Category: The Rockford Files

The unemployment rate in Illinois broke double-digits in May to hit a seasonally adjusted 10.1 percent, a 26-year high.  Of course, double-digit unemployment rates are nothing new here in Rockford; we have been above ten percent for the better part (so to speak) of a year now, hitting a high of 13.5 percent in March...

For those of us here in Rockford, Illinois, 200 miles (give or take) northwest of South Bend, Indiana, President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17 provoked a sense of déjà vu.  For it was on that same date six years ago that another commencement address on a controversial...

One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.”  It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...

“Hello, Americans.  This is Paul Harvey.  Stand by for . . . news!” His voice was arguably the most recognized in the history of radio.  His broadcasting career lasted over three quarters of a century, from his days as a high-school intern at KVOO in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, until 2009.  Yet few of the...

As the former governor of Illinois crisscrossed the country on his farewell tour, I kept imagining him lying back in his seat, scalp being massaged by his personal hairstylist (it takes work to keep that Serbian gangster hairdo in pristine shape), while an old Mac Davis song played on an endless loop on his iPod:...

On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy.  Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in...

He knew that he was destined for greatness.  The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer.  From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power.  Through his political connections, he got himself elected to the Illinois House...

Home folks think I’m big in Detroit City From the letters that I write they think I’m fine But by day I make the cars By night I make the bars If only they could read between the lines . . .   For decades, Detroit has been America’s whipping boy.  It’s not as if...

Most years, writing a column that is due on October 15 for an issue cover-dated December, which will go to press six days before a general election but appear in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands about two weeks after, would be a recipe for frustration. This year, it strikes me as an opportunity. I have...

No one expected the vote to be so close.  After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Republicans were certain they had found a rock star to compete with Barack Obama.  They could ride the crest of Palinmania all the way to the Oval Office.  All they had to do was keep the hockey...

As the summer slid into August, gasoline prices fell a bit, back to about $3.79 per gallon here in the Midwest, and even that modest reprieve seemed to dispel some of the summertime blues.  Traffic on the interstates around Lake Michigan was not quite up to normal August levels (on Sunday afternoon of the second...

I cannot remember when I first met Mary Ann Aiello.  I know, of course, that it had to have been sometime after I moved to Rockford in the last week of 1995, and I suspect that it may have been another three or four years later.  But there was something about Mary Ann that made...

Driving from Rockford to St. Paul, Minnesota, is a bit like going back in time.  St. Paul (like La Crosse, Wisconsin, where we crossed over the Mississippi River just hours before it began to burst its banks) is relatively well preserved, unlike its clearly fraternal twin. Much of the city is stunningly beautiful—from the immaculately...

Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates.  Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge.  I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...

September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.”  In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true.  President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening.  It would take another year and a half...

“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...

The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, the politicians and pundits tell us every evening on the news.  Lost in the rhetoric is any concern for members of the middle class, who are in danger of becoming nothing more than a footnote in future histories of the United States. If England...

The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy.  Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a...

When confronted with an American convert to Islam who has studied overseas, it’s hard not to think today of the celebrated case of John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban” captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and brought back to the United States to stand trial.  “Abdul” knows that, yet he’s chosen to be brutally honest...

A little less than a year ago, in the February 2007 issue, I introduced in these pages the story of Derrick Shareef, an African-American convert to mainstream Islam who was arrested on December 8, 2006, for plotting an attack on the largest shopping mall in the Rockford area during the height of the Christmas shopping...

Fr. Brian A.T. Bovee, the rector of Saint Mary’s Oratory in Rockford, sometimes calls his church Santa Maria Inter Carceres—Saint Mary’s Among the Jails.  It’s a (half-)joking reference to the oratory’s location just to the west of the Public Safety Building, just to the east of the new Winnebago County Jail, and just to the...

“How’s your garden doing this year?”  It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it.  I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time...

How much would you pay for a library card?  In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system.  With six branches scattered throughout the city and over 400,000 volumes, most avid readers who aren’t relying on the library for...

On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end.  After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight...

How did an eighth-generation German-American growing up in Rockford, Illinois, proud of his ethnic heritage, baptized Lutheran, educated in Catholic schools, come to convert to Islam?  As Aaron, “Abdul,” and I sit down at the Richard John Neuhaus Memorial Conference Table, that question hangs in the air. “I came from a broken family, basically,” Abdul...

