Whatever Happened to the Palace Shoe Service Neon Sign in Rockford?

For decades, a cobbler stood over North Main Street in downtown Rockford, hammering away at the same shoe. People who spent time downtown will remember the enormous Palace Shoe Service sign, the kind of elaborate commercial sign cities used to have before illuminated plastic rectangles became the preferred method of announcing that something was for sale.

The shoemaker on the sign wasn't always standing still. When everything was working properly, his arm moved through a three-part hammering animation. When the hammer came down on the shoe, two red neon sparks flashed at the point of impact. Then he raised the hammer and did it all over again. It was advertising, public art and mechanical theater rolled into one wonderfully unnecessary object.

And now it's gone.

Palace Shoe Service Goes Back to 1926

Palace Shoe Service was one of those increasingly rare Rockford businesses whose history could be measured in generations rather than years. Brothers Joseph and Jasper Giamalva opened the business in downtown Rockford in 1926. According to a history published by the Rockford Historical Society, the brothers had learned shoemaking in Sicily before eventually settling in Rockford.

Their first shop was on the east side of the 100 block of North Main Street. The Palace name wasn't an attempt to make shoe repair sound particularly luxurious. There really was a Palace nearby: the Palace Theatre. Four years after opening, the brothers moved across North Main Street to a location between the Orpheum Theatre and Simon Drug Store.

Downtown Rockford was a very different animal then. One Easter Eve Saturday during the 1930s, Palace reportedly shined 500 pairs of shoes in a single day, at ten cents a shine. Eventually Palace Shoe Service settled at 204 North Main Street, where generations of Rockford residents would know it.

Then Came the Cobbler

The famous Palace Shoe Service sign was built in 1950. It was approximately eight feet wide, and according to roadside-sign historian Debra Jane Seltzer, the shoemaker depicted on it was modeled after John Antunicci, who owned the business at the time.

The animation was what made the thing extraordinary. The cobbler raised his arm, brought the hammer down and two red neon sparks flashed where the hammer met the shoe. Then the sequence repeated. It must have been quite a sight when the neon and animation were completely functional, especially at night on a North Main Street filled with other illuminated theater and business signs.

The sign survived long after elaborate animated neon signs like it stopped being made. It even survived a move from an earlier Palace Shoe Service location to the later shop. By the 2000s and 2010s, it had become less an advertisement than a piece of Rockford folk art. Photographers noticed it. Travelers interested in old roadside America noticed it. Rockford residents certainly noticed it.

Restoring the sign, unfortunately, wasn't cheap. The business reportedly received estimates of $15,000 to $20,000 to bring it back to its former glory. For a family shoe-repair business, that was an enormous expense, so the old cobbler remained above North Main Street without being completely restored.

Ninety-Five Years in Downtown Rockford

Palace Shoe Service survived nearly everything downtown Rockford could throw at it. It survived the Depression, World War II, the decline of the traditional downtown shopping district, shopping malls and an era of inexpensive shoes increasingly designed to be thrown away rather than repaired. It even survived the Palace Theatre that had given the business its name. The theater was demolished in 1984.

Palace remained associated with the Giamalva family through four generations. In 2021, the Greater Rockford Italian American Association recognized the family and the remarkable longevity of Palace Shoe Service. By then, however, one of downtown Rockford's longest-running businesses was nearing the end of its story. After roughly 95 years, Palace Shoe Service closed.

Sometime afterward, the cobbler disappeared too.

RoadsideArchitecture.com, which documented the Palace sign over the years, records the business as closed and shows that by 2023 the famous sign was no longer there. That leaves a question that turns this from another piece of Rockford history into a Rockford mystery.

Where Is the Palace Shoe Service Sign?

An eight-foot-wide animated neon sign built in 1950 doesn't exactly disappear into someone's coat pocket. Somebody removed it from the building, but what happened after that?

Was it scrapped? Was it sold? Did a collector acquire it? Did someone connected with Palace Shoe Service save it? Is it hanging inside another building? Or is Rockford's hammering cobbler sitting quietly in a garage, warehouse or barn somewhere, waiting for somebody to remember him?

So far, I haven't found a reliable public source that answers that question. There is, however, reason to hope that "gone" doesn't necessarily mean destroyed.

