McHistory

From the dawn of electronic library databases to AI in only 50 years and Milner Library's 50th anniversary.

Movie theaters and railroads were early adopters of air conditioning in the 1920s and 30s.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz as part of the U.S. war with Iran has sent energy prices way up. In this episode of McHistory, you'll go back to 1973 when something similar happened in McLean County during the OPEC oil Embargo.

McLean County and central Illinois are gearing up for America 250 with a bunch of events, everything from a community drone show on July 2nd to readings of the Declaration of Independence. It's not the first national anniversary involving a big celebration. In this episode of WGLT's series McHistory, lets go back 50 years to hear what they did for the nation's bicentennial

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz as part of the U.S. war with Iran has sent energy prices way up. In this episode of McHistory, you'll go back to 1973 when something similar happened in McLean County during the OPEC oil Embargo.

For the first 100 years of Bloomington history, water was scarce. In 1929, the formation of Lake Bloomington began after periods of drought, contamination and scarcity of safe drinking water.  

Four airlines now fly in and out of the Central Illinois Regional Airport [CIRA]. They carried about 325,000 passengers last year. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the airport that served the Twin Cities had sod and gravel runways.  

To reduce water use in an ongoing severe drought, the City of Bloomington has asked residents to conserve water by a goal of 10%. Water shortages are not unheard of for the city. Even at its start, water was scarce in Bloomington.

During the Great Depression, the federal government tried to stimulate the economy by funding a variety of buildings and programs. Among them was the post office in the Town of Normal put up through the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. Inside that post office is another salute to the community, to human achievement, and to the importance of beauty in public spaces. It's an oil on canvas artwork.

It has been many decades since Downtown Bloomington was the premier destination for shoppers in the community. There was a time, though, when there were four large department stores downtown. One of them was My Store.

There's a declaration of emergency over the number of unhoused people in Bloomington right now, and efforts to provide new housing and expanded space in shelters. The issue is not new, though the response today is perhaps more humane than it was in other eras.

There's a declaration of emergency over the number of unhoused people in Bloomington right now and efforts to provide new housing and expanded space in shelters. The issue is not new. In this episode of WGLT's series McHistory, we find out the response today is perhaps a great deal more humane than it was in other eras. McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History. Charlie Schlenker produced this episode.

McLean County has one Nobel prize winner — but oh what a one! Modern electronics rests upon Clinton Davisson’s physics experiments bombarding a block of crystalized nickel with electrons. Davisson and his colleague at Bell labs, L.H. Germer, measured the angle at which the electrons were scattered by the nickel.

Despite the reputation of Bloomington-Normal as a staid and quiet community with nicknames such as Borington Insuranceville, the Twin Cities has a long history of protests. And unlike today's peaceful observances, it was not always so. In today's episode of McHistory, we learn about the violent streetcar strike of 1917 which involved machine guns and the state militia.

There have been a lot of political protests around Bloomington Normal lately. McHistory looks back at other protests, which weren't as peaceful as the ones today. Then, as now, the First Amendment right to free expression mattered, though sometimes it was not observed.

The iconic Route 66 will hit the century mark next year. Before it became the "Mother Road," it was Illinois Route 4. And on it was a rest spot for those early motorists on the south side of Bloomington.

The average corn yield last year in McLean County was nearly 247 bushels per acre. That's enough to blow the minds of the grandfathers of today's farmers. Agriculture has changed nearly beyond recognition in less than a century.

Imagine, if you will, how big a deal it would be if Taylor Swift gave a concert in Bloomington-Normal. That's the equivalent to the appearance of lyric tenor John McCormack on Nov. 24, 1924.

It seems like a new biography of President Abraham Lincoln comes out every few years, trying to uncover new perspectives of his time and character. Lincoln himself didn't write much about his life so what he did put down on paper has an outsized importance. On today's episode of our feature series McHistory,listen how a Bloomington-Normal man nudged Lincoln to do that. McHistory is a co production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History. You heard Bill Kemp and Frankie Gordey. Charlie Schlenker produced this episode.  

Human beings have marked the turning of the year with many different traditions over thousands of years. Some practices have fallen out of favor. Today, American society celebrates on New Year’s Eve, and not New Year's Day, though this was not always the case.

McHistory: A Civil War Christmas

In the early 1800s, supply chains were a lot shorter, but the lack of mechanized transportation sometimes made it tremendously difficult to bring goods to market. Yet, a regional — edging toward national — marketplace did thrive.

This episode of McHistory chronicles a huge temperature drop in the winter of 1836 that unsettled settlers and led to stories and tall tales for generations.

It takes a beloved or significant figure in the history of an institution to name a building after that person. Illinois State University ended up naming two libraries for Angeline Vernon Milner.

Bloomington-Normal and McLean County are not really known as a cradle of country music. But there was this one time...in the 1930s. Cynthia May Carver, better known by her stage name “Cousin Emmy,” was a pioneer in country and roots music during the golden age of radio from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Hall of Fame pitcher Burleigh Grimes was the last major league pitcher to legally throw a spitball. Grimes played with seven different major league teams, though mostly with the Dodgers and Cardinals. He retired in 1934, the year before he came to Bloomington.

