December 1989 – I read in the newspapers recently where “Christmas at New Salem” weekend will be done away with. Seems that research has proven that the inhabitants of that short-lived village where Lincoln grew to manhood were not the beliefs that would cause them to consider Christmas as any kind of holiday. So in […]
Roy L. French
Roy L. French of Virginia, Ill., is a longtime
contributor to Illinois Times.
Posted inArts & Culture
The tick-tock of Grandma’s clock
Some of Roy’s clocks, collected over a lifetime. We lived in the country during the 1930s when I was a kid. We would do about the same thing every day, all summer long. Brother Jack and I would run to the front yard when we heard a car approaching, just to watch it go by. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Skunked before Christmas
PHOTO BY TOM FRIEDEL VIA WIKIPEDIA.ORG We lived in a frame house in Hickory Hollow during our younger years. We had many interesting experiences there, especially in the wintertime. Brother Jack and I woke up early on a dark and cold December morning. Mom usually called us twice. Once to wake us and once to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Christmas like no other
“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long.” Mr. Hoskins hummed this tune over and over, thinking things would surely get better soon. But his luck wasn’t […]
Posted inOpinion
Window panes and the state’s fiscal pain
I was a painter in my younger days. With my dad, uncle and brother, we maintained many of the buildings in the Sangamon Valley back in the forties. I started when I was 17, making 50 cents an hour and working a 10-hour day. I remember the Taylor place. The rest of the crew were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Christmas memoir
It was in Grandmother’s desk, the same desk she used to write to her sister in the 1880s. It is the same desk my mother used to write letters to me while I was in the army, and I have some of them in a drawer yet. My daughter used the desk to doodle on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The church is a blessing
Mr. Houck came early to the Sangamon Valley while it was still a wilderness without many inhabitants. He came before the land was surveyed so his fields stretched from the big sycamore tree to the east, to the large cottonwood on the creek bank to the west. All the land in between and up to […]
Posted inNews
The War Years
Untitled Document We were fishing down at Rawlins’ off a sandbar that extended into a bar pit near the Illinois River. It was an autumn day with puffy clouds in the sky placed just right. We were watching the lazy current move the willow leaves back and forth. Leaves from the cottonwood trees fell on […]
Posted inOpinion
March of March
Untitled Document March 2 — A celebration of the sun. I have been walking on frozen snow for two months, the frailty of snowflakes built into awesome cliffs and drifts. Now it rots, disintegrates, dissolves, and moves to make water, to make streams, to make rivers, to the power of floods and oceans. I especially noticed […]
Posted inNews
The legend of the ungiven gift
Untitled Document The Frenches walked everywhere from their home in the hollow. They had walked the two miles up the west hollow to Uncle George’s and Aunt Daisy’s for Thanksgiving dinner. Dave walked miles on his trap line every other day. It was an easy walk through the timber to Frank Warner’s for eggs, even […]
Posted inNews
For as long as we can
It is dark now, an early darkness that will soon give us the longest night. A thin moon hangs high in the December sky, looking down cold, the color of ice. The first wind of winter out of the north gives voice to the oak and elm. I hear their conversations, and it keeps me […]