Rockford has lost other spectacular old signs from its streets without necessarily losing the signs themselves. The signs at Parthenios Luncheonette at 132 North Church Street survived after the restaurant closed in 2010. Those signs had originally belonged to Hobson Drug Company and may have dated to the 1940s or earlier. One of the vertical signs once alternated between FOOD and DRUGS in neon. The signs were eventually removed in 2017, sold at auction and reportedly entered a private collection.

The old Der Rathskeller sign also survived the closing of the restaurant it advertised and was eventually sold to a private collector. Somewhere, pieces of the Rockford streetscape that many people assume vanished forever are apparently still out there.

Maybe the Palace cobbler is one of them.

Help Us Solve a Rockford Mystery

This is where Rockford Blog readers come in. If you know what happened to the Palace Shoe Service sign after the business closed, we'd like to hear about it. Maybe you knew the Giamalva family, worked downtown, saw the sign being removed or heard that somebody bought it. Maybe you've actually seen it since it disappeared from North Main Street.

And if you have old photographs of the Palace Shoe Service sign when the neon and animation were still working, those are part of this story too. There must be photographs scattered through Rockford family albums showing North Main Street when the cobbler was still hammering away above the sidewalk.

For more than seventy years, he stood above Rockford working on the same shoe. That's long enough to earn an ending to the story.

So, Rockford: whatever happened to the Palace Shoe Service cobbler?

 

The Red Whale and the Ghosts of the 500 Block of East State Street

There are places in Rockford that disappear, and then there are places that disappear almost completely.

The Red Whale is one of the latter.

Sometime around the end of the 1960s or beginning of the 1970s, a head shop called The Red Whale operated in downtown Rockford. People remember it. Period sources prove that it existed. But finding the ordinary details we expect to find about an old business—an exact address, the owner's name, when it opened, when it closed—is surprisingly difficult.

What survives is a tantalizing combination of documentary evidence, local memory, and, perhaps, the ghost of a red whale still painted on a wall.

And the trail appears to lead to the 500 block of East State Street.

The Red Whale Was Real

Let's start with what can actually be documented.

In 1972, Rockford hosted a concert at the National Guard Armory featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service, Blue Öyster Cult and Flash, the British progressive-rock band featuring former Yes guitarist Peter Banks.

Tickets cost five dollars.

A contemporary newspaper account listed four Rockford businesses where tickets could be purchased: The Red Whale, Impulse Two, Budget Tapes and Records, and Team Electronics.

That's fairly compelling evidence of what kind of cultural territory The Red Whale occupied. This wasn't a hardware store that happened to have an unusual name. It was part of the network through which Rockford's young music audience encountered the counterculture of the early 1970s.

Another contemporary source takes us even farther outside Rockford.

An Illinois underground newspaper advertised a large concert featuring Dave Mason, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Pure Prairie League, Linda Ronstadt and David Blue. The advertisement listed ticket outlets around Illinois:

Peoria had Budget Tapes & Records.

Pekin had Freak Boutique.

Springfield had Right-On Boutique.

Decatur had Crystal Ship.

Macomb had Red Caboose.

And Rockford had:

RED WHALE.

The company The Red Whale kept on that list probably tells us as much about the store as anything else we've found. These were the record stores, boutiques and head shops through which the youth culture of the period moved.

The Red Whale was part of that world.

But Where Was It?

This is where history becomes considerably less cooperative.

I have not yet found a period city-directory entry, advertisement, telephone listing or other primary source that establishes the Red Whale's street address beyond reasonable doubt.

So what follows should be understood as Rockford oral history rather than established fact.

The persistent local recollection places The Red Whale in the 500 block of East State Street, apparently upstairs in one of the buildings now occupied by either Social Urban Bar & Restaurant at 509 E. State Street or Abreo at 515 E. State Street.

That distinction matters, and until somebody turns up a directory listing or advertisement, I don't think we should pretend to know which address it was.

But there is an intriguing piece of physical folklore attached to the story.

People who had access to the upstairs portion of one of these buildings years after The Red Whale disappeared reportedly could still see the outline of a large red whale painted on a wall.

If anyone reading this has actually seen that whale—or better yet photographed it—I would very much like to hear from you.

Because if that story can be confirmed, Rockford may have a surviving piece of counterculture history hiding above one of its most familiar downtown restaurants.

The 500 Block

Maybe that's why The Red Whale interests me.

I live on this block.

Today the 500 block of East State is part of the downtown Rockford most people recognize as the restaurant and nightlife district. Social is at 509 East State. Abreo is at 515 East State. They occupy old commercial buildings whose histories extend far beyond their current occupants.

