Welcome to Forgotonia

The following aired in February 2009 on NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio (with the sound clip linked here).

Storage and speed are just two of the features of the new e-reader being released today by Amazon.com. But commentator Alison McGaughey says she would rather live life among the stacks.

How are you doing on those resolutions?

So far, more than two months into the New Year now, I have been staying strong.

Sure, I still have plenty of pounds to shed.

But I have been sticking to the rule I set for myself on New Year’s Day, the day I embarked on a de-cluttering project:

I placed a moratorium on myself against buying books.

You see, I realized that I have been burying myself under the weight of good intentions.

In other words, picking up pieces of classic literature at a yard sale or thrift store, telling myself with each one, “I’ll save this for someday when I have more time.”

But—at the risk of being too dark here—I have started to fear that “someday” may never come.

Or, more accurately, I have started to resent the fact that tomorrow does come. Every day. But the “more time” part never does.

For example, it’s been at least three years since I hit up that one fantastic library sale.

But Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi has floated nowhere nearer to the top of my ever-flowing “to read” list.

That hefty Hemmingway novel is now dustier in my house than it was when I found it in a church-basement rummage sale.

Like an addict, I had been in denial about the fact that my habit was causing me harm.

But when friends came over, no one said “Wow, I’m impressed with your literary tastes.”

Instead, I was hearing things like,

“So where do you sit, again?”

In addition to all the ones I want to read for fun, there is a syllabus of books I need to get through for a class.

So I had to face the fact that I’ll never get to get to any of these books I’ve been buying, any time in the near future.

Or it will be until I finally figure out how to master simultaneous-speed-reading, dish-doing and laundry-folding.

Finally I forced myself to compile a stack for the Salvation Army.

But each step felt like a stab to the heart.

As I was in the process of purging and packing items to donate, I found an un-opened Time magazine.

When I finally got around to reading it, I saw a list titled “Best Gadgets of 2008.”

Among them? The Kindle. A hand-held digital-reading device.

I was already aware that something like this existed.

But I guess I had hoped that if I ignored it—like my clutter problem—it would go away.

Instead, the Kindle is so popular, apparently, that the Version 2 is now on sale on Amazon.com—for a mere $359.

Time magazine says:

“It definitely takes some getting used to […] but it’s simply a terrific tool for people who love to read books.”

But if they “love to read books,” why would they trade them in for something that looks and feels like a big, flat cell phone?

Perhaps a better description would be:

“For people who want their Faulker in the same format as a forwarded e-mail?”

But it seems a sure bet that, as a reading public, we’re going paper-less.

The Christian Science Monitor last year went all-online.

And I know how predictable, and how conservative, it seems—a literature lover lamenting the loss of the printed page.

If I advocate for the big, clunky book—rather than a sleek Sony Reader—I might as well call for bringing back the Betamax.

I know that if I can now get Mark Twain’s entire works on an Apple iTouch—but still believe in books—I might as well argue that dads should still carry camcorders on their shoulders—and toaster-sized battery backs on their hips.

But how is a progressive person who reveres the classics supposed to feel about a Kindle?

I mean, why didn’t they just name it the Terminator?

The Incinerator?

Better yet, the Fahrenheiter—as in 451?

Now, I have to make a confession: I bought a book the other day.

I couldn’t resist.

I found it in a cozy little used bookstore—the kind that will also surely die someday.

And in this book, the Southern writer Eudora Welty recalls feeling shocked and dismayed as a child—when she realized books were not “natural wonders” but created by people.

She says:

“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms […]“

And she grew up to win a Pulitzer Prize.

What would have happened if she were a child in the day of the digital-reader?

I don’t think she would have fallen for story in the same way.

(Not if its tangible vessel felt no different in her hands than a Nintendo DS.)

The following item originally aired as a local commentary on NPR-member station Tri States Public Radio, WIUM/WIUW.

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Earlier this fall Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a measure allowing parents to keep their children on their healthcare policies until their dependent’s 26th birthday. With the national spotlight focused on the presidential election and the bailout plan, Commentator Alison McGaughey says, it seems little has been said about this news item that emerged on the state level in Illinois.

