Knox in the News

From the Register-Mail:

During 1937 Dr. H.R. Muelder of Knox College’s history department presented a series of lectures at Central Congregational Church about the community’s early pioneers. Muelder was later to serve as acting president of the college.

Muelder painted a vivid picture of the pioneers. He pointed out that they had problems and sought the best ways to solve them. They were forced to exchange hardships for anticipated rewards.

The wives had the most to lose and the least to gain in the pioneer adventure. They more often than not had to give up their original customs for a life of hardship. Muelder pointed out that it was common in most pioneer cemeteries that as many as three wives were buried with pioneer husbands.

From the Register-Mail:

The sound of children singing. Half-seen images of women, dark hair dangling over their faces. And the Japanese urban legend of a beautiful woman who sheds a surgical mask to reveal a cut mouth.

The horror offered Friday night inside Knox College’s Lincoln Room was based on implication — and comforting images twisted in terrifying ways.

A group of about 20 Knox College students in the Japanese Club offered a different take on Halloween horrors, hosting what they called a “Kimodameshi.” The haunted house with a distinctly different flavor was free and based on ghost stories from both long-standing and popular Japanese culture.

“A kimodameshi is translated as a kind of test of courage,” said 22-year-old Yumi Kusunoki, a Knox student from Osaka, Japan and co-president of the Japanese club.

From the Register-Mail:

Don’t let the set fool you — ornate Victorian sofa, tall white pillars. Don’t let the costumes distract you — fitted corsets, long dresses and three-piece suits. The display on stage may seem like a passport to 1901 — and to an extent it is — but the themes of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” performed by Knox College still resonate today.

“The audience will be spending two hours with people who existed long before them, but whose preoccupations and struggles are very much the same as those we face today,” said director and chair of the theater department Neil Blackadder.

The play, at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 4-7 in Harbach Theatre, tells the story of three sisters in a small 19th century Russian town filled with “snap shots of moments” and “snippets of life,” said Samantha Newport, one of two assistant directors and a Knox senior.

From Colorado State University:

Katie Driver, a Colorado State University student from the Warner College of Natural Resources, was honored with the 2009 Rocky Mountains Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit Student Achievement Award for her work in creating a protocol for monitoring wetlands in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Driver has a long history of interest and experience in botany. At the age of 14, she completed a botany project surveying flowering plants in an open field near her home in Wisconsin. The project, funded through a grant encouraging middle school students to engage in academia, was only the beginning of Driver’s research life.

“Surprisingly enough, this experience affected the trajectory of my education, career and life,” said Driver.

Attending Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., Driver majored in biology but enrolled in every botany course the school had to offer. “I had a professor there who was a botanist himself, and he acted a mentor and encouraged my interests,” said Driver. She took her first botany-related job in college collecting plant species in Yellowstone National Park and afterwards continued to travel around the country working miscellaneous jobs in the field.

From the Associated Press (Belleville News Democrat, Belleville; CBS-2, Chicago):

Knox College has received a $400,000 grant that the school says it will use to pay for several different efforts, including faculty research.

The western Illinois college on Tuesday announced the grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The school says it is the fifth grant it has received from the foundation in the last seven years for a total of nearly $1 million.

According to the Galesburg school, the $400,000 also will fund new faculty orientation and mentoring, enhancements to current courses and development of new courses.

Knox College president Roger Taylor says the grant money, “recognizes the quality of Knox’s faculty and academic program.”

From the Register-Mail:

On Nov. 15, 1909, a century ago, Knox County student Reuben Johan Erickson won the Illinois Oratorical contest held on the campus of Monmouth College. As a result of his feat, witnessed by more than 300 Knox students and local residents, Erickson became eligible to represent Illinois in the Interstate Contest in Omaha, Neb…..

Before he entered Galesburg High School the structure at Broad and Tompkins Streets was destroyed by a tragic fire. Erickson was a member of the first class to graduate from the newly built school at the same location. He proclaimed on the first page of the first ever known GHS Yearbook that the school colors would be “Silver and Gold.”

Erickson’s greatest contribution to Galesburg High School and its citizens was the first ever school song entitled “The Silver & The Gold”…..

Reuben Johan Erickson, upon departing from GHS, would graduate from Knox College and John Hopkins University. He was a lieutenant in the medical corps during World War I. He practiced medicine in Albany, N.Y., before retiring to Santa Fe, N.M.

Reuben Erickson lived as long as his song was sung at Dear Old Galesburg High School. He passed away on June 5, 1959, following an automobile accident in New Mexico. This coincendentally was the last day of classes at the downtown GHS school site prior to the opening of the current facility on West Fremont Street. Reuben lived as long as his old school.