Home of Edgar Lee Masters in Petersburg. PHOTO BY KENROSSALEX VIA WIKIPEDIA.ORG The only class of people less happy to confront dead writers than high school sophomores are probably mayors. Dead writers cause more trouble in their hometowns than even the most factious of them ever do when they are alive. Over in Petersburg, I […]
Illinois – James Krohe Jr
Posted inOpinion
Trumped-up charges
Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/TNS Brother Trump is the savior come to rescue America, in the opinion of a majority of self-identified Republicans. On the stump he works crowds into a fever with his perorations against immigrants (how he spells “Mexicans”) who are surging across our borders without papers or prospects, taking “our” jobs […]
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A “D” for damnation
ILLUSTRATION BY RICK NEASE/TNS Ordinarily I would not trouble the Roman Catholic church with my opinions. Its sacred books are divinely inspired; my columns, alas, are not. I would happily take my nose out of the church’s business if it would stop sticking its into mine. Same-sex marriage is a civil matter, and it is […]
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Off the menu
Marquette Inn in Chicago, IL. A few years ago, I met an old pal from Springfield in Chicago. We grabbed a bite at the Marquette Inn, the ground-floor diner named after the magnificent 1895 Loop building of that name which housed it, a place sentimental for both of us for different reasons. It was just […]
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Getting a lot right
Solar panels were installed in 2012 at the parking lot of Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California. The state schools are turning to solar in hopes of saving billions state-wide on energy. PHOTO BY ANNE CUSACK/TNS Me and parking lots, we go back a long way. I’ve written at least seven columns over the […]
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Aggressive behavior
Karen Otterson (left) and Don Norton (right) hold signs used by panhandlers at a July 2 Springfield City Council meeting. The pair successfully sued the city in a federal class action lawsuit over the citys anti-panhandling ordinance. PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Nobody likes being bullied. Nobody likes being called names. Nobody likes being asked for […]
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Lincoln’s Union problem
The Quartet by Joseph Ellis Bells in Springfield – church bells, hand bells, even cell phone ringers – rang at 2:15 p.m. on April 9 to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of major Civil War fighting. Except, as I explored in part in “Naming rights and wrongs” (July 9, 2015), the Civil War […]
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Reforming what matters
PHOTO COURTESY OF AFSCME Tell me, brother, don’t you understandWe’re all working for the Pharaoh “Pharaoh” Richard Thompson© BMG Rights Management US, LLC Reform. Our problem is not that everybody talks about it but no one ever does anything about it. Our problem is that everybody talks about it but only a few people get […]
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A place for business to live
PHOTO BY DAVID HINE On July 28, Mayor Langfelder 2.0 made good a campaign promise and appointed the members of a new Economic Development Commission that will advise the city’s – which is to say the mayor’s – Office of Planning and Economic Development. Major development projects, such as the bungled Bluffstone proposal to build […]
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Tuning in
So much of happiness, I’ve realized, depends on getting tuned in. When he was a young married, my father used to tune in the console radio in the living room of the Krohe family mansion on Manor Avenue to the live broadcasts of big-band music “from the beautiful Blue Room in the Roosevelt Hotel” in […]
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The light that turns people on
Everybody’s very happy’Cause the sun is shining all the timeLooks like another perfect dayI love L.A. – “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman For years, people measured the deficiencies of life in Springfield in terms of lifestyle emporia or ethnic eateries. The city’s gloominess was thought to be cultural, not meteorological. But according to NASA […]
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Town character
“This is, I think,” explained the author to an interviewer in 1947, “a departure from the usual method.” That departure was to write a novel in which an American town would be the chief character, with the human beings as the background. That novel was American Years by Bloomington writer Harold Sinclair, published in 1938. The book […]
