Columns

She was, without question, an original.

With a life that spanned 102 years, Mary Peyton Meyer saw a slice of American life that boggles the mind. She, quite literally, saw us move from the horse and buggy days to a time when we can communicate, through cyberspace, with people anywhere in the world. She saw the first automobiles, she saw man walk on the moon, she saw the development of the first computers (though she never saw the need for one to do her reports).

And through all the changes, Mary exhibited a zest for life that amazed those half her age.

William S. Wait was a visionary who died before he could see his vision become a reality.

As far back as 1835, Wait, of Greenville, was thinking of a rail line stretching across Illinois from Terre Haute to St. Louis linking Greenville to both Eastern and Western markets.

He actively lobbied members of the legislature, and got some positive support. But when it came to a vote, the charter was given not to Waits project the Mississippi & Atlantic Railroad but instead to backers of the Alton & Terre Haute Railroad.

My dad, Edmund Torbeck, was born and reared one mile south of St. Paul in Wilberton Township.

The farm on which he was reared was also the birthplace of his mother, Anna Yund, and had been given to her by her parents when she married Henry Torbeck in 1903.

About a mile south of dads house lived his mothers bachelor brothers, Jacob and Albert Yund. Their unmarried sister, Wilhelmina "Minnie," moved in with them following their mothers death in 1929.

"I feel the earth move under my feet; I feel the sky tumbling down. I feel my heart start to trembling; whenever you're around."

When Carole King wrote those lyrics in 1971, she was musing about the physical impact of a lover's presence.

The same could be said for the effect of an early-morning earthquake that struck the area at 4:37 a.m. last Friday.

Some people snoozed right through the 5.2-magnitude quake. Not us.