Illinois History Minutes

It’s February Third, and on this day in 1809, Congress voted to carve off the western portion of the Indiana Territory and create the Illinois Territory.  The area included modern-day Illinois and Wisconsin, plus parts of Michigan and Minnesota. Both white settlers and Native Americans lived in the region, which had been claimed earlier by France, then England, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and finally the United States. The capital was at the former French settlement of Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi River. President James Madison appointed Ninian Edwards to be the territory’s governor. He persuaded Congress to grant universal white male suffrage, which at the time, was pretty progressive for a U-S territory.  

In 1818, less than a decade after its formation, the southern portion of the Illinois Territory became the state of Illinois.  

It’s February 2nd, Groundhog Day throughout North America. 

That’s Bill Murray in the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day”. And while the movie is set in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, it was mostly filmed in Woodstock Illinois, which now celebrates Groundhog Day the tradition, AND the movie every year. Their annual ceremony is patterned after the one depicted, over and over again, in the movie. 

Happy birthday to country radio station WUSN, that’s US-99 in Chicago. It first signed on in 1940, making it the oldest continuously operating FM station in the country. As WEFM, it aired classical music for years.  

Today is February First, the day when, in 1865, Illinois became the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. Ratification by the Illinois General Assembly came just one day after the amendment was approved by Congress. It took another ten months for the amendment to be ratified by 26 additional states, making it part of the U-S Constitution. 

Don Cornelius died on this day in 2012. The Chicago-born Marine, police officer and journalist created the music and dance program show Soul Train, the first Black-produced national TV show to primarily feature African American musicians and advertisers.  

It’s January 31st, the birthday of baseball player Ernie Banks, born in Dallas Texas in 1931. Banks played for the Chicago Cubs for 18 seasons and was considered the team’s greatest and most popular player. His sunny personality was on display when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at an outdoor ceremony in 1977. 

BANKS: “Banks: “We’ve got the setting … sunshine, fresh air, we got the team behind us. So, let’s play two. (cheers).” 

On this day in 1949, NBC premiered its TV soap opera These Are My Children, originating at Chicago’s WNBQ, known today as WMAQ. While it only ran a few weeks, These Are My Children was the first TV soap opera to be scheduled like the radio soaps, airing in the daytime, and running every weekday. 

It’s January 28^th. And on this day in 2009, the Illinois Senate listened to excerpts from wiretap recordings of Governor Rod Blagojevich at his impeachment trial. The FBI said they showed Blagojevich trying to sell his support of legislation favoring race-tracks to a track owner in exchange for a campaign contribution.

The next day, Blagojevich told the senators he had broken no laws, and the release of all the wiretap evidence would prove it.

BLAGOJEVICH: “I never, in any conversation, intended to violate any criminal law. All the conversations, warts and all, ought to be heard.” 

A few hours later, senators voted unanimously to remove Blagojevich from office. Later, he was convicted of federal corruption charges and served eight years in prison before President Donald Trump commuted his sentence.

It’s January 27^th, and Elmore James was born on this day in 1918. The King of the slide guitar was born in Mississippi, but beginning in the 1950s, he became part of the Chicago blues scene, and his voice and guitar playing were featured on songs including “Dust My Broom” and “The Sky Is Crying”

Football player and coach Fritz Pollard was born today in Chicago in 1894. He played football, baseball and ran track at Chicago’s Lane Tech. In college, he was Brown University’s first African-American football player, playing on their team for their loss to Washington State in the 1916 Rose Bowl.  He was the NFL’s first African-American coach in 1925, coaching for the Hammond Pros, a traveling team for which he also played.

It’s January 26th, and on this day in 1967, a major winter storm came to Illinois. In central Illinois, it produced high wind gusts and coated trees, utility lines and broadcasting towers with ice, causing many of them to topple. Among the casualties was one of the two towers transmitting the signal of WILL-AM, at the University of Illinois.  

In Chicago, where temperatures were colder, the winter storm brought snow, 23 inches of snow in 29 hours, the greatest snowfall recorded in Chicago in a single storm. 50-mile-per-hour wind gusts created snowdrifts as high as fifteen feet. A personal note --- I was a kid in the Chicago suburbs during what’s remembered as the “Blizzard of ‘67”, and for me, it was a fun adventure. But 60 people throughout the Chicago area died in the storm.

It’s January 25^th, the day in 1937 when “The Guiding Light” went on the air from Chicago on NBC Radio. It’s the show that in one episode asked the questions ------

The Guiding Light was created by soap opera pioneer Irna Phillips, and set in the fictional Chicago suburb of Five Points. The show’s title originally referred to the lamp burning in the window of the kindly Reverend John Ruthledge, the calm center in a storm of heartbreak, jealousy and intrigue. The show’s early years included radio’s first out-of-wedlock baby. There was plenty more in store, as The Guiding Light aired on radio, then television, until 2009.

On January 24 these three people were born, all in Chicago.

Animator and director Wilfred Jackson was born in Chicago in 1906. He was just 22 when he worked on Walt Disney’s groundbreaking Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie. He stayed with the Disney studio for thirty years.

Another Chicago native, science fiction writer David Gerrold, turns 78 today. Gerrold was 23 when he wrote a classic script for Star Trek, “The Trouble With Tribbles” --- the one about little rapidly multiplying blobs of fur that inundate a space station.

Also born in Chicago this day, Saturday Night Live star John Belushi, who was 28 when he filmed his big speech in the fratboy comedy “Animal House”.

It’s January 21st, and William A. Wrigley the Third was born this day in 1933. He took the reins of the Chicago-based Wrigley chewing gum company in 1961, introducing such brands as sugarless Orbit and Extra, Hubba Bubba bubble gum, and cinnamon-flavored Big Red. William Wrigley inherited the Chicago Cubs in 1977 when his father, P.K. Wrigley died. He sold the team to the Chicago Tribune four years later to pay off the tax bill. 

Sammy was one of the biggest hits from Chicagoan L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” --- not the movie with Judy Garland, but the musical that opened at New York’s Majestic Theatre on this day in 1902. All but forgotten today, this first “Wizard of Oz” musical ran for years on Broadway and on the road.