Illinois – James Krohe Jr

Some say that names are destiny. Surely jurist Learned Hand was doomed at his christening to take up the law, just as John Wisdom took up philosophy or Brandon Belt picked up a baseball bat. I am indebted to New Scientist magazine for what I know about “nominative determinism,” a spoof discipline that purports to […]

Ever know a kid who never quite grew up because her parents wouldn’t let her? The Y block in downtown Springfield is a lot like that. I described the partial clearing of that parcel in 1978. (See “A shooting,” Dec. 30, 2015.) I returned to the topic of its unrealized promise in 1981 in “People, […]

Hepzibah was a young woman of a sort we’ve all known – smart, full of gumption and eager for a little bit more from life than life was prepared to give her. “It does seem to me that any one who thinks me either pritty or remarkably inteligent must err greatly. I often complain of […]

All that banging and buzzing you might have heard coming from the Springfield city council chambers in September was the council and mayor building a wall along the city’s border with Sangamon County and the world beyond. That’s when alderpersons approved an ordinance requiring that contractors make good-faith efforts to ensure that Springfield residents work […]

Next summer, if things go well, I will become an historian, to the extent that the published author of a book-length history of mid-Illinois can be called an historian. In truth, I am untrained in the arts of the rigors of scholarship and don’t write history so much as I write about history. But I […]

If its citizens struggle to see anything new in a landscape with which they have become too familiar, what is the poor landscape photographer to do? In Larry Kanfer’s case, he does nothing much at all, to judge from the evidence of his new collection of Midwestern landscape photographs, A Prairie State of Mind, from […]

“You cheated!” is the lament of sore losers everywhere. Donald Trump warns – ominously, ludicrously – that the November election will be rigged too, presumably because the Democrats will flood the polls with phony voters. This is a nightmare from the Chicago of the 1950s that Republicans can’t get out of their heads. Things aren’t […]

Donald Trump has run for the presidency before. He ran in 1968 disguised as George Wallace and again in 1996 as Patrick Buchanan. He also ran in 1992, as my excerpted column from Oct. 29 of that year recalls. Perot’s defeat – by a Clinton – did not still the authoritarian impulse among our countrymen, […]

How embarrassing. The City of Springfield finds itself in the same bind as the young swain who, wooing a sophisticated lovely, invites her to a posh dinner only to realize at the end of the meal that he doesn’t have the money to pay the tab. Attentive readers will know of the hoped-for redevelopment of […]

The “I go to my reunion” essay is a staple of the genre. By now there is nothing new that can be said, but readers read them anyway, fearful that other people’s reunions were better than theirs. Which is a very high school reason. The most the reader can hope for from such an essay […]

PHOTO BY DAVID HINE When the Illinois State Fair was first staged in 1853, country people went there to see other country people. Later, city people went to see country people. These days  –  well, I’m not sure what people go to see at the fair. For decades, managers have tried to stage a one-size-fits-all […]

The Centennial Building, now known as the Howlett Building, will be 100 years old in 2018, the bicentennail of Illinois becoming a state. PHOTO BY DAVID HINE Last week, in “Getting it right this time,” I proposed that the State of Illinois commemorate the bicentennial of its founding in 1818 not with celebration but with […]