FOCUS/midwest

This story, about two St. Louis entrepreneurs, appeared in 1990. They were about 20 years early. Read Alan Kaufman’s recent essay about electronic books, “The Electronic Book Burning,” by clicking on this link.

Dust off the books on the shelf. Put ‘em in a box and take it to a recycling center.

You might not need them anymore, if a small St. Louis company has its way. The home library of the future could be reduced to a shoebox full of memory modules, each about the size of a quarter.

VPR Systems Ltd. — headed by Robert Griesedieck, 66, a former brewing executive, and Michael Saigh, 37, a stockbroker and business professor — plans to introduce a hand-held electronic book by the fall of 1991.

Unlike other manufacturers, who are developing systems that use compact discs for text and graphics, VPR’s ‘video pocket reader’ uses an interchangeable, reprogrammable memory module. Read the rest of this entry »

It hit New Madrid, Mo., on Dec. 16, 1811, at 2 in the morning. Settlers ran terror-stricken from tottering and falling buildings to find the earth belching forth great volumes of sand and water. Stores and houses fell into great fissures. The river rose five or six feet in a few minutes. Its color changed to a reddish hue and became thick with mud roiled from its bottom. The surface of the Mississippi was covered with foam and the jets on the shore went higher than the treetops. Within five minutes, the clear serene night became overcast and purplish. The air was filled with a dense, sulfurous vapor that left the inhabitants gasping for breath. The overcast stayed until daybreak; aftershocks (twenty-seven of them) occurring every six to ten minutes accompanied by sudden flashes of fire brought a night full of horror. The fissures ran from southeast to northwest. People felled trees across the direction of cleavage and hung to the trunks to keep from being buried alive. The churchyard with its dead was gone. The great fissures bared the bones of gigantic mastodons and ichthyosauri.

Between New Madrid and Vick’s Plantation, now Vicksburg, there wasn’t the sign of a town remaining along the 300-mile stretch of river. Read the rest of this entry »

During the Great Depression, an estimated 50 million people tuned into Father Charles Coughlin’s radio programs, which were known for their ultra-conservative denunciations of the Roosevelt administration and poorly concealed anti-Semitism. Coughlin left the airwaves in the early 1940s. Nearly a quarter-century later, FOCUS/Midwest contributing editor Bernard Eismann interviewed Coughlin, and found a substantially different man.

The white-haired priest, cassock skirts flapping, moved with short, quick steps along the snow-spotted pavement that runs parallel to broad Woodward Avenue in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. As he turned to enter the church his ruddy face, hardly showing seventy-one years, was brought into sharp relief against the gray stone background of the Shrine of the Little Flower that dominates the corner with a 150-foot tower supporting a stone image of Christ on the Cross. The priest is the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a living ghost of the angry Thirties, described in a chronicle of the decade as the master in “the arts of vituperation and demagoguery.”

In his study the radio priest of the Thirties, whose vein-straining oratory enraptured hundreds of thousands more than two decades ago, recently talked after keeping silent since 1940. The fire is not gone after the years of public exile, but Coughlin has mellowed, suffering no longer from what he calls the arrogance of youth. Read the rest of this entry »

The abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was the first American editor to die in defense of freedom of the press. Very few have been called to follow him since the transplanted Yankee’s blood ran out on the cobblestones of Alton, Illinois.

Today freedom of the press calls on editors to live for integrity of expression rather than to die for it. An editor who exemplifies the daily living free press is William Theodore Evjue, editor and publisher of the Madison, Wis., Capital Times.

White-haired Bill Evjue reached the age of 80 on Oct. 10 [1962]. Thus he has lived more than twice the lifespan of Elijah Lovejoy. But there is much in common in their careers and in their intense devotion of their own concepts of honor and truth and the welfare of their fellow men.

Evjue told the story of his mother and father, Nils and Mary Erickson Evjue, immigrants from Norway, in his page 1 column “Hello Wisconsin,” on his eightieth birthday. He told how they made their new home in the lumber country, surrounding Merrill, Wis. There Bill Evjue was born.

He did the hard work of a small town Midwestern boy, and then worked his way at the University of Wisconsin where he became a devoted admirer of the first Senator Robert Marion La Follette – “Old Fighting Bob” who led the liberal and progressive forces in the first quarter of this century.

Read the rest of this entry »

It has been nearly 10 years since the Battle of Armageddon was supposed to have occurred, according to the predictions of the late Richard Kieninger. Life in Stelle, Illinois, goes on.

