Illinois – James Krohe Jr

I expect that the main campus in Urbana and Champaign of the University of Illinois is the Downstate town that many Springfieldians know best after their own – in some parts the prettiest and in some ways (people walking!) the most interesting. It is indeed a town, with a daily population of nearly 54,000 students, […]

For 90 years, “Caterpillar” was just a different way of spelling P-e-o-r-i-a. But the company has decided to move its entire executive team of some 300 people out of the River City to Chicago’s northern suburbs. The mayor called the decision a kick in the gut, and well he might. Without these corporate Olympians, a […]

I was at my desk in 1982 when the phone rang. “Hello.” “What the hell is a pork belly?” It was Lewis Bergman, calling from New York City. Lewis was former editor of the New York Times Magazine who was then calling the shots at one of my magazines, the monthly published by the business […]

That man Trump, who relishes catastrophe, has done his part to unleash it on the planet by trashing the Obama Clean Power Plan to decarbonize the electricity generation industry. This is a matter of moment for Springfield, of course, since the capital city runs its office shredders and beer fridges on juice supplied from its […]

For some time I have been working on a history of mid-Illinois. One might ask – several potential publishers did – how one can make an interesting book of even modest size with facts and stories about such a dull place. After all, you can read a hundred county histories whose highlight was that time […]

At first I assumed that Jesse White was trying to goose sales of specialty plates to top off his budget. Why else would an Illinois Secretary of State oblige the drivers of his state to adorn their cars with the new standard State of Illinois passenger car license plate that looks as if it was […]

Opening Day is April 2, and in honor of the new season I bring you this column from 1978, when Springfield was, gloriously, home to the Redbirds, the St. Louis Cardinals’ AAA farm team. The piece was written in the mock poetic style beloved of lesser baseball writers and is embarrassing to read today. So […]

Teaching, it has been said, is like cultivating a garden. Some teachers believe that cultivating a garden is a form of teaching. The kids at Butler Elementary have been growing and harvesting heirloom seeds, specifically, seeds of the squash variety carried to Illinois in the 1830s that has been the basis of successful commercial hybrids. […]

I have written often in the past about tourism development in Springfield. The topic is a hardy perennial – not because there are always new things to say, but because there are always new reasons to say the old things again. The newest new reason is the “wow” park being contemplated for the Y block […]

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Springfield’s Rosanna Pulido about a bill in the General Assembly that would bar from schools, health care facilities and places of worship non-federal law enforcement officers seeking to enforce the Trumpian crackdown on residents whose papers are not in order. “I think the biggest question we have for Governor Rauner and […]

Oh, are we going to have us some fun. Public party space being planned in the form of a new Bicentennial Plaza between Fifth and Sixth Streets at Jackson and a park on the Y block across the street. Mayor Langfelder noted, presumably approvingly, “With that block tied into the plaza, you could have thousands […]

Who would be a gibbon? Or, more to my present point, who would be a gibbon in a zoo? We learned this week about poor Jari, a 3-year-old gibbon at the Henson Robinson Zoo. She came into this world in a zoo in Jackson, Mississippi. You wouldn’t think that life could get worse, but hers […]