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Baseball is happening and all is right with the world. Today, though, let's hear about another bat and ball game — softball. It was big in Central Illinois for many decades with lots of semi-pro teams and even industrial leagues for men and women. it also offered an outlet for young women before they had opportunities to play other organized sports.
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By now, most people know the Rivian story in which a scrappy startup electric automaker brought a mothballed Mitsubishi plant back to life, hired 8,000 people, and has now gone on to make more than 100,000 vehicles. Fewer may know Rivian was not the first electric automaker in Bloomington-Normal.
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Alpheus Pike campaigned in the eastern theater of the war and, after two years and nine months of service, was captured in May 1864 at a battle near Drewry’s Bluff in the Bermuda Hundred campaign and was sent to a notorious Confederate prison camp.
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Illinois high school basketball teams are grinding through the late parts of their seasons as the state tournament approaches early next month. In this episode of our series McHistory, we learn about the longest-running annual basketball tournament in the state — 112 years and counting.
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Most people know about the letter a little girl wrote to the New York Sun newspaper in 1897 asking whether Santa Claus is real. It prompted the famous response, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." Bloomington-Normal children encountered their own slightly more intrepid version of that idea a couple decades later.
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The words of a World War II prisoner of war from Normal show a grim situation filled with privation, guard brutality, and occasional diversions. This comes from Robert S. Hall’s wartime journal, recently donated to the McLean County Museum of History.
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The Major League Baseball playoffs are once again making October a special time. But baseball was not always here to root for and entertain us.
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It's cliche but children are the future. Bloomington resident Clara Louise Kessler passionately lived that.
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It's said that good writing is the soul of radio. A Bloomington-Normal boy made good exemplifies that adage.
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WGLT's McHistory series features Richard Blue, the first Black person to run for council in Bloomington. He was also a Civil War veteran, activist, member of a literary society, doorman at the state capital, and barber.