PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
Opinion
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Big bucks
Our next door neighbor on MacArthur was a nice lady named Mae Shaheen. She lived with her brother, George. They were the siblings of Joe Shaheen, who ran the Springfield Speedway. On race nights Mae worked the beer stand at the track. George was a traveling salesman. After Mae’s death the house was cleared and […]
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Bluffstone builds
At the Downtown Springfield Inc. annual awards dinner in January at the Wyndham City Centre, the Springfield Mayre Jim Langfelder talked about the most recent developments in the Bluffstone LLC proposal to build student housing downtown, which I wrote about it in “Doing development right.” The city council, you might remember, chose not to grant […]
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I call this progress
Reader Jay Kitterman CHA, director of the Culinary Institute at Lincoln Land Community College, writes to remind me that the death of Indian restaurants in Springfield in 1981 I described in a recent column has, happily, been remedied. “We now have two Indian Restaurants in Springfield. One is Taste of India. One of our students, Amandeep Kaur, is […]
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With 772 you get eggroll
As part of Illinois Times’ 40th anniversary observances, we will revisit in light of more recent events columns from James Krohe Jr.’s Prejudices series that ran from 1977 to 1994. Minor errors have been corrected and the pieces edited for length. The original, much longer essay can be read in its entirety on Krohe’s blog, […]
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19th century Illinois women made history
Many people recognize the name of Jane Addams from high school history textbooks, but few know much else about this incomparable woman of 19th-century Illinois history. And she was hardly the only one. Few opportunities awaited Illinois women in the era. In 1900, only 16.3 percent of all Illinois women were employed, with the exception […]
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Farmer Jim
Last week I remarked on a pretty good new book about corn and the Midwest from the U of I Press. (See “Where corn is god.”) I didn’t know it then, but when I became a magazine journalist my Springfield address doomed me to writing about corn. My first cover story for a national magazine […]
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The 1.4 percent solution
Back in June of 2015, in “The Razor blade in the apple,” I speculated about the likely effects if passed of Mr. Rauner’s ballyhooed property tax freeze. Among its provisions, the Rauner tax freeze would exempt local governments from the Prevailing Wage Act and allow those governments to limit what is on the table when […]
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Where corn is god
I grew up within a block of a corn field on the east end of Springfield. Nearly every weekend of those years we’d visit the relatives on their farm outside Beardstown; over the potholes and through the corn, to grandmother’s house we’d go, with me entranced by the corn rows, like the spokes of a […]
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Shameless in, shameless out: Running for president in 2016
Editor’s note: Roger Simon’s column substitutes this week for Jim Hightower’s column, which was not available at press time. “We live at a time of great events and little men.” No, this was not said after the last Republican presidential debate. It was said more than two centuries ago by Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de […]
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Government needs to work better
Whoever wins next November’s presidential election, it’s a sure bet that at some point he or she will vow to set the federal government on the straight and narrow. Maybe the new president will even resort to the time-honored pledge to create a government “as good as the people.” It’s a bracing sentiment. But you’ll […]
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Rauner releases calendar
Last fall, I got a tip. Gov. Bruce Rauner, my tipster said, doesn’t appear to have a state email account. The issue was germane. Besides Hillary Clinton’s infamous failure to do business on a State Department email account and her ensuing apology, Rauner has said that state employees shouldn’t conduct public business on private email […]
