James Krohe Jr.

Maybe it was the recent election of Richard Nixon to the White House that left me looking to the past rather than to the future in 1974. That was the year I published Honest Abe’s Honest Almanac. The little book was, as its subtitle promises, “a cornucopia of amazing facts, useful wisdom and amusing anecdotes […]

Illinois has a very short list of distinguished governors and a somewhat longer one of able historians. The list of distinguished governors who also are able historians is very short indeed. Only one name is on it, that of Thomas Ford. Ford’s term in Springfield, from 1842 to 1848, was his first and only popularly […]

When I was a student, I was introduced to the concept that the simplest-sounding phrases had irreconcilable and contradictory meanings that rendered interpretation impossible. No intellectual test was more demanding, and some of the more elusive texts torture me to this day with the taunt, “Explain me!” I was in fifth grade. It was the […]

The obituaries for the political career of the unfortunate Scott Lee Cohen list as the cause of death all the common viruses of Illinois politics, from dunderheaded party leaders and lazy reporters to voters happy to buy a pig in a poke if the pig squeals the right way. But Mr. Cohen was not only […]

Many years ago, I made my first visit to the Illinois State Historical Library in its handsome but cramped new quarters beneath the Old State Capitol. Having time to kill while waiting for the staff to fetch me a book, I wandered up the stairs to the mezzanine that overlooked the reading room. There, in […]

“One thing I don’t like, and Springfield don’t like, is someone to come in from outside and tell us about Lincoln.” That was the late Murray Hanes, talking as only Hanes could talk, to the late A.J. Liebling during a 1950 interview in Hanes’s office in the late downtown Springfield. Hanes was one of old […]

This town has been the theater for the careers of many a self-made man and woman (and nearly as many unmade ones) but the self-taught person is rare among us. Not so a century and more ago. In Illinois’s glorious past, when men were men and women wished they lived in Ohio, schoolteachers were as […]

The American Wind Energy Corp. in December announced its intention to plant 25,000 acres in western Sangamon County with wind turbines, beginning in 2011. While county officials busy themselves determining just how many votes it will cost them to approve the firm’s new Meridian Wind Farm, we will sit back and take in the larger […]

I was a bookish boy. I read at school and at home, encouraged by boredom and the summer reading programs at Lincoln Library. I didn’t read to learn; I read to be entertained. (There is no spur to youthful literacy as sharp as crap TV.) I plowed through the entire collection of nonfiction — it […]

The folks down in Chatham are facing that dilemma so familiar to our migrant middle class families whose second homes consist of minivans or SUVs: As more and more young families with children move to the suburb looking for a safe place to raise their tax deductions, the streets become less and less safe for […]

The setting was breakfast, the mood nostalgic. I and three aging friends sat talking about mobility. No, not our corroded knees or where to buy replacement tips for our canes. We were recalling our youths, when — each growing up in a separate Midwestern town — our city was really ours. One — the spinach […]

When asked by new acquaintances which of my many achievements I am most proud, I do not mention my bird imitations or my role (admittedly peripheral) in the Great Bran Flake Robbery in 1967. I tell them I am proudest of having won the Harvard Prize Book. I do not tell them — it being […]