It's cliche but children are the future. Bloomington resident Clara Louise Kessler passionately lived that.

It's said that good writing is the soul of radio. A Bloomington-Normal boy made good exemplifies that adage.

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.

Women political candidates are the norm today. But it hasn’t been so very long since a woman running for office was rare or even unheard of. The first woman to serve in the Illinois Senate was Florence Fifer Bohrer of Bloomington in 1924. But leading the way for Bohrer some years before was Helen Clark McCurdy, the first woman to run for office in Bloomington, in 1915.

Wherever humans gather, there is garbage. And getting rid of it is a challenge. The start of trash removal in Bloomington dates to the start of the 20th century and to a man known in his day as the King of Swedes.

The way Black people were treated in Bloomington-Normal got a lot worse in the 20th century than in the years before, and that's saying something. Those conditions produced jarring juxtapositions in people’s lives, such as that of an intelligent churchgoing Black woman who worked for the family of State Farm royalty and in a brothel to make ends meet.

One doesn’t think of Bloomington and central Illinois as a lurid hotbed of crime. But it certainly seems it could have been that way during the mid-to-late 1800s as portrayed by the three city newspapers of the day.

Coming from nothing, an illiterate Black man from Bloomington-Normal — long before the civil rights movement — found a niche in the national market for cleaning products. In this episode of the WGLT feature McHistory, hear about a floor polish and the man who invented and sold it.

Ellen Ferguson was a champion of women and women's suffrage. She made Bloomington-Normal her home in the 1870s.

Bloomington-Normal has a long and distinguished history of business entrepreneurship. One less than distinguished, but very successful, business, had a continent-wide spread in the late 1800s.