Lorado Taft

Lydia Moss Bradley, Betty Friedan and Jane Addams are among the state's top groundbreaking women; Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Ray Bradbury and Gwendolyn Brooks its top writers; Frank Lloyd Wright and Lorado Taft its top artists and architects.

Among the iconic fountains described are Buckingham (in Grant Park), Crown (in Millennium Park), Centennial (with its water cannon shooting over the Chicago River), and two fountains designed by famed sculptor Lorado Taft (Time and Great Lakes).

I worked on the other side of the river, up on the east bluffs, at Northern Illinois University's Lorado Taft Field Campus.

Thinking about the rocket pioneers who founded Huntsville's local astronomy club and built its observatory 50 years ago reminds me of the inscription on the base of Lorado Taft's Alma Mater statue at the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, where I studied in the early 1970s.

In addition to Timber-lee, other grade-level class trips include fourth- and fifth-grade excursions to Chicago and Springfield; a sixth-grade outing to NIU's outdoor education center, Lorado Taft; and an eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C.