Knox in the News

From the Register-Mail:

Scan the Midwest Conference football statistics and you will find a couple of Knox College players listed near the top in one category.

Sophomore Mike Schroeder is ranked No. 3 with 22.6 yards per return and senior Dan Kizior is No. 6 at 18.5.

It hasn’t hurt that those members of the Prairie Fire have had plenty of opportunities in the team’s 0-3 start and Knox coach Chad Eisele admits he’d quickly trade a lofty spot in kick return stats for something more substantial on offense or defense when the Fire travel to Beloit College for a 1 p.m. game Saturday.

The Buccaneers are 1-2 with a 34-31 win over St. Norbert and Eisele sees a little of what he wants his team to be in Beloit.

“They’re starting more seniors than we have on our team,” said Eisele. “They’re us two years ago. They started a bunch of sophomores and took their lumps. It’s their year to make things happen.”

Knox, with 47 underclassmen and 20 first-year players has taken its lumps so far, last in the MWC offensively by scoring just 15 points and allowing an average of 38.7. But the Fire are still confident better days are ahead.

From the Register-Mail:

Local dignitaries unveiled a new statue of President Abraham Lincoln on Labor Day at the Amtrak Depot.

The 11-foot-tall monument will stand as testimony to the links between Galesburg, the railroad and Lincoln, said state Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Gilson.

A group called the Galesburg Veterans Committee privately funded the statue, which shows the nation’s 16th president holding the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln engaged in a famous debate at Knox College with Stephen Douglas in 1858, one of a series of seven debates between the two candidates for the U.S. Senate that centered on slavery.

Poet and author Carl Sandburg, who grew up in Galesburg, wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lincoln, making another connection between Galesburg and the former president from Illinois.

From the Register-Mail:

They were the people who fill your churches, help you at the bank, answer phones at businesses, teach your kids in school and donate their time and effort to charities throughout Knox County. There was a retired judge. A few off-duty law enforcement officers. There were even Galesburg High School students and members of Local 60 — the union representing boilermakers from Morton. The list goes on and on.

There were a lot of people in Lincoln Park. The naked eye could estimate 500. Maybe 700.

Down in front of the union folks, not far from the lectern set up in front of the gazebo in Lincoln Park, were three Knox College students. They stood out for a reason.

Rana Tahir, Netsie Tjirongo and Shanna Collins aren’t white. They’re shades of brown. And not from Galesburg.

While it was plainly obvious they were a super-minority, none of three claimed the Tea Party movement or any of its followers who attended Thursday’s rally are racists.

“Look, it’s not surprising that there were not many people of color here tonight,” said the 19-year-old Tahir, who was born in Pakistan, raised in Kuwait and has lived in the U.S. for three years. “You see things on the news and I think some of it might put off people of color.”

From New Voices online:

When I first began my college search, or perhaps it’s better to say when my mother started suggestively leaving college pamphlets on my desk, I refused to acknowledge a life after high school. The prospect of recreating myself and re-establishing my Jewish identity in a foreign environment frightened me enormously, but I needn’t have worried. Little did I know that the school I chose–Knox College–which lay nestled in the heart of a sleepy railroad town called Galesburg, Illinois, would turn out to have a steady Jewish pulse.

From the Register-Mail:

With the help of more than 50 teams that had their own unique ways of bringing in money, the Knox County Relay for Life has raised $147,598 since September 2009, eclipsing its yearly goal.

Hoping to raise $144,000 in their fiscal year, officials were happy to report this month they brought in roughly $3,500 more than they expected. The money raised benefits the American Cancer Society in its continuing search for a cure.

“We did really, really well,” said Erin Olson, publicity chairwoman for the Knox County Relay for Life.

A good portion of that amount came from the county’s all-night Relay for Life event at Knox College in July. More than 1,000 people helped bring in $35,000 during the event, which honored cancer survivors and their caregivers.

A total of 167 survivors and 500 caregivers were in attendance during the event, which saw participants gather on the college campus and stay up through the night and into the morning.

From the Quad City Times:

Dan Dagget, founder and president of EcoResults!, will give a presentation titled “From Ecoradical to Conservative Environmentalist,” at 7 p.m. Sept. 28 in the Francois Room, E-117, at the Umbeck Science-Mathematics Center, Knox College, Galesburg, Ill. The presentation is part of the EquiKnox series of events sponsored by the college’s Presidential Task Force on Sustainability. Dagget writes in his online autobiography that he has worked against coal mines in Ohio and in favor of wilderness land designation in Arizona, and was designated one of the 100 top grassroots activists by the Sierra Club in 1992.