Photo by Jim Bowling, Herald & Review
A team photo of the original Decatur Staleys.

•September 19, 2018•

By Justin Conn
Of the Decatur Herald & Review

A.E. “Gene” Staley’s successful corn manufacturing company in Decatur was already producing starch, glucose, sugar and syrup in 1919 when it added professional football to the assembly line.
Staley, owner of the Staley Manufacturing Co., would eventually make Decatur the “Soybean Capital of the World.” He was behind the creation of Lake Decatur, the Staley viaduct and the Staley Building (now the Tate and Lyle Building).
But Staley’s legacy will forever be linked with the NFL’s Chicago Bears, originally the Decatur Staleys — a football team that grew from Staley’s desire to dominate an industrial football league and expand his brand.
With no professional football league at that time and many former college football players working factory jobs, industrial leagues rose in popularity in the early 1900s — particularly in the college-football-crazy Midwest.
Staley, wanting to offer athletics as an outlet for his employees, decided in 1919 to form a team of his own. The first team was made up of the existing pool of Staley employees, though about half the squad had played in college. The team practiced and played at Staley Field — built and also used as a baseball facility. Read More

•September 12, 2018•

By George Eaton

In summer 1814, skirmishes between the U.S. and British-backed warriors under the leadership of Black Hawk flared up and down river from Rock Island.
Since 1803 the U.S. had owned both banks of the Mississippi River. Lt. Zebulon Pike had reached the Rock Island in 1805 and immediately recognized its strategic and tactical importance. The Rock Island Rapids raced for 12 miles upriver. From Rock Island, the Army could control the entire Upper Mississippi River Valley by controlling the rapids.
Locally, the Sauk and Meskwaki, led by Black Hawk, opposed a disputed 1804 treaty that transferred over 50 million acres of land to the U.S. An Army post on the island could also keep an eye on Black Hawk and his followers.
The battles of 1814 confirmed to the Army that it needed a presence on Rock Island. In May 1816, Fort Armstrong was built on the downriver end of the island. The small Army contingent there was tasked to control the Upper Mississippi River Valley by monitoring the Rock Island Rapids; maintaining observation of assumed anti-American Sauk Indians in the area; maintaining peaceful relations between the local Native American tribes; and, later, providing security as settlers moved into the area. Read More

•September 5, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Three Downstate (outside metro-Chicagoland) legislators recently introduced a resolution to separate Chicago from the rest of Illinois.
Based on a recent analysis of the incidence and reflection of state revenue and spending, these lawmakers should be wary of biting the hand that feeds Downstate.
Resentment of Chicago by Downstaters goes back at least to 1870. For a graduate paper written years ago, for instance, I quoted from the diary of a man from my hometown of Toulon (Stark County), who in 1870 visited the House gallery in the old state capitol. He wrote that he was regaled by a debate on the House floor over whether to cede Chicago to Wisconsin or Indiana.
Yet, according to a report issued in July by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU, the 96 Downstate counties (outside the 6 counties that make up Chicagoland) receive dramatically more in spending from the state than they send to Springfield in taxes.
The big losers are the suburban counties that surround Cook (Chicago). The Simon Institute analysis shows the suburban counties receive back only 50 cents for every dollar they send to Springfield in taxes.
In sharp contrast, the 19 counties in deep southern Illinois, where resentment of Chicago seems strongest, receive almost $3 for every dollar folks there send in. Read More

Black Hawk statue is seen from the west side of the Rock River on Wednesday, July 16, 2014, at Lowden State Park in Oregon. MAX GERSH/RRSTAR.COM

•August 29, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Of the Rockford Register Star

First, let’s get his name straight. It was Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak. In English, he was Black Hawk, war chief of the Sac and Fox tribe who lived most of his life in the Rock River Valley in northern Illinois.
Black Hawk was born in 1767 in Saukenuk, a Sac and Fox village on the Rock River in northwestern Illinois. He built his reputation as a war fighter leading his tribe in skirmishes against the Osage tribe.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, a new enemy appeared — Americans, relentlessly moving west from the Eastern states, claiming the land for themselves as they went, building homes and villages and fencing off the fields.
The U.S. Army and state militias accompanied the settlers and protected them against the people who had been there for thousands of years. Treaty after treaty was made between the native people and the U.S. government, and they were regularly broken.
One of those documents was the Treaty of 1804, signed in St. Louis by representatives of the Sac and Fox tribe and U.S. officials. Black Hawk, who had not been at the signing, thought the treaty merely ceded some of the tribe’s ancestral hunting grounds to the American settlers. Read More

•August 22, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I just came back to my home office after attending the first-ever graduation of Illinois prison inmates who earned—outside their razor-wire fence “home”—their skilled welding program certificates at a Black Hawk College career training center in Kewanee.
Less than a year ago, I wrote in this space about a new, unique prison in Illinois called the Kewanee Life Skills Re-entry Center. The idea here is to provide career and behavioral training to medium and high-risk offenders who are within one to four years of release.
Black Hawk College has a welding center a few blocks from the Life Skills Center. Why not have inmates take their training “outside,” at the center?
“No way, can’t be done,” the bureaucrats said, of course. State senator Chuck Weaver (R-Peoria) and nearby attorney and workforce development specialist Mike Massie said, “Phooey on you,” and the barriers to such were pushed aside.
The objective is, of course, to reduce the Illinois recidivism rate, one of the highest in the nation. Recidivism refers to those released from prison who are returned to incarceration within three years of release. In Illinois the rate has been about half, and for African-Americans it has been three in five! Read More