If all goes according to plan, the governor’s new legislation—which will force companies to raise the cut-off age for their employees’ children—will become law in January.

According to the news release from the governor’s office, more than 300,000 people in the state between 19-25 are uninsured. With this new measure, (the news release promises), thousands of young adults will get to keep, or get access to, regular checkups and preventable care.

In other words, no more going to the doctor on what my friend Jane—who worked in a bookstore for several years after college—used to refer to as the Master Card Plan.

It’s easy to empathize with that classic post-graduation purgatory— the No Longer a Student, though Not-yet-Employed.

And, for the record, when it comes time for me to choose a candidate—it’s exactly this kind of stuff: expansion of health care coverage, concern for the underprivileged? This is how I roll.

(Me and several thousands of other young people who voted on November 4.)

But what seems like a wonderful change on the surface has started to make me raise some serious questions.

For one, how much will this measure truly protect the poor in the 19-25 age group—whose parents might not even have health insurance in the first place?

And is there a chance this could only perpetuate an already-prolonged state of privileged adolescence?

According to experts, we’re in an era of so-called “helicopter parents,” moms and dads who hover protectively over their kids more than ever before. Parents who not only pay for their kids’ educations but also might not hesitate to call their kids professors’ for a grade report.

If coverage would’ve been expanded for previous generations, where would today’s young entrepreneurs be today if they hadn’t ventured out into the world when they did?

Most importantly, would Mary and Rhoda ever even have met?

I realize that my qualms with this policy would not be popular with those in their late-late-teens and early-early twenties.

One young woman in particular, I know, would be disgusted with me if she could hear these comments.

That would be me—the me of 10 years ago—who, at age 21, came home from college hoping to spend the summer figuring my life out, figuring out how I was gonna live my dream.

All of which I planned to do from my old room in parents’ house.

My parents, however, had an actual plan—one that resulted in me getting a job within 10 days of graduation.

I was basically forced to go out and work. And the work I did made me miserable.

But it also, I can say now, taught me a lot. And gave me character. And forced me to grow up.

(Naturally, I have refused to thank my parents for this.)

If I’d have had a government-sanctioned reason to stay on my parents’ dime a day longer, believe me, baby, I’d have done it.

And put off becoming an independent, self-sufficient adult for at least another couple of years.

Waiting until age 26 or longer to leave the parental home might mean never knowing the spark of excitement of being out on one’s own in the world. Of throwing one’s hat into the Midwestern wind.

The answer to that quintessential question— “How will you make it own your own?”—is not supposed to be “I won’t have to—I’m covered!”

–
Alison McGaughey is a full-time employee and part-time graduate student at WIU.

Just in case ya wanna hear, I will have an essay–on a new measure approved by Illinois Gov. Bla-Go-Go-Boots-- on WIUM Tri States Public Radio on Tuesday (Nov. 11) during Morning (7:35-ish) and Afternoon (4:45-ish) Editions.

I think (but honestly don’t quite understand how, so don’t yell at me if this don’t work, mkay?) you can listen online using this link.

Thanks for supporting your local public radio station (and listenin’ to me pontificate!)

(The following item originally aired Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008 on NPR-member station WIUM/WIU, Tri States Public Radio)
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Commentator Alison McGaughey asks: when hip-hoppers are the predominant performers in Western Hall, has the culture changed, or have you?

Last fall a friend of mine, who happens to be attending Western to work on a biology degree, asked if I’d go with her to a concert in Western Hall. I was so excited at the thought of live music that I yelped “Sure!” before asking “Who’s the band?”

The following piece originally aired as a commentary on NPR-member station Tri States Public Radio WIUM/WIUW.

When it comes to living single in a couples’ world, commentator Alison McGaughey has some trash talking to do.

I read in the newspaper that when it comes to saving the planet, married people are leaving a lighter carbon footprint than those who are divorced. In other words, if you’re not married, apparently, it ain’t easy being green.

