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Rock Island Lines
Monday thru Friday 11 AM

A series of award-winning stories about our region's traditions, institutions, and people, past and present. Rock Island Lines is written and read by Roald Tweet, Professor Emeritus of English at Augustana College.

The stories in these three-minute modules are rooted in a specific place; a "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River." It's the logical site for a storyteller. It is from the rich heritage of our region that Tweet spins his histories, biographies, and "stretchers."

Roald has spent much of his life travelling up and down the river, with forays overland, east and west, talking to the people, reading their journals, and enjoying the humor and history of America's heartland. His observations about life around Rock Island strike responsive chords across the region. It's a viewpoint that will enrich and enliven your day.

Listen below or subscribe on iTunes or RSS. 

Sponsored by
Quad City Bank & Trust

Latest Episodes
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.The Tri-City Street Railway Company would have been more than happy to share the roads with those few newfangled…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.The first circus arrived in Rock Island less than ten years after the city was founded, and since then, each new circus…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.A short reprint from the New York Times appeared in the Argus on July 2nd, 1892, describing the white parachute, "no…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.You've seen it in Little House on the Prairie, or perhaps in the faded sepia photographs in your own attic—that…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.The Strange Adventures of Jonathan Drew, a Rolling Stone, 1821-24 might have turned out neither so strange nor…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.Few early settlers in Iowa were as idealistic about the possibilities of life there as John B. Newhall, who dedicated…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.From the moment he arrived in Burlington, Iowa, with the first wave of settlers, John B. Newhall became an Iowa…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.It was going to be the grandest, longest, most impressive parade ever held in the world—or at least in Moline and Rock…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as Karl Marx claimed, so is the road to success. Sometimes, it’s…
  • Community
    This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.If you have ready Huckleberry Finn you may have questioned why the slave Jim ever bothered to escape from Hannibal,…