McHistory

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.'

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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.

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