Kieninger founded Stelle, the German word for “place,” in 1973. The original residents of the planned community believed in the prophecies set forth in Kieninger’s 1963 book The Ultimate Frontier, which forecast that Armageddon would commence in November 1999. Writing under the pen name Eklal Kueshana, Kieninger further warned that survivors of the final war would be put out of their misery soon thereafter by a series of catastrophic events.

Among other things, Kieninger claimed he was the reincarnation of King David and Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. In The Ultimate Frontier, a mysterious character named Dr. White contacts a boy named Richard, who is then recruited into a multi-tiered secret society of perfect human beings, called the Brotherhoods, which allegedly originated 25,000 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Residents are concerned about mortality levels near the site of a 20-year-old radioactive waste clean-up.

Diane Ratliff, a native of Venice, Ill., remembers when the dump trucks first started lumbering up and down Meredosia Avenue in the early 1990s. She then surmised the drivers must have made a wrong turn. “Where the hell were they going?” she asked herself.

Nobody informed her or any of the residents of the neighborhood that a radioactive clean-up was taking place down the block.

That was 20 years ago, and Ratliff, a special education teacher for the East St. Louis School District, is still searching for answers as to whether exposure to radioactive waste may have affected the health of her family and neighbors. She is among a group of citizens who are now pressing the federal government for an epidemiological study of the area to determine the impact that the radioactive site may have had on public health. Read the rest of this entry »

The pack of Harley riders that roared into the Meramec Caverns parking lot on a sunny morning earlier this month had barely enough time to stretch their legs before their guide whisked them toward the ticket counter.

The group, which included five New Zealanders and more than a dozen Europeans, was following in the footsteps of countless other travelers who have been drawn to the cave’s cool subterranean confines. Lester Dill, an entrepreneur with the instincts of P.T. Barnum, opened the roadside attraction near Stanton, Mo., in 1935 with an eye towards luring passing motorists from the then-nascent Route 66.

But it was Rudy Turilli, Dill’s son-in-law, who initiated the publicity campaign that would forever link the cavern to Jesse James, Missouri’s notorious 19th century outlaw. For decades thereafter, barn roofs throughout the Midwest enticed cross-country travelers to visit the natural wonder by pitching it as Jesse James’ hideout.

The myth began to take shape in 1949, after Frank O. Hall, a journalist from Lawton, Okla., reported that the real Jesse James was still alive. According to Hall’s account, 100-year-old J. Frank Dalton claimed to be the outlaw and said that he had faked his own death in 1882 as a means to end his criminal career.

When Turilli heard the news, he arranged to have Dalton moved to a cabin on the Meramec Cavern grounds. Dalton, who was bedridden with a broken hip by this time, still managed to chew tobacco, cuss and fire a six-shooter indiscriminately on occasion. Read the rest of this entry »

This year marks the 40th anniversary of a boycott of white-owned businesses by the United Front of Cairo. The protest was met with violent opposition from local merchants and police — and, for the most part, indifference from state officials.

By 2000, the town’s population had fallen to 3,632; of those, 33.5 percent lived in poverty.

The town’s decline continues today. As a resident of Cairo wrote recently to The State Journal-Register, the capital city’s daily newspaper: “I guess the saying is true that ‘the state of Illinois stops at Carbondale,’ because anything south of that doesn’t matter!”

This piece was published in a special edition of FOCUS/Midwest. Read the rest of this entry »

Students who attend charter schools perform worse academically than students who go to public schools, says a new study from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

Commissioned by pro-charter school groups, the CREDO study found, in “unmistakable terms,” that charter schools nationwide are falling short of their promise.

Researchers based their conclusions on a review of test results from 2,403 charter schools, accounting for more than 70 percent of the nation’s charter-school students.

In five states — Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Colorado — the story was different. There, CREDO found “significantly higher gains for charter school students than would have occurred in traditional public schools.” Read the rest of this entry »

Those trying to understand the current economic crisis would do well to revisit the history of the Great Depression. Popular mainstream interpretations focus on the actions of the Roosevelt administration, but give short shrift to the significant grassroots pressure for government action.

In December 1933, Successful Farming published an analysis of Roosevelt’s New Deal by F.D. Farrell, then president of Kansas State College. Readers of the Des Moines, Iowa-based magazine were farmers, a group likely to look with suspicion on anything smacking of Big Government. Here, Farrell makes the case for “socialization,” arguing that it’s essentially an American imperative:

“In the recent difficult years the fact has come to be widely understood that the welfare of each unit of our society depends somewhat upon the welfare of all the other units. Particularly the public has come to understand that industrial and commercial prosperity requires agricultural well-being. Wall Street has become aware of the importance of Main Street [ . . . ] Read the rest of this entry »