There are truths. And there are poetic truths, ones that illustrate the human condition even if the stories portrayed lack a certain...accuracy. Why let facts get in the way of a good story, after all? Legendary broadcaster and storyteller Campbell "Stretch" Miller had that attitude toward life and storytelling in McLean County and elsewhere.

There was a time when people operated elevators across the country, instead of passengers just pressing buttons as they do today. Meet the elevator operators who kept McLean County moving.

Baseball is happening and all is right with the world. Today, though, let's hear about another bat and ball game — softball. It was big in Central Illinois for many decades with lots of semi-pro teams and even industrial leagues for men and women, and offered an outlet for young women before they had opportunities to play other organized sports.

The story of the Henney Kilowatt, the mid-20th century experimental electric battery-powered car made in Bloomington-Normal by the Eureka-Williams Corporation, is a colorful one, according to McLean County Museum of History Librarian Bill Kemp.

A teenaged boy-soldier from Normal survived one of the most brutal prison camps in history. Decades after the Civil War, Alpheus Pike wrote a memoir. He detailed horrific sanitary conditions, the murderous behavior of guards and prisoners alike, and amid the privation, the grace notes of human caring that emerged from these trials. Pike was born in Maine in 1846 and came to Bloomington as a young boy.

Central Illinois, particularly in small rural school districts, is basketball country. Hear about the longest running annual basketball tournament in the state, at 112 years and counting.

In 1927 The Pantagraph newspaper in Bloomington held its own holiday affirmation of Santa Claus with dispatches from an intrepid explorer named Danny Dare who traveled to the arctic to prove Santa existed and then wrote to children about his adventures.

On this Peal Harbor Day, let's reflect on the experiences of a soldier from Normal in Europe during World War II. In this episode of our series McHistory, we find out from a soldier's diary what it was like to be a prisoner of war. Produced by WGLT's Charlie Schlenker.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are once again making October a special time. But baseball was not always here to root for and entertain us. This is part of WGLT's McHistory series.

It's cliche but children are the future. Bloomington's Clara Louise Kessler passionately lived that. She went by Louise. Kessler got her start as a kindergarten teacher on Bloomington's west side and went on to serve more than three decades as a children's librarian who tried to foster and fulfill the literary and creative needs of young people. Kessler also became a published lyricist for more than 50 children's songs.

It's said that good writing is the soul of radio. A Bloomington-Normal boy made good - exemplified that adage. It's hard to dramatize the failure of the butcher to deliver meat or the business of buying a Christmas present for the boss. Yet Paul Rhymer did so for a big nationwide audience on the NBC radio network during the golden age of radio in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the man who put Bloomington 'on the air.'

WGLT's McHistory series turns its focus to Richard Blue from Bloomington, whose remarkable life really speaks to the travails and the triumphs of black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The series McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.

Women political candidates are the norm today. But it hasn’t been so very long since a woman running for office was rare or even unheard of. The first woman to serve in the Illinois Senate was Florence Fifer Bohrer of Bloomington in 1924. But leading the way for Bohrer some years before was Helen Clark McCurdy, the first woman to run for office in Bloomington, in 1915.

Wherever humans gather, there is garbage. And getting rid of it is a challenge. The start of trash removal in Bloomington dates to the start of the 20th century and to a man known in his day as the King of Swedes.

The way Black people were treated in Bloomington-Normal got a lot worse in the 20th century than in the years before, and that's saying something. Those conditions produced jarring juxtapositions in people’s lives, such as that of an intelligent churchgoing Black woman who worked for the family of State Farm royalty and in a brothel to make ends meet.

One doesn’t think of Bloomington and central Illinois as a lurid hotbed of crime. But it certainly seems it could have been that way during the mid-to-late 1800s as portrayed by the three city newspapers of the day.

Coming from nothing, an illiterate Black man from Bloomington-Normal — long before the civil rights movement — found a niche in the national market for cleaning products. In this episode of the WGLT feature McHistory, hear about a floor polish and the man who invented and sold it.

Ellen Ferguson was a champion of women and women's suffrage. She made Bloomington-Normal her home in the 1870s.

Bloomington-Normal has a long and distinguished history of business entrepreneurship. One less than distinguished, but very successful, business, had a continent-wide spread in the late 1800s.

Bloomington-Normal has a tie to famed actor John Wayne and legendary filmmaker John Ford — a hardware store clerk turned noted author, Harold Sinclair.

There is not much prairie left in Illinois. Once, there was a waving sea of tall perennial flowers and grasses across much of the state. Now there is .01% of the original prairie left in Illinois.

A 19th century Bloomington doctor was a respected physician who was accused of stealing corpses.

In 1913, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in Bloomington to stop the defamation of Jewish people by appealing to minds, morals, and the law. Sigmund Livingston served as its first director.

McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.