When Vernon Kays retired from being County Clerk, Dad ran for the office against Vernon’s Chief Deputy Rosemary Azzaro. Rosemary won, even winning at least one Crystal Lake Coventry precinct in which she knocked on doors. Dad didn’t do any … Continue reading
Category Archives: Eleanor Skinner
This is the fourth in a serialization of my father’s biography. Previous parts can be found below on McHenry County Blog. One of Dad’s inspirations for running for office involved an unresponsive city government. Plunk, plunk, plunk. I can hear … Continue reading
Previous parts of this biography can be found below on McHenry County Blog. I am running them again because my father would have been 105 on June 8th, if he hadn’t been a smoker. (His mother lived to be 96.) … Continue reading
Cassandra was a Greek goddess who could predict the future, but who could do nothing to change it. That came to mind when I read of the accident at Randall Road and Alexandra Boulevard on Saturday. When that part of … Continue reading
When Vernon Kays retired from being County Clerk, Dad ran for the office against Vernon’s Chief Deputy Rosemary Azzaro. Rosemary won, even winning at least one Crystal Lake Coventry precinct in which she knocked on doors. Dad didn’t do any … Continue reading
Prior to the 1972 elections, the United States Supreme Court ruled that legislative bodies like the McHenry County Board and city councils had to be apportioned on a one-man, one-vote basis. The county board divided the county into three districts, … Continue reading
This is the fourth in a serialization of my father’s biography. Previous parts can be found below on McHenry County Blog. One of Dad’s inspirations for running for office involved an unresponsive city government. Plunk, plunk, plunk. I can hear … Continue reading
Previous parts of this biography can be found below on McHenry County Blog. I am running them again because my father would have been 100 on June 8th, if he hadn’t been a smoker. (His mother lived to be 96.) … Continue reading
The first part of my father’s multi-part biography ran yesterday. Today, we’ll run Part 2 in honor of his birth 100 years ago. Dad graduated debt free from college in three and a half years. Somehow I have gotten the … Continue reading
My father would have been 100 years old todeay and it seems appropriate to run my articles on him again. There are lots of parts. Calvin LeRoy Skinner was born in Wilmington, Delaware June 8, 1916, the second son of … Continue reading
My mother, Eleanor Stevens Skinner, was born on November 26, 1917. Through the years her birthday came on Thanksgiving Day every once in a while. This is one such day. My first memory is a political one. (Surprised, right?) She … Continue reading
They’re back. The rabid bats, I mean. I first got interested with rabid bats when the McHenry County Health Department used them as an excuse to try to impose what I came to call the McHenry County Republican Cat Tax. … Continue reading
With the new WordPress program I am using, I get notified when people link to a story. Thursday I got a “pingback” about from “Motivate Grammar.” The author, Gabe Doyle, “a fourth-year graduate student in Linguistics at the University of … Continue reading
If I still drove or walked my son to South Elementary School, I would have seen the activity in my neighborhood before 2. As it was, I noticed cars on Meridian Street in front of our home. As I drove … Continue reading
When Vernon Kays retired from being County Clerk, Dad ran for the office against Vernon’s Chief Deputy Rosemary Azzaro. Rosemary won, even winning at least one Crystal Lake Coventry precinct in which she knocked on doors. Dad didn’t do any … Continue reading
Prior to the 1972 elections, the United States Supreme Court ruled that legislative bodies like the McHenry County Board and city councils had to be apportioned on a one-man, one-vote basis. The county board divided the county into three districts, … Continue reading
This is the fourth in a serialization of my father’s biography. Previous parts can be found below on McHenry County Blog. One of Dad’s inspirations for running for office involved an unresponsive city government. Plunk, plunk, plunk. I can hear … Continue reading
Previous parts of this biography can be found below on McHenry County Blog. The night I was born, June 11, 1942, my father and his Methodist minister friend Charles (Charlie) Jarvis, who baptized all three kids and, having moved to … Continue reading