Here will be found articles about Illinoisans not named Abraham Lincoln—some famous, all interesting in their ways—in the form of reminiscences, book reviews, and feature articles. Please note that I include profiles of the dead as well as the living, revealed mainly in their letters and public utterances as made available by biographers. 

 

There are quite a few  such people. Consider just those worthies who dwelt in the quiet corner of the state that lies within  half-hour's drive of Springfield. The name of Jacksonville’s Jonathan Baldwin Turner appears among the eighteen Illinois “great men” that were memorialized on the frieze of the Centennial Building (now the Howlett Building) in 1918. Turner is known for having introduced the osage orange hedge to Illinois, and if he did not exactly introduce the idea of the land-grant college to America, as his admirers once insisted, he energetically backed it. “The fact that of what he offered her, his country, and especially his adopted state, cared to take only the Osage orange hedge and the agricultural college, should not blind the student to the fact that Turner’s intellectual interests were far broader than either scientific agriculture or highly technical education,” wrote historian Theodore Pease in 1918. In 1843–1844 for example, Turner edited a newspaper at Jacksonville that scanted news of barn fires and stolen pigs in favor of debates over law and theology and the morality of slavery—a focus that was as unusual in his days as it remains in ours.

​

Many a sizable town in that part of the state, and not a few small ones, has its Turners. Edward Mills Purcell, the Harvard physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for work on atomic nuclei and who made important contributions to radio astronomy, was born in Taylorville. Illinois College graduate and Jacksonville teacher Newton Bateman organized the first free public schools in Illinois.

​

The region also produced arguably the most important American-born Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Missouri-born Reinhold Niebuhr grew up in Lincoln, where his father was pastor at St. John’s United Church of Christ Illinois and was himself confirmed and ordained there. Young Reinhold attended Lincoln’s Central School, then studied in the Chicago suburbs and St. Louis before going on to Yale.

 

When additions to the old Centennial Building were made, the friezes on the additions were left blank, and they remain blank today. Either the state no longer produced great men and women after 1918 or, as is more likely, the process of deciding which Illinoisans were great has become so fractious that officials now shy from attempting it.

 

That’s a shame, because deserving people Illinois has, by the bus-load. In "Famous Downstate Illinoisans," listed below, I mention dozens in addition to those citied above; I didn't even try to compile such a list of Chicagoland citizens, so many would there be.  

​

Certainly Illinois's quasiofficial roster of notable citizens cannot be considered definitive. The Lincoln Academy was established in 1965 to honor Illinois's most distinguished citizens. Most Lincoln Academy awardees tend to be earnest improvers or public servants—Mortimer Adler, John Chancellor, Hyman Rickover, William Westmoreland, Archbishop Fulton Sheen. (The presence of the Vietnam commander and the anti-war bishop on the same dais might have made for interesting dinner chat.)

 

Typical are the 2002 winners: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman of Chicago, one of the world's most respected Jewish educators and leaders; Frank Considine, a Chicago business and social service leader; Lou Conte, a Du Quoin native who founded Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago; Jack Greenberg, a lifelong Illinois resident who is chairman and CEO of McDonald's Corp.; and Bernard Shaw, a Chicago native who was an anchor at the cable TV news network CNN for 20 years.

 

“Distinguished” has come to mean “famous” (not, please, infamous), and honorees have tended to include more and more figures from show biz, media, and sports. (In 2002, alone, for example, the list included Roger Ebert, Walter Payton, Maria Tallchief, Mike Royko, Ann Landers, John Hope Franklin, Marva Collins, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, Saul Bellow, Benny Davis, Jack Benny, Ernie Banks, and Jack Brickhouse.)

​

Alas, to the tons of topsoil washed away down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and the surplus of tax dollars sent to Washington, D.C., we must add the flow of women and men of talent to other places. Alert readers will note that dismayingly few of the Illinois people I describe made their reputations in Illinois, and that many  that did cashed in their reputations to buy their tickets to other places.