A few years ago, the executive director of the National School Boards Association said, “In a democracy, school boards are the closest thing to the ground.” “Like dandelions in a lawn,” I muttered to myself. In my too-many years as a public scold, I have learned to accept the many absurdities occasioned by government of […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Fountain of death
How did that song go again? I had it right on the tip of – oh yeah. “I hope I die before I get old.” Apparently you have a good chance to doing just that if you live in Sangamon County. A health research center at the University of Washington in Seattle recently published the […]
Posted inOpinion
A double shot of urban-type feel
“Everyone wanted it to have an ‘urban’ type feel,” said one focus group participant to the State Journal-Register about the new supermarket that Niemann Foods Inc. plans to build at Second and Carpenter, “although it’s in a neighborhood.” The County Market’s potential shoppers were talking about Starbucks and a deli counter. A surer way to […]
Posted inOpinion
Topping off the tank
As I understand it, the Republican position on gasoline prices is to save drivers money by refusing to raise the excise tax on gasoline that pays the federal share of building roads and bridges. As this will cause the road network to crumble, people will have to stop driving, thus saving them hundreds a year […]
Posted inOpinion
Springfield visited
No doubt some members of the of the Springfield Diocesan Council of Catholic Women settled into their seats at the Centennial Auditorium in March 1949 looking forward to being instructed by their invited guest on the writers and converted Catholics G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Graham Greene. I suspect more of them came to learn […]
Posted inOpinion
Made in the shade
I think that I shall never see a car park lovely as a tree. Not in Springfield anyway. You’d have to travel to the Gobi to see expanses of treeless terrain to match the city’s larger parking lots. At White Oaks Mall, for instance, the mall’s southwest lot boasts 13 smallish trees on the perimeter of a space that […]
Posted inOpinion
All aboard
I suppose the question to the Springfield City Council ought to be phrased this way: If they come, will you build it? “It” is a multimodal transit center, a nice plan for which was unveiled in February by Downtown Springfield, Inc. and the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission [See the Feb. 23 IT cover story, […]
Posted inOpinion
Going on… and on
A while back – a long while back – I undertook to write a smallish book about a large topic, the history and culture of Illinois. I was certain that after more than 30 years spent reading, thinking and writing about Illinois in most of its aspects, it was a job I could do in […]
Posted inOpinion
True unbelievers
In February, the New York Times’ Timothy Egan nominated Roger Williams as the true founding father of America’s religious freedom. It was Williams who, in 1636, established a new colony at Providence to which he invited Jews, Quakers and unbelievers. These were the sort of people whose presence had offended the Massachusetts Puritans, who had […]
Posted inOpinion
The Cadillac Queen drives again
Readers who were around back when Ronald Reagan was just another lying politician and not yet a saint will remember the Cadillac Queen. She was a Chicago welfare recipient who starred in Reagan’s stump speeches for having used 80 names, 30 addresses and 12 Social Security cards to collect benefits for four husbands who were […]
Posted inOpinion
Tag-teaming history
Another Lincoln birthday month has come and gone, and this one was busier than most. We learned that the Mary Todd Lincoln that had looked down from an oil portrait in the Executive Mansion for more than 30 years isn’t the president’s wife after all. The painting was removed as fraudulent, but I think it […]
Posted inOpinion
Wanderings and doings
Yes, kids, I really did used to walk two miles to school. For the whole of my ninth grade year in 1962-63, I often walked from Washington Junior High at 21st and Jackson to our house near the Statehouse. I was not moved by any of the current faddish arguments for walking. Nor was I […]
