This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Those baseball players who momentarily confused Iowa with Heaven in the movie, A Field of Dreams, were not the first to do so. A hundred years earlier, the same thought helped George W. Van Horn of Muscatine rest easy on his death bed.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you suppose there is something in the American air that turns our visionaries bi-focal? While English gurus sell all that they have, dress their followers in white, and climb a hill to await the second coming, our Utopianists have always kept one hand on the plow, turning a dollar or two between prayers. The Shakers danced themselves into a celibate religious frenzy, but they weren't above inventing the idea of mail order and selling seed in packages.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West showman, was fond of saying to Eastern reporters, "I stood between savagery and civilization most my whole life." He should have stood near the joining of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers, the site of one of the largest Indian villages in North America. Here, he would have found a clear contrast between the savage and the civilized.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Now and then, great institutions have beginnings as humble as United States Presidents once needed to get elected. The City of Rock Island can boast at least one such humble beginning.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In real life, there sometimes is such a thing as a straw that breaks the camel's back. For downtown Rock Island, that straw would have to be McCabe's Department Store. In an age where there are few loyalties to place left, it is difficult to explain to newcomers the feelings we Rock Islanders had toward McCabe's.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If there is a rich heart of the heart of the Illinois prairie, it would be Henry County just south of here. In the first decade of its opening to settlement, the county's rich black soil attracted six separate colonizing groups. It's as if every potential Eastern Moses in the 1830s drew lines across the Appalachian wilderness, all of which converged on the same Promised Land—Henry County.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you one of those kids whose parents went off to Disney World and all you got was this lousy T-shirt that announced that very thing? Try not to be too jealous of Billy in the following story.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The august members of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences who met in June of 1869 to vote on the membership of Joseph Duncan Putman must have had a reservation or two. They were only amateur scientists themselves—a penmanship teacher, a public-school teacher, a real estate agent, and a tobacconist who had formed the Academy to combine their personal collections of shells, minerals, bones, and rocks. But Joseph Putnam was only thirteen.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you a stressed-out parent who wonders how you are going to get son number one to play practice on time and still rush your daughter to volleyball in time to pick up son number two from Cub Scouts and get him over to Little League? Have I got a role model for you.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Did you ever wonder as a kid what you would do if the world came to an end as you sat in the fifth row of the Crown Theater some Friday, midway through a Gene Autry movie? I mean, would it be okay to finish your Black Crows and popcorn?