Three months ago, in the American Proscenium (“By Their Fruits,” February), I posed a question: “Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone?” My musings were prompted by the arrest, on December 8, of the Rockford jihadi Derrick Shareef (a.k.a. Talib Abu Salam Ibn), a black convert to the “religion of...

Around this time every year, I find myself in the strange circumstance of writing a column before Ash Wednesday that won’t appear until after Easter Sunday.  If the overarching theme of my column were something other than Rockford as a microcosm of America, this situation might not seem so odd.  Every year, however, I’m haunted...

The November election results were all about the war, the chattering classes told us; and in this case, there’s probably more truth to popular opinion than not.  For those of us who have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning (and even before), this seems a rather strange moment.  After all, what really changed...

In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites.  Founded in 1900, the Barber-Colman Company gradually built the 15-building plant between Rock and River Streets, by the very ford in...

According to an article in the New York Times on September 10, “In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.”  Moreover, many of these are not simply Muslims who had been here on guest visas but now have been granted permanent...

The archetypical middle-sized town in the middle of the Middle West, Rockford seems about as far removed from the border as you can get, unless we count the border with Wisconsin, a few miles to the north.  And yet, Rockford has been subject to successive waves of immigration that have brought with them (if in...

The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings.  The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system.  The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...

The Rockford Public Schools, as longtime readers of Chronicles know, have seen more than their fair share of troubles.  With the end, in June 2002, of the 13-year-long desegregation suit and its accompanying rule by the federal courts, and the hiring of Dennis Thompson as superintendent in 2004, however, the school board has begun to...

Rockford alderman Ann Thompson owns a cleaning service.  That, in itself, is not surprising; while Rockford aldermen receive some benefits that are traditionally reserved to full-time employees (such as health insurance), they are paid a part-time stipend, and only those who are retired or independently wealthy could afford not to have another job. For months...

The results of two extensive studies were released too late for me to consider them in my column (“Truth and Consequences”) last month.  Both the “Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the 2006 Supplementary Report to...

Next month will mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption, by the U.S. Catholic bishops, of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.  The protocol document was the bishops’ response to allegations of long-standing clerical sexual abuse of minors over the past 50 years.  While the media, victims’ advocates, and not a...

The Rockford Institute sits on the northern edge of Rockford’s downtown, at the upper end of a stretch of North Main Street that local boosters have dubbed “the Cultural Corridor.” The corridor is not much even by the standards of modern cities—a few museums, the Coronado Theatre, the New American Theater, the Rockford Woman’s Club,...

For the past 40 years, Rockford’s Midtown district has seen more downs than ups.  Centered on Seventh Street from First Avenue to Broadway, southeast of the main part of downtown, Midtown—once a bustling commercial and cultural center at the heart of a Swedish neighborhood—was, for far too long, a haven for prostitution and drug use. ...

In January, this column will celebrate its fifth anniversary.  When Tom Fleming and I originally conceived of the idea back in 1998 (as an occasional “Letter From Rockford” to be written by various local activists), we were capitalizing on the fact that our city was considered by marketing agencies and national chains as an ideal...

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear.  One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear.  One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...

Tuesday, April 5, was a beautiful day in Rockford.  By the time the sun had burst through our windows in a blaze of red and orange, the chill had already left the air.  The pitter-patter of little feet—squirrels on the rooftop; children on the floor below—was accompanied by the excited trills of songbirds.  With few...

While Rockford, as I wrote last month, is becoming increasingly Democratic, Winnebago County, in which Rockford lies, remains fairly strongly Republican.  Despite the massive growth of the City of Rockford over the last two-and-a-half decades (it now pushes all the way to the Boone County border on the east and occupies over 60 square miles,...

April 2005 will mark the third mayoral election since I arrived in Rockford at the end of 1995.  In that first election in April 1997, Rockford’s first (and, so far, only) black mayor, Democrat Charles Box, was running for his third term.  For eight years, the city had been under a federal court order to...

From oracles to astrology to double predestination, men throughout history have sought hope in a glimpse of their future.  As the Greeks well understood, however, foreknowledge is usually at the root of tragedy, and even Saint Augustine warned against consulting astrologers not because astrology is mere superstition but because of the possibility that the astrologers’...