At least that appears to be the claim made by a recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If you’re divorced, chances are greater that you have fewer people living in your home. You might even be living alone.

According to the findings, married people and their families get by with just 2.5 rooms per person, whereas the average divorced household in the U.S. has 3.7 rooms per person. And living alone means taking up more space and resources for yourself.

This makes it sound like the solitary lifestyle is “equivalent to driving around in a gas guzzler all by yourself with the air conditioner on full blast and a cell phone needlessly plugged into the charger,” as LA Times columnist Meghan Daum put it.

I didn’t like what I read about this study.

I’m not divorced, but I am the only person under my own roof.

And I’m an obsessive recycle-r. A driver of a fuel-efficient vehicle. The way I re-use my cottage cheese cartons would make my Depression-era Grandma proud.

So it stings to have to question my validity as a green-gung-ho goody-goody. But more than that, I really didn’t need anything added to the societal stigma against single people.

When I mentioned that I live alone, people often tell me: “You should get a roommate.”

To be fair, they’re trying to be helpful—because I do tend to complain about the constrictions of living on a single income.

But I still bristle at the suggestion that I shouldn’t be living on my own.

Like many single people, I cherish the luxuries of peace and quiet. But it isn’t just that.

It’s that living independently is non-negotiable for me—as much a part of what counts toward “Official Adulthood” as having to pay taxes.

(Plus, who doesn’t love the freedom to openly double-dip a chip?)

As if it wasn’t bad enough to I read this story in the national news, I was hit on the local level with an environmental slam against my single status.

The little white pamphlet from Waste Management of Macomb, which arrived on Jan. 12, seemed innocuous enough: A helpful review of which kids of items can and cannot be recycled.

(I was perturbed to find that I’d been making an egregious refuse error over the last several months—No plastic plates or black microwave trays“?!? Now I have to feel guilty for for the fact that I subsist off of Lean Cuisines?)

But that would turn out to be the least of my woes.

As the flier reminded me, the City of Macomb has switched to a cart system, meaning that a new 96-gallon cart will be delivered to my home.

I knew right away this behemoth beast would never fit through the door to the storage area where I stash my weekly pile-up.

(I have to protect it from the insanely bold raccoons that prowl my neighborhood at night).

But the new system means you can’t just plop your single bag on the curb. And I can get a smaller one, the pamphlet re-assured me, but I have to go to City Hall to do it.

And within a certain—short—time frame.

And, at least twice when I’ve called to see if I can make the request over the phone, I’ve been received by a recorded voice. The lady who di answer an 800-number at Waste Management the told me to call the same number I’d already called.

Truth is, I’m just annoyed by this little errand because it feels like another way that single people get the short straw.

But if I can ever get anyone to answer the phone and agree to issuing the single-people trash-storage unit, and the the married folk roll out their 96-gallon carts, I’ll proudly put out my little bachelorette bucket: a measly 35 gallons of trash.

I mean, the very idea that single people should feel guilty for living alone?

That’s just a bunch of garbage.
–

The following piece was originally a commentary on NRR member station Tri States Public Radio, about the ongoing saga of the old Carthage College campus.

It was announced last month that Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, will close its doors. Commentator Alison McGaughey says that when the halls of academia begin to crumble, there’s only one solution: pray for pigs.

I couldn’t help but feel a kind of pang when I heard on the news that the once-prestigious Antioch College is set to shut its doors. Not because I, too, am a private-school grad–I went to nearby Monmouth College—but because I grew up in a town where a once-successful college closed its doors.

When I heard the news about Antioch, the first thought that came to mind wasn’t “what will happen to the students and faculty?” but:

“What will happen to the town?”

According to an Associated Press story, the non-traditional liberal arts college is being forced to close its doors because of a lack of funds and declining enrollment. Antioch officials say they do, at least, hope to re-open in four years.

But some schools—or should I say, some towns—aren’t so lucky.

