Richard Buckner carries himself like a professional baseball player. The resemblance is more than coincidental. After finishing high school in Decatur, he attended Bradley University on a baseball scholarship and graduated with dual master’s degrees. In the early ’80s he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, but never played in a Major League game. “I wasn’t […]
Job Conger
Posted inNews
“An interesting and mysterious void”
To many, Springfield is a one-war town. One needs only to consider the internationally venerated Lincoln Tomb to understand why. This is, after all, the home of the leader who preserved the Union during the nation’s darkest conflict. In recent years, memorials to Illinoisans who died in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as […]
Posted inNews
Hello, Kitty!
Outside, it’s a gray Sunday afternoon in November, and you are a cat in a box. Since you came into this world eight months ago, you have known only your mother and five brothers and sisters who share the back of an abandoned garage on Pasfield Street. About three weeks ago, Mom departed and never […]
Posted inArts & Culture
If he shows, he’ll have to blow out 124 candles
In 1908, in his poem “On the Building of Springfield,” the celebrated poet Vachel Lindsay wrote: Let every street be made a reverent aisle, Where music grows and beauty is unchained. At the time of his death 23 years later, Lindsay’s star had faded — and his hope for a Springfield where “beauty is unchained” […]
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Flight plan
On Saturday, the passenger-airline hub in St. Louis fades to a memory as American Airlines cuts its operations at Lambert Field by nearly 200 flights a day. As part of the cutback, American will also drop six of its 10 daily flights to St. Louis from Springfield’s Capital Airport. For St. Louis, the loss of […]
Posted inMusic
Guitar society hosts Serbian-born artist
The Springfield Classical Guitar Society launches its 2003-2004 season on Saturday with a performance by Petar Kodzas, a native of Yugoslavia. Kodzas’s appearance offers a unique opportunity to see a guitar virtuoso whose training derives from a distinctly Eastern European tradition, says Russel Brazzel, society president. “He is a mature player with a friendly, younger […]
Posted inNews
Family plot
Girl Scout Troop 44 gathers in a prairie just west of Springfield. For the past year they’ve been restoring a cemetery that saw its last burial in the 19th century, but shoulder-high grass had long covered all traces of these resting places. The graveyard is important because one of Springfield’s founding families is buried here. […]
Posted inNews
The long road home
When Roosevelt Sam Smith became the pastor of New Salem United Methodist Church in New Berlin two years ago, he considered it a homecoming of sorts. The 47-year-old Smith was born in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. But back in 1883 his great-grandparents had moved to the African nation from Jefferson County, Tennessee. Settled in the early […]
Posted inNews
Not in my public housing complex
Times are not good for the Springfield Housing Authority. About 25 percent of all SHA units are empty and federal funding has plummeted over the past five years, according to SHA director Willis Logan. The feds briefly took over the SHA in 1996, as the agency struggled with financial woes and high vacancy rates. The […]
