Earl Lee's blog pic (by permission)
Rockford, IL, a city founded on two sides of a river called Rock that the original settlers had to "ford" across, hence the name, and that old rugged Christian faith, was initially home to New Englanders, followed by an eclectic ethnic and religious mix, notably the Swedish. Yet apart from being the home of Cheap Trick's original four, the sock monkey (the sock part), and dwindling manufacturing firms and metal screw factories, it's also the former stomping ground of freethinker Jane Addams (b. 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois), first woman Nobel Prize winner, founder and author of Twenty Years at Hull-House, as well as home to Mattie Parry Krekel (b. 1840), incessant writer to The Truth Seeker, seminal free thought newsletter, no longer circulating, and birthplace of Earl Lee (b. 1955), Librarian, Poet and Parodist (Kiss My Left Behind), who recently wrote on his blog (from Pittsburg State University): "For The Religious, the real world is a separate category kept in a seperate mental box...." It might be added that the city's rich heritage of questioning and seeking could have been perhaps too easily stuffed in a box and forgotten.
Despite its frequent characterization as the most typical of Midwestern cities, Rockford's modest schools and, significantly, the Rockford Female Seminary, later Rockford College for Women, chartered in 1847, grew during the course of just over a century into venerated and nationally recognized institutions. According to the City of Rockford, IL Website, that now coeducational Rockford College "is today recognized as a top liberal arts institution...." Jane Addams wrote about her experience there, where idealism both enlightened and clouded the minds of these pioneers who early weathered the male-dominated social climate:
"We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, that the difficulty of life would lie solely in the direction of losing these precious ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and complexity of life's purposes." (Twenty Years at Hull-House, 1910, p. 63)
Earl Lee credits his early experiences at plain old New Millford Elementary School, District #205, as a seminal launching pad for his future devotion to studying and learning. "One of the better experiences," he writes, "was being in the 2nd grade class of Mary Ann Moored, who gave me a book The Arrow Book of Funny Poems. I guess you could say that this launched me into a life of reading and writing." His formative faith-experiences seem typical of non-theists and non-believers today:
"While living in Rockford and New Milford, my parents attended a small Southern Baptist church which was, I think, on the south side of Rockford. It was there that I was I saw my first real evangelist. The experience of five days of intense rants by this evangelist scared me into being baptized and joining the church. I guess this experience eventually led to my becoming a freethinker."
Rockford is an aesthetically beautiful place, incorporating nature and classic architecture, culture and crime (see americanmafia.com), middle-class security and impoverishment. The seeming dialectic tension between conservatism and liberalism, in religion, politics and education, encapsulate the perceptions of Rockford's residence, both former and current.
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