My hometown of Carthage, Illinois was once home to a private, liberal arts school: the aptly named Carthage College. But because the town was far-removed from interstate access— located in a region once dubbed The Republic of Forgotonia—college officials voted in 1962 to move the campus to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

When I was a kid in the 80s, the campus was inhabited by a business school, Robert Morris College. But then Robert Morris moved, too—in this case to multiple locations in Peoria, Springfield, and the Chicago area—and I watched as my town slowly began to lose population, businesses, and, in some ways, hope.

The campus was sold to a South Korean man in 1994. But he neglected to do anything with the property.

By the time I was a teenager, when my friends and I would cruise the main drag through town for the millionth time, it was hard not to wonder what it would’ve been like to live in Carthage when a college was still there. There would’ve been an abundance of young people. Professors and their families. Theatrical and musical performances.

There would’ve been boys.

But instead of having a lively cultural center, my hometown had a miniature ghost town—buildings with broken windows and leaking roofs, a campus of thigh-high weeds. This is the depressing site that greets visitors who enter Carthage on the east side of town.

When I left home to attend college myself– to the small private Monmouth College– I learned that one of my English-major/theatre buddies, a guy from the Chicago suburbs, had transferred in to Monmouth–from Carthage College in Kenosha. When I excitedly asked him if he knew where Carthage College got its name, I was actually, like, mad at him when he said he had no clue.

Over the years, Carthage community leaders have tried to do what they could about the declining campus. One city leader even tried pitching the story of Kang Moo Lee’s extreme absentee landlord-ism to national news shows, but to no avail. Rumors have circulated for years that Mormons with ties to local history would buy the property. Nothing ever materialized.

But late last month, a local vet announced that his investment group, consisting of Carthage Veterinary Service, Ltd. and Professional Swine Management LLC, has purchased the property.

At least three of the 12 existing buildings are beyond repair and will have to be demolished, according to one news report.

But the group plans to turn at one former hall into office space for the veterinary clinic and swine management operations. They might also refurbish another building into temporary housing for new employees, and possibly for starting a small-business incubator.

Admittedly, a swine operation can’t promise the cultural boost that a college would.

But it’s the end of an eyesore—and an era of neglect and disrepair—and that’s the best shot in the arm my hometown has received in a very long time.

I can only hope the best for the town of Yellow Springs. And maybe now, if I happen to meet any other people who tell me they are alumni of the current Carthage College, I can ease up on them just a bit.

–

The following was originally aired as a commentary on local NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.

Children in the region will be out and about knocking on doors this week. Commentator Alison McGaughey says that’s exactly what gives her fright.

Tomorrow night, I will be participating in trick-or-treat—my first time as an adult.

Not as a parent taking kids from door-to-door, but as a citizen, opening my door to the treat-seekers.

I should be excited, but I’m nervous.

I’m not afraid of the ‘trick’ part. It’ll be the children of friends and co-workers who’ll be stopping by. And I’m going to be generous. I’ve got full packs of bubble gum to give out, which isn’t too shabby, I don’t think. So I’m not worried about anyone throwing eggs.

I’m nervous because this is a big step for me. This is my first time participating in Halloween as a city dweller. (Well, “city” in terms of being aMacomb resident who lives within city limits.)

You see, I grew up on farm a few miles outside town, which you could only reach by driving down a bumpy gravel road. In my entire youth, we had exactly one visit from kids seeking candy. For people who live out in the country, Halloween is a silent night.

We only lived a few miles outside town. Even if any of my friends had thought to come all the way out to our house for a fun-sized Snickers, their parents would have discouraged it. “My dad says it’s too hard on the tires.” Or, “My mom wants to know if your mom will bring you into town instead, because she just washed the car.”

At least this meant Halloween got to be all about me. My parents drove me in to town and I got to hit up everyone we knew. I never had to sacrifice a single second of loot-gathering time by staying home to return the favor.

And really, we weren’t all that cracked up on people popping in, anyway.

When you live in the country, a knock at the door is something to fear. If it’s not the Culligan man or the meter reader, chances are it’s some drunk dude who staggered for miles to the first light source he saw after he slamming his car into a ditch five miles away. (We never were quite the same after that one.)

