About the issue Here once again is our “Remembering” issue. We devote the last issue of the year to in-depth obituaries of some of the local people who have died in the past year. There is no attempt to be comprehensive, or even representative; these are people who have come to the attention of our writers, and others who our readers have brought to our attention by answering our call to contribute their personal essays to “Remembering.” These are not the rich and famous, although there are some local celebrities here, but mostly just interesting and remarkable people our writers and readers wanted to write about. Together this collection of 22 lives reminds us of the vast amount of love and experience that has made its mark and left the local scene in just a single year.
Included is the gripping story of “Tuck” Belton (“The man who fell to earth,” p. 20), shot out of the sky over Holland in World War II, rescued by the Dutch underground, narrowly escaping discovery by Nazis on several occasions.
Bob Folder (“A fisherman’s friend,” p. 17) made Springfield famous for the fishing lures he made here. His workshop boasts letters from Jimmy Carter thanking Folder for the lures he sent, especially the “Goofus Bug.”
Former U. S. Senator Alan Dixon is remembered here (‘We’ll do the right thing for people,” p. 10) for the progressive and courageous stances he took in his early career. Gene Callahan, the behind-the-scenes political aide who helped both Dixon and the late U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, is also memorialized. Both articles, and another about David Kenney, are written by Robert Hartley, the veteran journalist and historian who writes books on Illinois politics.
Our stories include an artist, a child, a priest who worked globally against religious persecution, a teacher who died in childbirth, an African-American trailblazer, a daughter mourned by her father. For each of them a family is experiencing the first holiday season without their loved one, sad yet consoled by a community’s gratitude for “the lives they lived.”
–Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher
