News Progress

•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

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

•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

•July 18, 2018•

By Roger Ruthhart
for Illinois Press Assn.

The Quad-Cities region has provided a footnote to history for virtually every war fought on American soil, including the Battle of Campbell’s Island – the western-most battle of the War of 1812.
According to the records of Indian historian John Hauberg, as the French and Indian War ended, the last of the French soldiers of the northwest spent the winter of 1760-61 near present-day Rock Island, ice bound, on their retreat from Michilimackinac to Fort Chartres, Ill., following the British conquest of Canada.
All Indian villages in the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes were canvassed by British agents to enlist Indians for fighting in the frontier during the Revolutionary War.
The Americans, even before General George Rogers Clark conquered the Illinois country in July 1778, had agents who had succeeded in keeping the Sauk and Meskwaki from joining the British ranks. With the arrival of Gen. Clark, messengers were sent to all of the tribes inviting them to come to Cahokia to join in treaties of peace.
According to the writings of Hauberg, the Sauk held to the middle ground – trading with the British but also with the Spanish at St. Louis and with the Americans in Illinois. Read More

•July 11, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Regular readers of this space might recall that I have a love affair with Chicago. I take Amtrak in, revel in the incomparable offerings of symphony and jazz, art and museums, all within walking distance, and follow up with dinner from an endless selection of clever restaurants.
Yet I continue to be haunted by the paradox of mindless street violence playing out daily, almost in the shadow of this oasis of high culture. How can the two worlds exist side by side, I wonder, in a civilized society?
I have written about this before, based on visits I have made to the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Yet I feel compelled to weigh in again, for the violence, now chronicled in leading national and international publications, threatens to mar this great American city.
In recent weeks, there have been incidents of apparently lawless groups of youth brazenly walking off their gang turf and into the vibrant city center, generating high anxiety among the culture seekers.
Violence in Chicago is actually down significantly from what it was in the 1990s. But it wasn’t much reported then, as it is now, and most present mayhem occurs within a few poor, largely minority neighborhoods to the west and south of the city center.
According to the Heartland Alliance, a poverty research group, in 2016 African-American men aged 15-34 represented just 4 percent of Chicago’s population, yet made up over half the city’s murder victims. Read More