City Beat

     It seems we have a lot of special days, weeks and holidays and, sometimes, it is difficult to keep all of them in the proper observation.      Today, Wednesday, June 14th, is “Flag Day”, also called National Flag Day, in the United States, a day for honoring our national flag. The holiday commemorates the date in…

       Each year, on or near the anniversary of D-Day, when allied forces began landing on the northern coast of France, I publish a Scrapbook article (pages 4, 5 in this week’s Tribune) about that event that had such far-reaching implications connected to it.      As I wrote in the article, some argue that it was…

       Mark W. Sorensen, who is the Official Macon County Historian, has an article in our Scrapbook feature (pages 4 and 5 of this week’s print and online editions) about Decatur’s Darkest Day: The 1893 Lynching of Samuel J. Bush. The details of the article are shocking to read but in order to improve as…

         It’s so nice to walk through Central Park on my way to the downtown post office each day and enjoy the Central Park fountain that is now fully activated for the season and looking beautiful!      Believe it or not, it has been 21 years since the “new” fountain was built and dedicated! It…

       This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day set aside to honor our mothers. One of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous quotes was about his mother who died when Lincoln was nine years old. The quote was in a letter Lincoln wrote to a young woman whose father had been killed in battle in an attempt…

       I was walking back to the newspaper office after going to the downtown post office one morning last week when something happened on the sidewalk in front of the public library that has never happened before — in all of the decades of walking downtown!      After making sure that I walked safely through the…

     I found it interesting that the Illinois Municipal League (IML) announced a Civility Pledge at its Spring Board of Directors meeting last week. The pledge seeks to restore civility in local governments, encourage productive dialogue and build public trust in all of Illinois’ 1,295 cities, villages and towns. IML stated: “A growing need for civility…