Illinois Public Media News

Kevin Williams was a college sophomore in Ohio when he started driving around Michigan and Indiana, knocking on the doors of Amish women with a pitch: write a weekly newspaper column about your life, tack on a recipe, and he'd get it into print. He heard "no" most of the day. Then, in Adams County, Indiana, one woman said yes.

That column, "The Amish Cook," is still running — these days written by an Illinois woman named Gloria Yoder — and it set Williams on more than three decades of reporting on the Amish and other people dedicated to simple living.

His new memoir is Not So Simple: My Adventures Among the Amish, Mennonites, Shakers, and Other Plain People.

Illinois farmers are filing for bankruptcy at a rate that's climbed for three years running — a trend that echoes the 1980s farm crisis, which is part of what led to Farm Aid's founding in Champaign-Urbana.

Jennifer Roscoe spent 34 years at WCIA-TV — all of them at the same central Illinois station — before signing off last month. She joins The 21st Show to talk about her career, which started with a 1992 internship at WCIA and included an unlikely brush with celebrity: sharing shrimp with '90s heartthrob Fabio in a mall green room.

Roscoe also reflects on the losses of two colleagues, meteorologist Robert Reese and anchor Dave Benton, who both died of cancer, and on how the industry itself has changed — from typewriters and pagers to satellite trucks, and from a public that trusted local news to one now more skeptical of the press. A tornado that struck central Illinois just days before her retirement convinced her that local TV news isn't going anywhere: she says only a station with people on the ground can tell viewers, in real time, which way a storm is headed.

Now retired, Roscoe says she's looking forward to spending more time with her daughter Sophia, who has special needs.

From “da Bears” in Chicago to “Hahvahd Yahd” in Boston, our accents shape how the world hears us — and how it judges us. Linguist Valerie Fridland explores how and why in her new book, "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents," which traces how American speech patterns took shape over centuries and why they're still shifting today.

To close out the show ahead of the Fourth of July, we're featuring the first three voices in a new Illinois Public Media series, "America at 250: The Questions Before Us.” It asks Illinoisans what they think are the most important questions facing the country at the United States Semiquincentennial.

These installments were reported by Annisyn Krebs-Carr and Fernanda Romero of the Illinois Student Newsroom, and University of Illinois journalism professor Charles "Stretch" Ledford, who also conceived of and produced the series. Special thanks to Christine Herman for helping prepare it for The 21st Show.