200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
The library reading room is closed this week for lead abatement work.
200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
In the early morning hours of May 19, 1948, a hit-and-run truck driver knocked down two gasoline pumps at D.E. Henderson’s service station in Towanda. Fortunately no one was hurt.
Who remembers when gas pumps looked like this?
Robert Bible (left) and Wilson Hall of the International Derrick and Equipment Co. of Columbus, Ohio, work on the installation of WJBC’s new radio tower. This 400-foot steel tower was adjacent to the station’s under-construction office and studio building off Route 66 (now Veterans Parkway) on the southwest edge of Bloomington.
Sixty-eight years later WJBC is still located at this site.
This aerial, looking due north, shows the Route 66 “Beltline” which is now Veterans Parkway.
Located at the junction of South Main Street and the Route 66 Beltline, the Phil-Kron drive-in theater featured a full restaurant built under the movie screen.
Back in 1968 there wasn’t much at what’s today the intersection of Veterans Parkway and GE Road! The General Electric plant opened in 1954 and shutdown remaining manufacturing in the fall of 2010.
On Sunday, September 22, 1935, one person was killed just before 6:00 a.m. when a southbound Greyhound bus collided with a coupe on U.S. Route 66 several miles south of Lincoln.
John M. Newman of Pittsfield, IL, was killed on October 28, 1949, when his Pacific Intermountain Express truck sideswiped an automobile parked along Route 66 south of Bloomington. The owner of the parked vehicle, 20-year-old Donald Slaughter of Bloomington, was unharmed in the tragic accident.
A 75-year-old Nelva Menzel, longtime waitress at the Dixie Trucker’s Home, is seen here in late 1981. By this time she had already put in 32-plus years at the Route 66 landmark in the Village of McLean, located some 15 miles south of Bloomington.
On Friday, February 3, 1939, four area men were killed in a late evening automobile accident on U.S. Route 66, about 2 miles south of Chenoa. The crash took the lives of Carl Weymouth, owner and driver of the car, Paul Trunk, Sr., Nelson Francis, and Claude M.
About 50 members of the Grim Reapers Motorcycle Club led a funeral procession for L. Wayne Martin.
Built by Elmo and Arline Winterland in 1960, the Oasis Drive-In was a local Route 66 landmark. Does anyone remember the drive-in's “Luigi Burger," a hamburger with a special sauce?