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.

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

This week's episode of McHistory recounts Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to Bloomington-Normal in 1937.

In this episode of McHistory, a look at the McLean County Poor Farm, where living conditions were often inhumane.

The National Liver and Kidney Cure was said to be made from vegetables and herbs—and may have had some alcohol in it for an extra kick. It was made right here in Normal.

On this month's episode of McHistory, you'll meet Florence Mae Risser Funk of Bloomington, who played a key role in getting women the right to vote.

The McLean County Basketball Tournament is one of the longest running basketball tournaments in the state of Illinois.

Here is a profile of a man who drove vice presidents and governors, wealthy landowners, visiting artists, and the prominent of Bloomington-Normal all about town more than a century ago.

The early 1900s saw an influx of racism and discrimination in the Midwest, from anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-African American sentiment, to race riots in Springfield, Chicago, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Ku Klux Klan became a force in central Illinois. Segregation grew in Bloomington-Normal and what had been a thriving black middle class was gradually destroyed.

Bloomington-Normal had only one documented lynching.