Hometown News
If the Miserable Donuts can call any place 'home' it may well be Rockford, IL. Of the six primary contributors, five hail from this hapless burg. For the record, four of the five had the good sense to leave this hapless burg early on. The vaunted Chicago Tribune recently ran an expose on Rockford and I thought the Rockford Ex-Pats might want to take a look. For all other Donuteers, it may be interesting reading on the perils of isolationism. Click Below - (You may need to log in to the tribune)
Rough Ride in Rockford
posted by Mighty Quinn at 2:03 PM
2 Comments:
I grew up in Rockford (Keith Country Day School and Auburn) and left around the time the fallout from the People Who Care lawsuits started taking its toll. The notion that bussing people to schools near where they live constitutes "raising discrimination to an artform" or that this needed hundres of millions of dollars to remedy was just absurd. The resulting property tax increases rolled many house prices back 20 years and will cost many their retirement... and to what benefit?
Blaming Rockford's woes on isolationism makes less sense than looking at the terrible property taxes and Illinois' lopsided treatment of unions against businesses. (Just look what this did to steel.)
I've been watching Morrissey from afar, and I'm hopeful for the rail plan and other improvements. Despite the many jokes surrounding Rockford ("armpit of America," "What's there to do? Well, there's a petting zoo") there's still much going for it: NAT, On the Waterfront, the great buildings in Scandinavian Village, Rockford Airport, a four year college and one of the country's best community colleges, plenty of spare manufacturing capacity... the place is going to explode someday when the right person comes along to put the pieces together correctly.
Man, you can almost hear the irony thudding in the phrase "vaunted Chicago Tribune". I cancelled my subscription to that piece of fishwrap years ago. Sounds like they haven't changed since they stopped getting my subscription check...
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