The one Halloween that some kids did come to our door, I was long past the age of being a trick-or-treater myself. It was my senior year of high school, and I was doing homework at the kitchen table when my parents suddenly appeared in the adjacent dining room, peeking out through the blinds and looking concerned. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Someone’s coming down the road, and they’re slowing down,” Mom said. “They’re stopping. I think we’ve got trick-or-treaters!”

Sure enough, the car stopped, and a little witch and a fairy princess stepped out, followed by their mother. Family friends of ours. Mom darted to the kitchen. “What am I going to give them?”

“I don’t know,” I said, jumping up and searching through my bookbag for stray pieces of gum. But all I found were cough drops. “Don’t we have any…chocolate chips or anything?”

But we were out of time.

“Trick-or-treat!”

I went to the door. “Um, just a sec,” I said. I tried to think of something to stall them, as I heard cabinet doors banging behind me.

Then Mom was behind me. I was just about to say, “Sorry, kids,” but I watched in horror as she dropped packages of instant oatmeal into their plastic jack-o-lantern buckets. When they looked up at her with somewhat bewildered thank-yous, this was her reply:

“Hey, at least it’s brown sugar!”

This piece aired Tuesday, 9.25.07, on NPR member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.

A recent speaker at Western Illinois University prompted commentator Alison McGaughey to do a little “California dreamin’.”

Sometimes, in weaker moments, I find myself wishing I was someone else. Specifically, Joni Mitchell.

I experienced such a moment just last week when journalist Michael Walker visited the WIU campus in Macomb to deliver a talk on his book, Laurel Canyon: the Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. His presentation included photos, music, and outtakes from his interviews with musicians who lived in the California canyon in the 1960’s. In one: Joni looking dreamy as she sits cross-legged in a Laurel Canyon yard, strumming her guitar. In another: with her long blonde locks tucked into a crocheted cap, she tilts her head lovingly toward Graham Nash, fellow Canyon resident and 60’s musician. She was just so darn glamorous. And, oh–also an amazing poet, instrumentalist, and painter.

photo credit: Henry Diltz, via Michael Walker

Walker told the story of how Graham Nash wrote a song about Mitchell and Nash’s love affair and cohabitation in a Laurel Canyon house—you know the one, the “very very very fine house.”

As he described how these and many others came together, harmonizing musically and spiritually, Walker pointed out that in an age before cell phones, e-mail, etc., the young people of Laurel Canyon had to get out of their houses and congregate in order to get in touch with one another. The communal lifestyle allowed for spontaneous music-making sessions. The author said he often wonders why today’s generation of teens and early-twenty-somethings—around 50 or so of whom attended the talk in the University Union Sandburg Theatre—remain interested in a time so long before they were born. A common response, he said, is, “We’ll never have anything like this.”

Walker, a Chicago native, also showed photos of modern-day Laurel Canyon, where he lives today. And while his photos did capture some of today’s young people wearing tie-dye, there wasn’t much about the physical neighborhood itself that spoke of the 60’s and the magical moments of music history that happened there. Which led me to think of another legendary California neighborhood that played a major role in 60’s counterculture.

I visited the famed Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during a family trip to California in early August. As I walked around the neighborhood that I’d read and heard about all my life, it just seemed like lots of shops selling incense and tie-dye, shops not unlike those present in every other college town. I was finding it to be a bit anticlimactic, until my dad happened to notice a homemade sign placed outside a shop. Someone had taped up some snapshots of the houses in which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Greatful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane had lived, the house numbers written helpfully in ink pen below. I walked down the street excitedly to check out the house where Hendrix had lived. The lower half housed an organic produce market. The upper half, apparently housing an apartment, was un-remarkable— though there was tie-dye tapestry tacked up over the windows in lieu of curtains.

I would’ve expected a plaque sponsored by the tourism bureau at the very least.

