Residents were angry and surprised by a proposal that would put a homeless shelter in their neighborhood. PHOTO BY BRUCE RUSHTON It sounded like a Seinfeld episode. The Salvation Army buys a building on Ninth Street for a new homeless shelter and spends half a mill fixing it up, only for Mayor Jim Langfelder to […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Pots and kettles
The late Mike Royko, Sun-Times columnist Bruce Rauner is trying to divide Downstate from Chicago over school funding. It’s a low tactic that has a long tradition, as I noted in this column from the IT of June 5, 1981. The much longer original will appear on my blog, Second Thoughts. Chicagoan Mike Royko declared […]
Posted inOpinion
Selling off the family silver
Endangered. Photo BY DAVID HINE Bruce Rauner’s campaign to destroy the Illinois State Museum risks losing tourist income, the services of top scientists and administrators and priceless artifacts, not to mention any claim Illinois might make to being a civilized commonwealth. Might there be yet one more loss – the loss of the museum building […]
Posted inOpinion
If you don’t market it, will they come?
Photo by Alan Solomon/Tribune News Service You wouldn’t think that a town that boasts the burial place and the only adult home of a man famed around the world as not only America’s greatest president but America’s greatest citizen, a town furthermore that is just down the road from the reconstructed village where that man […]
Posted inOpinion
Bruce Rauner, progressive
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
Posted inOpinion
Where corn is god
I grew up within a block of a corn field on the east end of Springfield. Nearly every weekend of those years we’d visit the relatives on their farm outside Beardstown; over the potholes and through the corn, to grandmother’s house we’d go, with me entranced by the corn rows, like the spokes of a […]
Posted inOpinion
Imagining revolutions
PHOTO BY Anthony Souffle/TNS Drowsy after a heavy holiday meal, I settled in to finish Stefan Zweig’s classic 1934 biography of Marie Antoinette. As I drifted in and out of sleep, the Versailles in Zweig’s account of the final days of Louis XVI and his queen faded and was replaced in my imagination with the […]
Posted inOpinion
Childproofing culture
While visiting an old friend in Evanston last weekend, I attended a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at Northwestern University’s Millar Chapel. It was typical of such performances – hard benches and good music, and this time a polite “says who?” delivered to the scare-mongers among us in the form of lessons delivered in Spanish […]
Posted inOpinion
Unhappy days are here again
Photo by G. Kunz/ Tribune News Service The news media, as their name suggests, focus on what is new in the world. Journalism’s only subject is current events – “current” having been defined of late to mean “within the past 10 minutes.” Yesterday is barely mentioned, last year is nearly forgotten, a century ago does […]
Posted inOpinion
Breakfast of a champion
PHOTO COURTESY CHARLIE PARKER’S To such names as A.L. Ide, Ira Weaver and George Celani (who in the 1980s invented an express air package service out of thin air!), we should now add to Springfield’s roster of distinguished inventors that of Mike Murphy, who devised a process to turn an English muffin into a $25,000 […]
Posted inOpinion
Let the Pilgrims land again
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin PHOTO BY HARRY E. WALKER /TNS The United States should accept 100,000 refugees from the ghastly violence in Syria, said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin recently. More than half of that nation’s people have been driven from their homes and to date at least 250,000 have been killed – the equivalent of […]
Posted inOpinion
Winner takes nothing
As you might have heard, the merry band of ball players disguised as Chicago Cubs won for themselves a chance to go to the World Series this year as one of the two best teams in American professional baseball. Except that the two best teams were already known back on Oct. 4. They’re the Royals […]
