Business man returns to Rockford radio for a bit

Add comment March 16th, 2009

Tim Larson, president of Skyward Promotions in Rockford, will fill in for Riley O’Neil on the morning show at WROK (1440-AM) starting at 5 a.m. on March 26, 27 and 30, while O’Neil is out of town at baseball spring training in Arizona.

Larson was a mid-day personality at the station for two couple-of-year stints in the early to mid 1980s.

Golan art gallery still in business for now

Add comment March 16th, 2009

Golan Liberman Art Gallery in Rockford will remain open for now, owner and abstract artist Roni Golan said today.

“Can I tell you I am out of the woods?” he said. “No, not yet.”

Golan held a maybe-going-out-of-business sale late last month with discounted prices on his works at the studio at 2209 E. State St. Going forward, he said he’ll keep his prices lower. And there’s more traffic now that the DiTullio’s has opened a deli next door.

Golan will continue to host his free Laughing Club meetings at the studio for the time being anyway. He said he vows to “turn Rockford into a city that never stops laughing.”

Bowling and gambling in Dubuque and our weekend getaway to a close-by city that’s far from where Rockford is economically

1 comment March 16th, 2009

Two of us traveled from Rockford, two hours west to Dubuque, Iowa, last weekend and experienced a reasonably priced good-time getaway.

It was a trip that took us from a 13.7 percent unemployment rate in a city of 150,000 to a unemployment rate half that, of 6.6 percent, in a city of 60,000; from a city where “for sale” signs on houses are to be found on practically every street to one where we spotted very few for-sale signs.

The city was busy, even though a few bed-and-breakfast owners were willing to give us discounts because they considered it a slow weekend. We had trouble finding a hotel room downtown or even on the outskirts Saturday night; there was a dog show downtown and a statewide bowling tournament that continues weekends through spring. By the way, a game of bowling here is $3.95 versus $3.25 at the spanking new Diamond Jo land casino where the two of us lost a reasonable $50 for three hours of playing poker, and shoes were $2.50 versus $3 here.

Comparisons between Rockford and Dubuque were in the local news a month ago. That’s when local business leaders were quoted as stewing over IBM’s decision to transform a downtown building to open a computer hub for 1,300 highly skilled, highly paid workers in Dubuque. Dubuque won out because of its highly educated labor pool, something Rockford doesn’t have. Dubuque is home to five institutions of higher education.

By the way, when we asked a bed-and-breakfast operator there at the Victorian Hancock House  to tell us a few things about Dubuque, the IBM jobs were at the top of his list. Rockford wasn’t in the running for the $100 million IBM project. But like Rockford, Dubuque in the early 1980s was “nearly dead,” according to the head of Dubuque’s economic development arm. But now, it’s poured more than $300 million into its riverfront and downtown in the past five to 10 years.

(Dubuque Riverwalk Plaza)

And the downtown and riverfront look great. It felt like we were in a happening place in a city where we didn’t see hardly any litter on the streets, and we drove downtown and all around the city in its better neighborhoods and those that weren’t tops. We didn’t see any boarded up windows, like there are on many west side Rockford homes.  It was a far cry from the empty pop bottles and plastic grocery bags we noticed on our re-entry into the city in parking lots along Auburn Street, to name one eyesore area here.

In the Feb. 14 Register Star story linked to above, Rockford businessman Peter Provenzano, CEO of SupplyCore, said of  Dubuque, “They’re a symphony, and we’re a bunch of street-corner musicians.”

Maybe we should get the Rockford Symphony Orchestra’s popular conductor Steve Larsen to tutor Rockford leaders in how to pull everyone together so we can be more like Dubuque and make beautiful music? Other suggestions?