One of the country’s oldest outdoor murals covers a storefront on Chicago’s Northwest Side. People who care about the 40-year-old painting are finishing a facelift. The mural restoration is doing more than brightening up a gritty stretch of North Avenue.
Of the 900 men who mustered into the 95th Illinois Infantry in 1862, only 153 were still in the regiment by the end of the Civil War. Albert Cashier was one of them. And that’s historic - because Albert was a woman. He was born Jennie Hodgers on Christmas Day of 1843, in Clogher Head, Ireland.
Thirty years ago this summer, President Ronald Reagan was at an economic summit in Canada when his French counterpart, Francois Mitterand, pulled him aside to deliver startling news: the French had a mole, a high-level KGB colonel.
For more than a half-century tourism has been big business around the Great Lakes. For many small towns in the north, the entire economy can depend on visitors coming for two months out of the year.