It was no internet in terms of its impact on communications but in the 1960s and ’70s cheap web offset printing allowed anyone who had a gripe, a dream or even just an itch they needed to scratch to “put out a paper.” All you needed was some rubber cement and a typewriter and an exaggerated sense of your own importance. In the 1970s and early ’80s such “newspapers” popped up around Springfield like weeds after a spring rain – the Spectrum, Pure News USA, Atlantis, The Phoenix, Focus, Citizen.
I started two of those papers and wrote for a third, so I knew a doomed newspaper when I saw one. Such appeared to be Illinois Times, which blossomed in the fall of 1975. It had real journalists who were paid (barely) and had an office but the sign out front was hand-painted and it could afford only one telephone. I figured it would be dead by the time the ducks headed back north, lamented only by whoever loaned it money.
Which just goes to show what I know. Since 1975 IT has published not just more consecutive issues than any of its contemporary papers but more than any newspaper in the state capital save the State Journal-Register and its predecessor papers, which had a 144-year head start and (since the 1920s) the California wealth of the Copley Press behind them.
Ever since the days of the Sangamo Journal in 1831, newspapers in Springfield were created to back a faction, to push a party line, to carry a flag, to settle a grudge. IT’s program, to the extent we had one, was not to boost party or money as conventional dailies did. Nor were our editorial preoccupations radical or hippy or causist like most other alternative weeklies. (A place less imbued with the spirits of rock and dope can’t be imagined.) We were progressive improvers in the old-fashioned sense of those terms. We were not exactly fuddy-duddies but it would not be too far wrong to say that IT was alternative to the SJ-R in the way that a left shoe is an alternative to the right.
We wanted to make Springfield better, in short, not different. Of course, to abet change a paper has to be paid attention to by influentials. But who are the influentials in a city this size? In his first editorial, Alan Anderson Jr., announced his hope that the nascent Illinois Times community would attract the town’s “best people,” that is people who are active, involved, curious and concerned. As this paper saw it, then, the city’s best people included not only the likes of aldermen and county board presidents but that nice, retired lady who planted a flower patch on her sidewalk that inspired her neighbors to do the same.
This caricature appeared over Jim Krohe’s regular Illinois Times column, “Prejudices,”
Such people have never constituted a majority of the citizens of Springfield but then such people are not a majority in any polity larger than a Kiwanis Club. Happily they often are a majority of this neighborhood group or that advisory panel or this other civic group. Unknown to each other (mostly) these people meet, as it were, when they gather in front of our pages over breakfast or in the waiting room. The newspaper thus defines the boundaries of their own private Springfield. While they are visiting us, they enjoy the pleasure of believing that Springfield is a more cosmopolitan place where racial and social and economic justice matters. That the pages of IT sometimes seem to be the only place in which they matter makes us worth all the more.
Editorial manifestos are hopes more than promises and some of ours were disappointed. “We see ourselves as members not of one city, or one county, but of all the downstate region,” we hymned in the debut issue. “We are as concerned with Athens as with Zeigler; with Fancy Prairie as with Pleasant Plains.” Alas, few of our Springfield readers were concerned with any of those places. But readers can’t be interested in places they’ve never heard about so we will try harder to tell them. There’s an agenda, if one is needed, for the next 50 years.
Any person who is now in her 70s and 80s will have learned that merely surviving for so many years is an accomplishment. But longevity by itself is not enough. The early IT made no rash promises to save this tiny corner of the world, or even improve it, merely to make it easier for the people who live here to improve it. Many readers who have been with us since 1975 probably agree with us that while Springfield has gotten bigger it has not always grown. But we hope they also agree that while Illinois Times has gotten older, it has not sold out or given up.
Beardstown-born and Springfield-raised, James Krohe Jr. contributed well over a thousand feature articles, reviews and essays of opinion to Illinois Times when not pursuing a career as magazine journalist and critic, specializing in such disparate fields as urban planning and Fortune 100 management. He was Illinois Times’ contributing editor when it debuted in 1975 and served in that capacity on a half-dozen other magazines in New York, Chicago and Springfield. Illinois in all its aspects has been a recurring topic; the best of that work is available at The Corn Latitudes at www.jameskrohejr.com. Mr. Krohe also authored the prize-winning Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois.
This article appears in 50th Anniversary special section.
