois. Indeed, reading is essential for anyone who wishes to understand the state’s politics. How much better than the blare and the rant […]
