Rock Island Lines Podcast

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The word for today is "epiphany"—that moment in the dark reaches of the mind when a light flicks on at two in the morning, and we understand the calculus problem we have been struggling with, or capture just the right image for the poem, or know that it is really love.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you are at all inclined to superstition, avoid that whole bottom land below Black Hawk State Park where the Rock River meets the Mississippi. It may be haunted.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In 1839, the village of Bloomington just south of here was upgraded to the status of second-class town by the Iowa Legislature. Its city council met only once, and then only to permit grocery stores to sell whiskey. That same year, the Iowa Territorial Legislature officially defined "grocery store" as any establishment that sold whiskey in less than gallon lots.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Susanne Denkmann came from one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Rock Island. She was educated in the most exclusive schools on the East Coast. With her father's money, she could easily have followed the seasons around the world from theater in London to art auctions in Germany to sun on the Mediterranean. By the time she was born in 1872, her father and his partner, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, had already begun to amass a fortune in the logging and

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. With steamboats as with humans, there only are one or two ways of coming into this world, but an infinite number of ways of leaving it.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 sent shock waves around the world. Southern women wrote rebuttal novels showing how wonderful slavery was, Germans set up Uncle Tom shops selling soul food, and Lincoln suggested to Harriet Beecher Stowe that she had brought on the Civil War.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you cringe when you see the words "new and improved," because experience has shown you that it often means "costs more and works half as well as the way your grandmother did it"? This story of the Corps of Engineers versus one of the largest obstructions in the Rock Island Rapids is for you.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. To your list of fearless and feisty women—if you keep such a list—please add Kate Perry of Covington, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Miss Kate was the owner, operator, and conductor of her own highly illegal railroad.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. One of the oddest projects ever to reach the Mississippi River was the seventy-five-mile Illinois and Mississippi Canal connecting Rock Island via thirty-three locks with the Illinois River at Hennepin, and from there to Lake Michigan. Completed in 1907, it was too little and too late to save the dwindling steamboat traffic on the Mississippi. It was seldom used, reaching a peak of one six-hundredth of its capacity in 1929 and closing for good in 1951.

This is Roald Tweet in Rock Island. No community in America has arrived until it's had its bank robbery. Preferably, it should be by Jesse James, Dillinger, or Bonnie and Clyde, but in a pinch, just about any robbers will do.