But as we pulled away from the famed neighborhood I realized I was thankful— at least the original neighborhood hadn’t been plowed down to house a kind of Hendrix Hard Rock Hotel.
And during the Laurel Canyon presentation, I took comfort in knowing that journalists like Walker are preserving the stories of the Sixties. And keeping younger generations interested in the art and culture of the period—and the fascinating free spirits like Joni Mitchell who once lived there.

Because, apparently, not every young person grows up to be as fascinated by the period.
When I was chatting later in the week with a student who happens to be a journalism major, I asked if he’d enjoyed Walker’s talk.

“Oh, I didn’t go,” he said. “I’m not really into the music from that time. I like a little Steppenwolf, but that’s it.”

Which leads me to believe universities should adopt Walker’s book as required reading—with soundtrack to go along.
–

The following originally aired as a local commentary on NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.

You can read/ listen to more of my essays here.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut died April 13th at the age of 84. Upon hearing news of his death, commentator Alison McGaughey revisits a local legend about the man who wrote Slaughterhouse 5.

The news of Kurt Vonnegut’s death earlier this month reminded me of the “rural legend” I once heard about the revered writer: that he supposedly visited Macomb and wrote an essay about the experience–and didn’t exactly give it rave reviews.

So I went online in search of this story, and was surprised when I found what I was looking for fairly easily. I was also a little annoyed—because in the essay in question, titled “Teaching the Unteachable,” Mr. Vonnegut makes fun of people like me. And not, as it turns out, just because I live in Macomb.

The essay was published in the New York Times in August of 1967, when Vonnegut was, according to the bio at the end of the article, “working on a new novel, Slaughterhouse 5.”

“You can’t teach people to write well,” he says in the opening line. “Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.”

Vonnegut takes aim at the idea of summer writing conferences, the short retreats usually held at prestigious universities, sometimes at more exotic locales, that allow amateurs to learn from, and rub elbows with, “real” writers. He pokes fun at people who attend them as being repressed housewife types–actually, he says “minister’s wives”— who basically just want to get away for a vacation. “The idea of a conference for prose writers,” Vonnegut says, “is an absurdity.”
Um, ouch.

(I was already stinging by the time I got to this point in the article, because…. guess how I’m spending my summer “vacation?” I’ve signed up for a week-long session at the Iowa City Summer Writing Festival, where I’ll work under the guidance of a published and somewhat acclaimed fiction writer. In other words—Vonnegut’s words, to be exact—I’ll be “pretending to be a writer.” I am not, however, a minister’s wife.)

So what does all this have to do with Macomb?

It turns out that at some point, apparently not too long before the essay was published, Western Illinois University hosted a West-Central Writers’ Conference, with Vonnegut as the featured writer —an experience he apparently found less than enthralling.

In the essay, he describes the student-faculty get-together that opened the event.

Held in the TraveLodge Motel “in between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand …amidst the sounds of Muzak and drag races out on Route 136,” he writes, the party attracted only a handful of students— who, according to Vonnegut, showed up only because there was booze.

“The founder and director ….was a cigar-eating young English instructor named E. W. Johnson,” he writes, “… the only teacher at Western Illinois to have published a book. Johnson was sad …because he had sent out thousands of brochures and had advertised lavishly in Writer’s Digest and Saturday Review and so on, and yet only 19 students had come…”
The party died at midnight, with only Vonnegut and a few stragglers sitting around the swimming pool, quote, “breathing chlorine and carbon monoxide.”

The lone remaining student announced to Vonnegut and the WIU professor that she knew why more people didn’t show up: “Because,” she said, ‘Macomb, Illinois’ sounds like such a hell-hole, and because ‘Western Illinois University’ sounds like such a jerkwater school.”

Don’t expect that to end up on University brochures anytime soon.

Vonnegut did find the heart to write, “The Town isn’t all that bad, I guess, and the University is handsome and booming.” “But,” he says, “there isn’t any water there, and there aren’t any mountains there, and there is no grand hotel. If you don’t have water or mountains, and you want to found a writer’s conference, you had better have a grand hotel.”
Of course, the essay stings a bit because the truth hurts. And I do share some of Mr. Vonnegut’s cynicism. Writing retreats come with a steep price tag. And they do attract poseurs, whose primary purpose for attending is to be able to mention at parties that they’ve done so.

