Posted4/4/2021 5:30 AM
This is Good News Sunday, a compilation of some of the more upbeat and inspiring stories published by the Daily Herald during the previous week:
It s that time of year when the best of the student performers leave college early for the pros.
Vernon Hills Robert Black knows what that is like. I was thinking about dropping out to play my first season, says Black, a sophomore attending Rice University remotely from his apartment in Milwaukee while he does his professional job as the principal tubist with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
At age 18, Black skipped Vernon Hills High School s senior award day to travel to Milwaukee to audition. Black distinguished himself among more than five dozen tuba players and made the cut for the Final Four. In the months before the final audition, that group grew to about 20. Even so, Black won the position in January 2020 to become one of the youngest tubists ever hired by a major orchestra.
When change can be difficult to accept, and we lose things that were important to us, we have a tendency to look in the rearview mirror and imagine a better past.
Updated 3/4/2021 8:52 AM
Change is a powerful concept that can deliver a devastating demise or provide promising progress or both. During the losses and growth of this pandemic, we ve made rewarding connections online and in bubbles, and we ve lost loved ones, seen jobs and businesses disappear, canceled vacations, and been forced to forgo funerals, weddings and graduations.
As history plugs along, with change as its eternal passenger, we often gaze at the rearview mirror.
Throughout history, in times of stress and challenges, it s human nature to look back on the past as a place of solace, a place where you can step away from the challenges, says Dan Schoeneberg, museum administrator for the Arlington Heights Historical Museum. You compound that with COVID and a global pandemic we haven t seen in a century.
When change can be difficult to accept, and we lose things that were important to us, we have a tendency to look in the rearview mirror and imagine a better past.
Posted1/25/2021 5:30 AM
In many of the old, yellowed photographs from the early days of the Arlington Heights Fire Department stands Frank White, a charter member elected by his fellow firefighters as president of what started in 1894 as an all-volunteer department. He posed as they did: stiffly and self-consciously. His walrus mustache was full, drooping at the sides in the classic soup-strainer style of the day, wrote Dick Hoffmann in a Sept. 28, 1961, Daily Herald article.
The firefighter did differ from the others in one particular way: his race.
As village leaders today work to complete a diversity, equity and inclusion project, they re looking to the past for inspiration, with plans to honor the man who was the first Black resident of Arlington Heights.