Category Archives: Editorials

Illinois is a Center of Aerospace and Aviation Technology

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Photo furnished
Tino Oldani (left), president of Ingersoll Machine Tools, speaks with Rex Walheim, NASA astronaut, during a tour held at Ingersoll Machine Tools in 2017.

•August 22, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Rockford Register Star

Many Illinoisans don’t realize it, but our state is a center of aerospace and aviation technology.
Illinois’ aerospace cluster is centered around the northern and northeastern portion of the state. The Rockford area alone has more than 70 companies in the aerospace supply chain employing 7,000 people, says the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
If you include Chicago and southeastern Wisconsin, “there are more than 200 companies in the aerospace cluster, including giants such as AAR Corp., Northrop Grumman and Boeing,” DCEO says.
Illinois is home to prime contractors and subcontractors that together supply the U.S. military, NASA, Boeing, Airbus and smaller airplane manufacturers with numerous systems and components.
In fact, it’s been estimated that there’s no commercial jet in the air today (apart from those made in Russia) that does not have Illinois-made parts and systems on it.
Why northern Illinois? Sagar Patel, president of aircraft turbines at Woodward Inc. in Loves Park, explains.
“Over time we have built the ecosystem here, with companies that planted their roots here long ago and have adapted to the changing technologies successfully,” says Patel. Read More

1908 Springfield Race Riot Led to the Creation of the NAACP

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•August 15, 2018•

Editor’s Note: This article is a compilation of multiple stories written by former (Springfield) State Journal-Register reporter Pete Sherman for the special section “Outrage: The events and aftermath of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot” that appeared in the June 1, 2008, edition of The SJ-R to mark the 100th anniversary of the riots.

By The (Springfield)
State Journal-Register
IPA Bicentennial Series

One of the pre-eminent civil rights organizations was born from one of the worst moments in Springfield’s history.
In August 1908, a white mob, thwarted in an attempt to lynch two black inmates in the Sangamon County Jail, went on a rampage. They destroyed dozens of black-owned businesses and homes in Springfield. Two black men were lynched and five white men died during the riot, with dozens more injured. Other deaths connected to the riots happened in the days prior to and after it ended.
Appalled that such an event took place in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, civil rights activists in New York began meetings that led to the formation of the NAACP.
For numerous reasons, noticeable tension along racial lines existed among the 50,000 people who lived in Springfield in 1908. That tension boiled over in August, having simmered for at least a month after the first of two high-profile accusations were made against black men.
New to town
On or near June 1, 1908, 17-year-old black teenager Joe James jumped off a freight train passing through Springfield. Police ordered him to leave but James stuck around, and was eventually arrested for loitering. Read More

Understanding Illinois: The Strength of Family and Community Can Fight Poverty

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•August 15, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I have been reading a 2017 report, “Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence and Trauma” by a century-old social services organization in Chicago called the Heartland Alliance.
Since the stated objective of the organization is to end poverty, maybe it follows that the 43-page report seems to hammer away on the theme that poverty is the fount of all social pathologies.
I beg to differ. Doing so will put these scribblings in the middle of an intense, on-going, half-century old debate about the roles of culture and poverty in shaping our society. The Left tends to agree with the Heartland Alliance, while the Right tends to see dysfunctional culture at the family and community level as the root of poverty, not the poverty itself.
As I read the report, two families from my post World War II childhood in rural central Illinois came immediately to mind. Please indulge me.
Bertha Hughes of LaFayette, Illinois (pop. 300) lost her young husband to a fatal heart attack in 1945, when her four children ranged in age from 13 down to 6. She was left with nothing but the family’s $500 home, which had no plumbing. Read More

Understanding Illinois: Make No Little Plans-They Have No Magic To Stir The Blood

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•August 8, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Illinois could sure use a couple of big thinkers and doers like Daniel Burnham and William Stratton. Based on what I see of political TV ads, we may have to wait another four years. But we can dream, can’t we?
Architect and city planner, Burnham was the driving force behind the creation of the fabulous “white city” that was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which put Chicago prominently on the world map.
Overcoming earlier false starts by others, a national economic panic, and almost impossibly tight deadlines, Burnham triumphed. The fair drew 27 million people to Chicago (the Illinois State Fair each year draws maybe half a million).
In 1906, Burnham went on to develop his namesake plan for Chicago—the glistening public lakefront, extensive park system and wide boulevards that symbolize the city today. He became famous for the line: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
In 1952 at age 39, Republican William G. Stratton was elected governor of Illinois. Over two terms, the slight-of-build state chief executive with the squeaky voice transformed the Prairie State. Read More

Lincoln the First President to Make Use of Electronic Mass Media

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•August 8, 2018•

By Steve Tarter
Of the Journal Star of Peoria

FDR used the radio, JFK scored on TV and Donald Trump expouses on Twitter. But the first president to make effective use of electronic communications was Abraham Lincoln.
His use of the telegraph, a tool used extensively during the Civil War, was one of the things that made Lincoln a unique communicator in tumultuous times.
“Two things set Lincoln apart in terms of his relationship with, and mastery of, the press,” said Harold Holzer, author of “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion,” published in 2015. “His language was simple and direct enough to make press reprints of his speeches especially compelling. Second, he courted journalists from the beginning of his career.”
Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York City, added two more things: “(Lincoln) drafted editorials for his Whig and Republican newspapers and owned a newspaper, himself (as did his arch-rival, Stephen A. Douglas),” he said. Read More