But for us amateurs—who dream of ever doing anything remotely close to writing as successfully as Vonnegut did— conferences are the only chance to spend an intensive period working on and learning about writing—because the other 51 weeks of the year we’re behind a desk or in front of a classroom, or doing whatever else it is we do to make a living.
This summer, as I stroll the streets of Iowa City, it will be hard to block Vonnegut’s comments from my mind.
(But at least, thanks to him, I’ll know better than to stay at a TraveLodge.)

[The following is a radio essay aired on NPR member station Tri States Public Radio some time in 2007, I think-- when the "Looking for Lincoln" Heritage Coalition, based in Springfield, announced plans to put up more than 150 historical signs across central Illinois that point out places where Lincoln made history.]

Commentator Alison McGaughey tries to envision who, exactly, is “looking” for Lincoln.

I was surprised to read in the news recently that one of the fancy new “Looking for Lincoln” signs will be placed in Fountain Green, Illinois— just a few miles down the road from where I grew up.

All my life, I only knew the village of Fountain Green for one thing: that it was home to a giant vehicular graveyard—the place where my high school cruising car was laid to rest.

But it turns out some of Lincoln’s relatives are buried there.

And Fountain Green isn’t the only place in Hancock County were signs will be going up.

For example, one sign will explain that Lincoln tried, and lost, a case in the Hancock County Courthouse in Carthage.

Another will point out a place where he likely stayed the night, and another, where he gave a speech.

How could it be that until this sign campaign was announced, I had never known any of this before?

I knew there was a big rock on the Courthouse lawn that had something to do with Lincoln, but had no idea my tiny hometown had so many connections to one of the most significant men in American history.

When my friends and I were teenagers, we made more loops around that courthouse square (in that aforementioned car) than… well, more times than is worth mentioning.

But I guess I never discovered these facts about my surroundings because I had never been looking for them.

Which prompts the question: who is?

As these signs go up, I know there are history buffs who will come to track down historical tidbits and trivia.

And they will bring bucks to town when they do.

That’s what local developers and the Looking for Lincoln program promoters are banking on.

According to a story from the Peoria Journal-Star, the program is an effort to spread Lincoln history, and related tourism, beyond just Springfield.

But is it a little idealistic to think there are people out there who care enough about Lincoln history to hit the road?

When families decide to spend their hard-earned money and vacation time on a road trip, aren’t they more likely to make an excursion to Disney World than to Fountain Green, Illinois (“Where Good Cars Go to Die”)?

But just as I begin to doubt, a vision comes to my mind—an image of a great man.

Not Lincoln behind a courtroom lectern.

But my dad—behind the wheel of a brown station wagon.

And the vision speaks to me, saying that the Lincoln signs will have an audience— if families like the one I grew up in still exist. Families who venture not to Disney World, but to…DeSmet, South Dakota.

One year, on our way out west to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, we made a special venture to the tiny, out-of-the-way town of DeSmet—which I remember being about as lovely as its name—all to see, and get our pictures taken in front of, one of the places Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived, and her grave marker.

We spent money in DeSmet, too, because we stayed the night there in a truly Mom-and-Pop hotel. ( Although, at least one potential tourism dollar went down the drain, when Dad realized he had forgotten his toothbrush—and there was no place open at 8 o’clock at night to buy a replacement.)

So, each time I see one of the new Looking for Lincoln signs, I will be reminded of all the times I would just be settling into a nap—a Dramamine-induced nap—only to hear Dad call over his shoulder, “Look out the window, kids: another historical marker! ‘Hysterical marker’ coming up!!”

If there are families out there who still take road trips together, I hope the parents will take time to stop at all the turn-outs for historical markers.

I hope they do force their kids to learn a bit of trivia and history.

But I also hope they do remember to bring their own toothbrush.