Knox in the News

 From the Daily Bulletin
It opened in the heart of the Roaring ’20s, when women for the first time were given the chance to leave the confines of home and family and take an active place in society.

Appropriately, a new college for women was started in Claremont by the considerable fortune of Ellen Browning Scripps to celebrate “the wonderful age we are living in and in particular the wonderful development of womanhood in all the practical and spiritual angles of the new civilization.”

Eighty-three years ago this week the academic community of Claremont came together to honor the woman whose generosity created Scripps College and made possible the Claremont Colleges of today.

Just short of her 92nd birthday, Scripps was too infirm to attend the festivities Oct. 14, 1927, but her presence was felt anyway…

Scripps herself decided at an early age that she would play a role in a world that then gave women very little opportunity.

A native of London, England, she came to America as a young girl when her family settled in Illinois.

In 1858, she graduated from Knox College, the activist institution in Galesburg, Ill., that was especially prominent at that time in advocating abolition of slavery.

Later, Scripps was outspoken about social causes and women’s suffrage…

From the Register Mail

Retention rates at three local colleges are linked to admission requirements and average ACT scores, school officials said Monday.

When looking at Knox College and Monmouth College, the higher the average ACT scores, the more likely their freshman students will be returning to the same school the following year.

At Knox College, where the ACT scores typically range from 26 to 31, freshman retention rates have hovered around 90 percent since 2000. In 2004, the rate was 84.1 percent, while it was 89.9 percent in 2008…

School officials, however, warn retention rates have their shortcomings.

“What we don’t measure is what the students intent is,” Condon said.

For instance, a student who leaves a college after their first year may not drop out of college altogether. They may opt to take a few classes at one college before transferring another, which would lower a school’s retention rate.

“Settling on a college is all about making the right fit,” Heartlein said.

From the Register Mail 

Shively Shoe Repair & Leather Goods has been in business for more than 37 years. Owners Bruce and Margo Shively agreed that just like everything else, the shoe repair business has changed a lot over that period of time.

Margo Shively said that when her husband bought his business from Troy Price, “in the U.S., there were over 45,000 shoe repair shops. It is down to slightly more than 5,000.”

Shively now has the only shoe repair shop in four counties. He said there is one in Peoria and some in the Quad Cities, but even those cities have lost many. He said there were 19 or 20 in the area when he started….

Margo, who is by trade a fashion designer, is the costumer designer at Knox College, teaches classes in costume design and runs the costume design shop at the college. All of this in her “spare” time. At the store, she does leather coat alterations, shortens sleeves and hems, sews patches on leather coats and fixes zippers on camouflage coveralls, especially with the onset of deer hunting season.

“I couldn’t tell you how many patches I’ve sewn on,” she chuckled. “I’ve done tailoring for years and years. Not so much anymore because of my job at the college.”…

From The Register Mail:
After scoring a combined 36 points in their first five games, it’s obvious something has happened to the Knox College offense in the past two weeks.

The Prairie Fire have scored 54 points in that span, producing their first victory and a near-miss at Illinois College last week that generated 513 yards in offense and earned receiver Clarke Cuthbert some national recognition.

His team still looking for a win and showing little offensive punch, Knox coach Chad Eisele confessed he and his staff did a little soul-searching three weeks ago.

“We put Drew (Diaz) and quarterback and put Bill (Meyer) at receiver,” said Eisele of a move that relocated his senior quarterback and saw him catch seven passes last week. “We weren’t moving the ball offensively and we had some injuries.
“Being a spread team is what we want to do and Drew gives us the best opportunity to do that.”

Diaz, a freshman from Niles Notre Dame led Knox past Grinnell 31-21, throwing for 208 yards and two touchdowns, then led a near-upset at Illinois College last week (a 31-23 loss) by going 17-for-33 for 316 yards, throwing for one TD and rushing for another of 68 yards. Diaz did throw three interceptions, however.

“For the last three weeks we’ve improved every week,” said Eisele. “I know 513 yards is a lot of yards but we had the ball in the red zone four times and only scored 10 points. We’ve got to do a better job once we get down there.”

From The Register Mail 
To most young athletes today, the second-best thing to going pro in their sport is earning an NCAA Division I scholarship. That means the bright lights, big arenas and TV attention is often not much different than the play-for-pay athletes enjoy.

A generation apart, Galesburg’s Mark Junk and Knoxville’s John Liston had those D-I opportunities. Instead, both chose to study and play basketball at Knox College.

This weekend, Junk (1991) and Liston (1958) are part of the 2010 class to be inducted into the Knox-Lombard Athletic Hall of Fame along with Tom Neagle (2004) and Steven Varick (1976).

“I had offers from Northern Iowa, Loyola, Northwestern and WIU,” said Junk, a three-year basketball star at Galesburg High School before becoming a four-year starter at Knox. “I have no regrets whatsoever. From the experience and education I got, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Liston actually played at Iowa for two years before transferring to Knox. “I have no regrets because I didn’t like it,” he said. “If I would’ve stayed, I would’ve started. But I wouldn’t have liked it.”

From the Register Mail

Knox College has always been home to Pete Thierry.

“Where third base is at the Knox baseball field is where our house used to sit. I was born and raised right there,” he said. “I lived on Central Street.”

Thierry, 74, who stands about 5-foot-5, has short black hair tinged with gray and white, a black mustache and an ever-present pair of black Gucci glasses, has been attending Knox games for the past 57 years.

“It is just a school that I was born close to and it became a part of my life,” he said. “I had a cousin, Binky Johnson, who played for Knox. He was from East Moline. I followed him all four years he played at Knox.”

Thierry, a 1953 Galesburg High School graduate, is a former Silver Streaks basketball and baseball star. He also played football for one year, but he would not have if it were not for the Knox connection.

“I weighed 100 pounds and was the starting quarterback my sophomore year. Before the football season, Bill Heerde, who played for Knox and was from Knoxville, taught me how to throw a football. He was a quarterback,” Thierry said. “I went to the old Galesburg High School which is where the Public Safety Building is now and I would cut across through Knox to go to school. I would always stop and watch them practice football.”

Heerde is not the only Knox athlete Thierry has bonded with over the years. For three years, he played summer league softball with Knox’s athletic director and head football coach, Chad Eisele, who graduated from Knox in 1993.