Understanding Illinois: We Must Not Steal From Young Peter to Pay Old Paul

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•August 1, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

As I near 77, I find myself on a treadmill, you might say, of visits to doctors, specialists, clinics, hospitals. Ditto for many contemporaries I hang with. I worry that our society can’t afford all the health care that we oldsters enjoy.
In just the past few years, I have had procedures or operations for Lasik, cataracts, hernia repair, depression, prostate cancer, arrythmia, and more, plus many medications and endless check-ups.
I have no idea what all that costs, because we are shielded from the numbers. I did read that the new-fangled proton beam radiation treatments for my prostate cancer cost $100,000, several times the cost of traditional radiation for prostate cancer. But Medicare covered the treatments, and I was told there wouldn’t likely be any important side effects (there were), so who cares?
As a result, I am in relatively good health, and thankful. Yet still I worry that we are robbing Peter to pay Paul for all this.
Some background. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that 5 percent of the population consumes half the costs of health care. This nickel slice isn’t all for oldsters, but much of it is. Read More

Storied HS Football Rivalry Continues This Year

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•August 1, 2018•

By David Porter
Of the Arcola Record-Herald and the Tuscola Review

At the end of 2016-17 school year, there were only four schools in Illinois that had won more than 700 football games in their team’s history. And two of them are small-school rivals just 8 miles apart.
Tuscola, population 4,391, and Arcola, population 2,864, have been battling it out on the gridiron since the 1890s. At times, including present day, their conferences have kept them apart, but the “Cola Wars” are set to resume Aug. 31, 2018, during the Illinois’ Bicentennial.
They narrowly missed facing off in 2017, as both teams climbed the brackets in the state Class 1A playoffs. Arcola, which has four championship titles, was eliminated in the first round while Tuscola was runner-up in the Final.
The Arcola Purple Riders have title bragging rights with four championships — the most recent was 2015. They also won the state title in 1978, 1985 and 1988. The Tuscola Warriors won in 2006 and 2009. Read More

Letter to the Editor1: 7-25-2018

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Dear Editor,

The July 11 issue contained a letter from Ms. Ellen Dick-Ferrera who seemed to want to reduce the issue of abortion, the deliberate terminating of the life of an unborn child, to what she calls a “choice”. Throughout her remarks she champions what she calls “choice”.
While knowing, as she writes, that she is not fond of crotchety and those she considers to be ignorant old men, as a former unborn child who is well on my way to becoming, if not ignorant, a crotchety old man, what I know for sure is that if my mother had chosen to end my life in the womb I would have had absolutely had no choice in the matter at all. As President Reagan once pointed out: “I’ve noticed everyone in favor of abortion has already been born.” Read More

Cahokia Mounds in Collinsville: ‘America’s First City

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•July 25, 2018•

By Mike Koziatek
Of the Belleville News-Democrat

A gaggle of rambunctious fifth-graders scrambled to the top of the 100-foot-high Monks Mound to get a great view of the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis and burn off energy at the end of their class field trip to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
Before climbing Monks Mound, the Gardner Elementary students from Waterloo, Illinois, toured the historic site’s spacious interpretive center in Collinsville, Illinois, and learned how Native Americans based at the mounds conducted trade with people in other regions, including the Great Lakes for copper and the Gulf of Mexico for seashells.
“People from around the world come here to see the Cahokia Mounds, and it’s right in our backyard,” said Amy Wagenknecht, one of the students’ teachers.
The students were among the estimated 300,000 people who visit the state historic site each year.
Monks Mound was built by Native Americans, who are now known as members of the Mississippian culture. It is the largest pre-Columbian, earthen structure in all of North and South America, said Bill Iseminger, the assistant site manager who has worked at the Cahokia Mounds site since 1971. Read More

Understanding Illinois: The Titan Versus The Third-Rate Businessman

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•July 25, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

This column is one of several about colorful but little-known characters from Illinois history, written in tribute to our 2018 bicentennial this year.
Charles Tyson Yerkes and George E. Cole were larger-than-life figures who squared off in the Gilded Age of the 1890s, when Chicago politics made today’s game look like tiddlywinks.
In 1886, fresh out of jail in Philadelphia for financial improprieties, Yerkes exchanged a loyal wife and six children for a stunning beauty. The twosome headed for Chicago, the fastest growing city in the world, to make his fortune, which he did, many times over.
Yerkes built or bought 48 street car lines to get Chicagoans around, and became worth a reported $29 million, when that was more than real money. In business, he was tough as nails, and brilliant.
For example, the great retail merchant Marshall Field and fellow investors completed a street car line in Evanston, immediately north of Chicago. They figured it made sense to hook up to Yerkes’ line where the two cities met. But Yerkes said No, leaving Field three blocks short of a good investment. Read More