Illinois History Minutes

It’s February 17^th. And on this day in 1836, surveying work was completed on Petersburg, a brand new town on the Sangamon River that would soon become the county seat for Menard County. The surveyor hired to lead the platting of the new community was a 27-year-old law student and state representative named Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln lived upriver in the small village of New Salem. He had moved there in 1831, thinking his career would grow along with the town. But New Salem did NOT grow. By 1840, its remaining residents had abandoned the town for Petersburg. As for Abraham Lincoln, he moved to Springfield, finding success there as an attorney and politician.

Today, many of Lincoln’s friends and associates are buried in Petersburg’s cemeteries, including Ann Rutledge, the woman Lincoln is believed to have been in love with until her premature death.

Its February 16^th, and on this day in 2004, WILL’s morning talk show, Focus 580 welcomed an obscure U.S. Senate primary candidate who introduced himself by explaining his unusual name.

"Well, usually the first thing people want to know is where did I get this name. Barack Obama. And people mispronounce it. And call me Alabama. There are all kinds of variations to it."

During his Focus 580 appearance, Obama answered questions from callers on taxes, immigration, the Patriot Act --- and healthcare. On that topic, Obama proposed guaranteed healthcare for certain age groups, as a stepping-stone to something more ambitious.

"And I think that if we can start with children and those persons 55 to 64 that are the most vulnerable, then we can start filling in those holes, and ultimately, I think move in the direction of a universal healthcare plan."

It’s February 15^th. And Knox College was established on this day in 1837 in the western Illinois town of Galesburg, by the town’s namesake, George Washington Gale. The college name is traced to two different Knoxes, Calvinist leader John Knox and George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox. Knox College hosted one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. And it was the inspiration for the Old Siwash stories, humorous stories about college life written a century ago by George Fitch.

On this day in 1842, the Illinois state capital welcomed its first railroad train. The train came to Springfield from Meredosia on the tracks of Illinois’ first railroad, the Northern Cross, which would eventually stretch from the Mississippi River to Danville. The route is part of the Norfolk Southern railroad today.

February 14^th is Saint Valentine’s Day, and also the anniversary of the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seven members and associates of “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang were shot and killed in a garage in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The prime suspects for the shooters --- members of Al Capone’s rival South Side Gang, and possibly Chicago Police officers seeking revenge for the killing of an officer’s son.

Another mass shooting occurred in this day in DeKalb in 2008. Steven Kazmierczak, a University of Illinois grad student with a history of mental illness, opened fire on students in a lecture hall on the campus of his alma mater, Northern Illinois University. 23 students were shot and six of them died, as did the shooter, by his own hand.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was still a baby. And she said the city shaped her as a writer.

Brooks wrote about the Black experience in poems like “Kitchenette Building”, which she recorded here, comparing the dream of escaping poverty to the exhausting grind of day-to-day life for a poor family.

BROOKS: “We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong

Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner, and Illinois Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poetry throughout the 20^th Century, and taught extensively at colleges, mostly in her hometown of Chicago, although she herself never went beyond junior college.

It’s February 10^th, and on this day in 2007, Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, stood before the Old State Capitol in Springfield to announce he was running for president.

OBAMA: “I know that I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”

The man who would become America’s first Black president said he advocated for change because he knew the nation was capable of it, that it had changed before when called upon to do so.

OBAMA: “Today, we are called once more, and it is time for our generation to answer that call” 

Obama would make change the theme of his campaign, as he ran against older and more experienced candidates, on his way to a two-term presidency.

It’s February 9^th, and on this day in 2006, readers opened up the University of Illinois student newspaper, the Daily Illini, and found some of the cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had printed four months earlier. The cartoons, some of which depicted Islam as a religion of violence, sparked global protests --- some of them violent.

The cartoons’ publication in the Daily Illini attracted both praise and complaints, including a demonstration on the Quad by Muslim students. It also led to the suspension by the Daily Illini’s publisher of the two editors who decided to run the cartoons, on the grounds that they kept their colleagues in the dark about it. Those editors denied the charge, and said they ran the Muhammad cartoons, not to endorse them, but to test principles of free speech.

It’s February 8th, the 50th birthday of the musical “Grease”. You know the song “Summer Nights”if you’ve seen “Grease”, unless you only saw its original production at the Kingston Mines Theater in Chicago, which opened on this day in 1971.

In that production, Danny and Sandy sang a different song,“Foster Beach”, named for the beach on Chicago’s lakefront. The original “Grease” was full of Chicago references, drawn from co-authorJim Jacobs’ own high school experiences.  

It’s the birthday of the Boy Scouts of America, launched on this day in 1910 in Ottawa, Illinois, the home town of co-founder William D. Boyce.

On this day in 1990, Governor Jim Thompson signed a bill legalizing riverboat gambling in Illinois. The state’s first gambling boat launched on the Mississippi River at Alton the following year. Today, Illinois has a total of ten riverboat casinos. Riverboat gambling was promoted as a milder form of gambling because the flow of customers was disrupted by the boats’ regular trips up and down the river. But today, the boats are permanently docked, thanks to a change in the law in 1999.

On this day in 1911, future actor and president Ronald Reagan was one day old. He was born the day before in the town of Tampico, to Nelle and Jack Reagan. Ronald Reagan would grow up in small towns in northwest Illinois, first in Tampico, then Dixon, and then in Eureka, where he attended college.

Feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan was born in Peoria on this day, February 4th, in 1921. Interviewed on Peoria public TV station WTVP, Friedan said that while there were things about her Peoria childhood she found limiting, there were also benefits. 

FRIEDAN: “The good things that I got from Peoria, was that sense of community, and that sort of American rootedness in a way. And a sense of a larger reality than the sophistication of New York and Los Angeles, which I think is a good part of my effectiveness, politically.” :17  

Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique”, widely credited with inspiring a second wave of American feminism. She also co-founded the National Organization for Women … and organized the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, with rallies in several cities calling for equality for women in jobs and education.