Here in Champaign County the school year is drawing to a close. University students have finished their Spring semester, many have headed home for the summer, and K-12 students and teachers are eagerly awaiting their own summer break. For those individuals in the Air Force, however, education is often asynchronous. Basic Training is and was, generally, eight and a half weeks long and the technical training that followed could vary from six to 72 weeks depending on the career field that the airmen and officer’s followed. Read more about Technical Training at Chanute Air Force Base

The first airplane to reach Chanute Field was a Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny.” Traveling over sixty mph, Chanute Captain W.W. Spain passed over the base on Tuesday, July 3, 1917 at 11:25am. Residents from Rantoul and nearby Paxton gathered on the streets and watched from railroad tracks as the Jenny flew more than 1,000 feet above them. Read more about Chanute Spotlight: The Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny”

It is officially springtime and we are heading into ripe storm territory. Luckily for those of us in Urbana and Champaign, we have an abundance of tornado sirens to warn us of impending danger. These lifesaving devices that can be heard on the first Tuesday of the month during testing are actually a fairly old technology. Read more about Tornado Sirens in C-U

Charles Van Doren died this month at the age of 93. Known for his participation and eventual guilty plea in the quiz shows scandals of the 1950s what made Van Doren’s rise and eventual fall spectacular was his background. His obituary in The New York Times puts it this way:

In the heyday of quiz shows in the 1950s, when scholarly housewives and walking encyclopedia nerds battled on “The $64,000 Question” and “Tic-Tac-Dough,” Mr. Van Doren was a rare specimen: a handsome, personable young intellectual with solid academic credentials, a faculty post at a prestigious university and an impressive family pedigree. Read more about The Urbana connection to disgraced quiz master Charles Van Doren

On March 16, 1992, former Chanute cook and World War II veteran Donald R. Hakala wrote to base historian Don Weckhorst asking for recipes from his time at the base. Hakala fondly remembered cooking in the Chanute kitchens and serving the men and women of the base breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the 1950s. By 1992 Hakala, was getting on in years and eager to revisit his life as a cook on the base to share the stories and recipes with his family and friends. Read more about Greetings from Chanute! Let’s visit the Dining Hall

Between 1906 and 1948, the fork of Main Street and Springfield in downtown Urbana was occupied by a prominent building called the Flatiron.

On March 29, 1940, Jackson Luker of Urbana, IL filed an application at the United States Patent Office for his angel food cake package called Pan-O-Cake. His patent claimed that the way the cakes were shipped and packaged uniquely protected the angel food cakes so that they could be transported and kept for multiple weeks without damaging the air cells within the cake. He was granted the patent in 1942.  Read more about Luker's Pan-O-Cake

Although I grew up in the piedmont of North Carolina, my mother and her family hails from the north Georgia mountains deep in Appalachia. The Foxfire books, which captured the oral history, crafts, and traditions of Appalachian culture, were a constant in our household. Imagine my delight upon discovering that south-central Illinois has its own version, Tales from the General Store, and that they are accessible for FREE through the Digital Public Library of America.  Read more about Tales from the General Store

Mary Ruth Clemons (1910-1992) was born in Marion, Illinois on February 18, 1910 to John Robert and Edith Caroline Grant Crenshaw. In the 1920s, Clemons attended Marion Township High School. Following high school, she enrolled in Browns’ Business College in Marion, Illinois. Browns’ was a chain of schools founded by George W. Brown in the 1870s that focused on specialized office jobs, such as bookkeeping, stenography, cashier work, and clerkship. During their 10-month school year, Clemons rigorously trained in bookkeeping, commercial arithmetic, writing, commercial law, business correspondence, spelling, shorthand, typewriting, indexing and filing in preparation for a secretarial career. Read more about Chanute Spotlight: Mary Ruth Clemons

PART 1 looks at the early history (1926-1979) of professional wrestling in Champaign-Urbana. 

National wrestling took hold in the 1980s under the influence of Vincent Kennedy McMahon Jr. and Champaign started to hold shows in Assembly Hall. The first World Wrestling Federation (WWF now the WWE) live event held at Assembly Hall occurred November 5, 1988 with a near sell-out crowd of 14,000 fans. Attendees witnessed epic brawls from some of the periods most iconic professional wrestlers. The Tag Team Champions Demolition successfully retained over The British Bulldogs, Davey Boy Smith and Dynamite Kid. Intercontinental Champion the Ultimate Warrior also retained his title after a 3-min disqualification victory over the Honky Tonk Man, most likely the result of a smashed guitar on an opponent. The main event featured Hulk Hogan taking on the Big Bossman. This bout ended in a count out. This is the most successful live event in the history of Champaign in terms of attendance. Read more about Professional Wrestling in Champaign-Urbana, Part 2