Rock Island Lines

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George Washington never slept here. You can't visit Rock Island and sleep in the same bed for an extra nine dollars a night the way you can up and down the east coast. You'll just have to settle for Robert E. Lee.

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Folks around Rock Island don't take much stock in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. None of those wonders did any work. The pyramids in Egypt and the Colossus of Rhodes merely took up space.

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Cindy Weretheman lived near Rock Island for almost twenty-four years. For the last four of those years, she taught me something about light.

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Consider this an advanced warning should you decide to invite a Rock Islander into your home for dinner. Like most Midwesterners, we inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley speak a dialect that may need translating.

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Several months ago, I went to Anna V. Larson's funeral at St. John's Lutheran Church in Rock Island. It was one of those passings that people call "a blessing." Anna was well up in her eighties and for the last ten years or so had lived in excruciating pain from a pinched nerve. She needed a walker to shuffle even small distances. One or two Sundays a year, she actually skipped church.

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Just as Adam named all the flora and fauna in the Garden of Eden, so we Rock Islanders give names to the landscape around us in order to show our control—our dominion. Valleys have names, as do the bluffs. Even the smallest ponds and creeks have names. And of course, every human construct has a name, too: 38th St., the Kahl Building.

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Newspaper editors are almost as apt as other folks to change their minds when a better idea comes along. Here's a local example.

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On May 10, 1823, at about noon, a small sternwheel steamboat drew within sight of Fort Armstrong at the western tip of Rock Island. She was greeted by a welcome salute cannon from the fort and musket fire from the Sauk and Meskwaki Indians along the shore.

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A while back I told you about a local professor whose grand imagination represents the pinnacle of professor-dom. I'm afraid I can't tell you his name. A major university would certainly snatch him away from our small local college.

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Fourteen miles upstream from Rock Island at the head of the Rock Island Rapids, sits the small town of LeClaire, Iowa, home of several restaurants and gas stations. Its claim to fame is that Buffalo Bill lived here briefly as a child.