David L. Finnigan, originally from Lincoln, now of Springfield, was a graduate student in architecture at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in 2018 and was reading a book about English palaces. He says, “My first thought was that it is too bad we don’t have something like that here. Then, it dawned on me – we do. […]
Cover Story
Posted inOpinion
2022 Wedding Issue
Some couples postponed their wedding plans due to COVID, while others got engaged after more togetherness during the pandemic. Pent-up demand has made 2022 the year for weddings to come back in a big way. Vendors are doing their best to accommodate all the couples who want to get married now and figuring out how […]
Posted inNews
More girls accuse detective’s son of sexual abuse
The girls were 14, 15 and 16; Zane Merreighn, the adult son of a Springfield police detective, is charged with sexually abusing them, and their parents say area law enforcement failed to adequately protect their daughters. Merreighn, the 22-year-old son of detective Jennifer Oglesby Mack, was arrested Oct. 26 on charges of sexually abusing a […]
Posted inNews
Taking health care to the streets
“The sad part is, I never smoked.” Zevernett Holloway had been inhaling the equivalent of 28 cigarettes per day for the past 43 years by simply living in her Springfield home. “I did not know about radon until I heard about it about five years ago,” Holloway said. “Then I met Nick through this program, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Healthy, wealthy & wise
The ongoing pandemic has thrown off many of our regular routines. This year’s Healthy, Wealthy and Wise issue has tips on how to get back on track physically, mentally and financially or simply just keep better tabs on your goals and progress so that you can see how far you’ve come. It’s easy to feel […]
Posted inNews
Pandemics of the past
This started as a story about what happens after a pandemic ends. Then the pandemic didn’t end. Vaccinations stalled. The delta variant fueled new waves of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. By September, some states had more hospitalized COVID-19 patients than they did during the winter surge. The economic outlook for this decade has gone from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best Films and Scenes of 2021
In his seminal memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter William Goldman wrote that there is one truism in Hollywood – “Nobody knows anything.” Case in point, the gross for the opening weekend of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was $10.5 million. Stop and think about that – the great American filmmaker of the last […]
Posted inSpecial Issues
Remembering the lives they lived 2021
Our annual REMEMBERING edition, the last issue of the year, reminds us small-town folks that people we thought we knew we didn’t know as well as we wish we had, and those we didn’t know, we wish we had known. It reminds us that many more have died this year than we could possibly write […]
Posted inNews
Holiday blessings
A home, sobriety, a future, a new career, and the chance to live. These aren’t your typical holiday gifts but they are greatly appreciated by the recipients, whose lives have been changed, and saved, during 2021. In these pandemic, politicized and polarized times it’s humbling and encouraging to learn that good things still happen to […]
Posted inNews
Where does the next meal come from?
The line of cars queuing up Dec. 10 for the food distribution at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Illinois stretched for several blocks along Capitol Avenue on a gray, foggy day. Marcia Cass was among those in line. A former home health worker who has been retired since her knee replacement surgery last […]
Posted inNews
The missing moderates
Illinoisans are passionately moderate. For a quarter century, that was the contention of the Republican governors who led the state from 1977 to 2003. Governors Jim Edgar, James R. Thompson and George Ryan governed from the middle, sought consensus and coated whatever they did with a heavy layer of pragmatism. Edgar and Thompson supported abortion […]
Posted inNews
Project Censored
Project Censored’s co-directors, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, title their introduction to this year’s edition of State of the Free Press, “A Return to News Normalcy?” drawing a direct parallel between our world today to that of post-World War I America, “When the United States faced another raging pandemic and economic recession,” with other […]
