•May 16, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Governing is a respected magazine that reports on state and local governments in the U.S. Reporter Daniel Vock recently posed this question in a lead article in the May edition: Who ruined Illinois?

Vock interviewed former Illinois Republican governor Jim Edgar (1991-98) at length, who said: “Illinois government did work (presumably when he was in office), but then we had bad luck with a couple of governors (presumably Rod Blagojevich and Pat Quinn, both Democrats).”

I have great respect for friend Jim Edgar, and I am not privy to the whole of his interview. Yet, I beg to differ with this suggestion that all blame be placed on the two more recent, admittedly failed governors he fingers.

I contend that many, maybe most, of us who participated in Illinois politics and government over the past half century share at least a sliver of the blame for our present parlous situation. Read More

•May 9, 2018•

By Jim Dunn
Of Sauk Valley Media

On Feb. 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was riding high as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in Dixon, Illinois, the county seat of Lee County and the town where he lived as a youth for a dozen years starting in 1920.

More than half a century earlier, Reagan had ventured forth from his hometown to earn a bachelor’s degree at Eureka College, class of 1932 – not an easy feat during the Great Depression.

Then he became a radio sports announcer in Iowa, an actor in about 50 Hollywood movies, president of the Screen Actors Guild, a television personality, and spokesman for General Electric.

Turning to politics in the 1960s, he served as governor of California for two terms and, on his third try, was elected 40th president of the United States.

His hometown birthday bash in 1984 found Reagan – tall, handsome and known for his sense of humor – in good spirits as he addressed a crowd that packed Dixon High School’s Lancaster Gymnasium. Read More

•May 2, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Of the Rockford Register Star

Victory Bell can still remember the night when he boarded the Illinois Central Railroad’s City of New Orleans in Durant, Mississippi, bound for Chicago, then changing trains and ending up in Rockford.

It was 1945, at the height of the Jim Crow apartheid in Dixie that purposely kept blacks poor with few rights. Bell, his mother and siblings were headed north to join his father, who had already moved north to get a factory job.

“We had been sharecroppers,” the 83-year old Bell remembers working near Durant, 60 miles north of Jackson. The family had eked out a living, but opportunities for advancement just were not there for black folks.

“I remember it was in the middle of the night when we boarded the train. We had to sit in the black section. When we got to Illinois, the conductor said we could sit anywhere we liked on the train,” Bell said, “and we no longer had to say ‘sir ‘or ‘ma’am’ to white people, which was new to us.”

His uncle and father had come to Rockford in 1943 and 1944 to get jobs that paid better than sharecropping. Read More

•April 25, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

When I was a kid politician in the 1960s, titans of commerce and industry often served on appointed boards in Illinois, especially those for higher education. No longer, it seems.

Instead, the elites of commerce, technology, industry, law, and financial services focus their influential efforts on Chicagoland. They serve through the likes of the Chicago Economic Club, the Commercial Club of Chicago, Chicago Ideas Week, World Business Chicago, the Chicago Club, and 1871 (a Chicago incubator). You see “Illinois” anywhere in that list?

Elites tend to focus on matters of direct concern to them, like business, family, social circles. Illinois as a state and its government aren’t on their radar screens.

The State of Illinois is basically responsible for education, higher education, transportation, social services and health care.

Yet, elites in Chicagoland send their kids to private schools or good suburban public, which don’t rely on state dollars.

Later, elites send their youngsters East and to other, well, elite private colleges. Read More

•April 25, 2018•

By Joseph Bustos
Of the Belleville News-Democrat

During the first century of the state’s history, the natural habitats along the Illinois River helped spur fishing industries and had places for hunting.

The Illinois River was a habitat for bottom-feeding fish such as catfish, common carp and smallmouth buffalo as well as mussels. The abundance of fish led to a commercial fishing industry between Havana and Meredosia, according to the state museum. Towns had their own markets that processed and shipped fish to large Midwestern and Eastern cities from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Sport hunters formed clubs and bought land along the Illinois River to start duck hunting resorts managed by locals, according to the state museum.

However, there also was a demand to be able to transport goods, which changed life along the river. Read More