Illinois – James Krohe Jr

This week’s column is the 1,000th to appear under my name in this paper, and I’ve decided it’s time to take a break from weekly opinion-mongering. After so many essays, even I am getting tired of hearing myself talk. Besides, I have been working on what I believe will be a very interesting book about […]

The Springfield city council has before it a draft of a new comprehensive city plan, City of Springfield Comprehensive Plan, “Forging a New Legacy,” intended to guide development in the capital city until 2037 or until a growing Chatham annexes it, whichever comes first. Compiled by the clever Santa’s elves at the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional […]

Oh dear – the North Koreans are threatening the United States with a preemptive nuclear strike. In November, Kim Jong-un ordered a test launch of the Hwasong-15 missile, which has the potential to reach any spot in the U.S. The missile for the moment is incapable of delivering any warhead more lethal than a couple […]

The Illinois Bicentennial looms. In the Illinois that exists, the Rauner administration looks forward to beer parties and pantomime shows. In the Illinois of my daydreams, historians scribble away at biographies of the state’s best (not necessarily most famous) citizens. People like Springfieldian Logan Hay, for example. By the end of his life in 1942, […]

Cemeteries are not only places to park dead uncles while they await their maker. They also are, or were, parks, picnic grounds, trysting places, settings for patriotic rituals and party venues for teens happy to find one place where their elders didn’t shout at them to quiet down.  But cemeteries also can be classrooms.Any person […]

It is possible paint a picture with numbers. The State Journal-Register did it the other day when it used data from the Illinois Report Card, the state’s education data source, to draw before-and-after portraits of 15 area school districts from 2001 and 2016. I was particularly interested in one measure: how much of the enrollment […]

The news from the Illinois Statehouse almost makes one nostalgic for the Illinois politicians of old, those sticky-fingered but charming rogues. Today’s Capitol, we learn, is a playpen for not at all charming jerks, creeps and pervs who feel not only empowered but entitled to prey on any females who cross their paths. Sex at […]

Unless we are blessed with snow, December hereabouts can be a grim month, which might have been one of the reasons that Vachel Lindsay decided to shuffle off this mortal coil on the fifth of that month back in 1931. Which melancholy reflection started a chain of thought that took me (mentally at least) to […]

Usually, Amazon sells stuff at a discounted price. At the moment it is trying to sell something at the highest possible price – a second headquarters operation somewhere other than its hometown of Seattle. That takes in a lot of territory, and a hundred or so U.S. cities are competing for it. The prize (according […]

In 2015, in a rare lucid moment (see “A place for business to live,” Aug. 6, 2015), I suggested that Mayor Jim Langfelder’s just unveiled economic development commission include not only the usual businesspeople and pols but labor economists, urbanists, tech-heads and an historian or two, the last to remind aldermen of all the economic […]

UIS wants to be everything it can be in spite of the General Assembly, so it has launched a four-year, $40 million fundraising campaign, “Reaching Stellar: The Campaign for the University of Illinois Springfield.” Its marketing rhetoric certainly soars: “With your support, we can propel the University and today’s students to new heights and continue […]

In my youth, Springfield’s Roman Cultural Society held an essay contest every year in which grade school kids were invited to address the topic, “What Columbus Day  Means To Me.” I never entered then – I hadn’t yet learned how to spell “imperialist exploitation” – so here is my essay, 50 years late. Illinois and […]