The businesses change. The buildings remember.

The block The Red Whale may have inhabited would have looked out on a very different downtown Rockford.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, downtown was still a genuine commercial center rather than a historic district trying to reinvent itself. State Street had department stores, restaurants, record stores, theaters, bars, clothing stores and all the strange little independent businesses that once occupied second floors and narrow storefronts in American downtowns.

And then the culture changed.

Long hair got longer. Psychedelic music arrived. Underground newspapers appeared. Incense burned. Black-light posters went up on bedroom walls. Rolling papers and pipes appeared beside records and leather goods.

Every decent-sized American city seemed to acquire a head shop.

Rockford apparently got a whale.

What Did They Sell?

Here again, caution is necessary.

Modern recollections specifically call The Red Whale a head shop, while another modern Rockford retrospective remembers it as one of the area's old record stores.

Those descriptions aren't contradictory.

A head shop around 1970 could sell records, posters, incense, jewelry, clothing, underground newspapers, patches, buttons and other counterculture merchandise alongside the smoking paraphernalia that gave the stores their name.

And we know The Red Whale sold—or at least distributed—concert tickets.

The surviving evidence therefore points toward something more interesting than simply a record store.

The Red Whale seems to have been one of the places where Rockford's emerging counterculture gathered.

A Store That Almost Disappeared From History

Here's the strange part.

Search for some long-gone Rockford businesses and you'll find photographs, advertisements, matchbooks, newspaper stories and dozens of people reminiscing about them.

The Red Whale barely exists online.

A Rockford-area record-store retrospective published decades later included it among ten remembered local record stores, but even the writer admitted he'd never heard of the place and asked readers for their memories.

In 2020, someone posted to the Rockford subreddit looking for information about “The Red Whale headshop” for an art project. They had apparently encountered exactly the same problem: they knew something had been there, but reliable information was difficult to find.

That's how local history disappears.

Not dramatically.

Nobody announces that a place is about to vanish from the historical record.

The sign comes down. Another business moves in. Somebody paints the room. The people who worked there move away or die. Photographs sit unidentified in boxes. Fifty years pass.

Eventually everyone knows somebody who remembers the place, but nobody can remember exactly where it was.

Somewhere Upstairs, a Whale

And that's why I keep coming back to that story about the wall.

Maybe someone will read this and say:

Of course it was at 509. I bought a poster there in 1971.

Maybe someone else still has a Red Whale shopping bag, business card, matchbook, newspaper advertisement or photograph.

Maybe a former employee is still in Rockford.

Maybe somebody knows who owned it.

And maybe, somewhere upstairs at 509 or 515 East State Street, beneath half a century of paint and renovation, there really is still the faint outline of a whale.

For now, that's where the historical record ends.

The Red Whale definitely existed.

It was operating in Rockford by 1972.

It was associated with records, the head-shop culture and major rock-concert ticket sales.

Local recollection places it somewhere in the 500 block of East State, likely in the building now occupied by Social or Abreo, although I have not yet found documentary evidence establishing which one.

And according to Rockford lore, long after the people and the merchandise were gone, the whale was still on the wall.

That's not quite enough evidence to close the case.

But it's more than enough reason to keep looking.

78 Years of Art: The History of Rockford's Greenwich Village Art Fair

 There are some Rockford traditions that have been around so long that it's easy to forget somebody had to start them.

The Greenwich Village Art Fair is one of them.

In 1948, Rockford held the first Greenwich Village Art Fair. Nearly eight decades later, the event is still going, making it the longest-running art fair of its kind in the Midwest, according to Rockford Art Museum.

In 2026, Greenwich returns for its 78th year on September 19 and 20.

That's a remarkable run for anything, but especially for an arts event.

Greenwich Before Greenwich Was Cool

The first Greenwich Village Art Fair took place in 1948, a very different moment in Rockford history.

World War II had ended only three years earlier. Rockford was booming as an industrial city. The postwar era that would transform the city's neighborhoods, businesses and population was just beginning.

And somewhere in the middle of all that manufacturing, machinery and industry, Rockford started an art fair.

It survived.

Through recessions, changing tastes, downtown redevelopment, generations of artists and the enormous changes Rockford itself has undergone, Greenwich became one of those events that simply returned every year.

The name is a nod to New York City's Greenwich Village and its long association with artists and bohemian culture, but over the decades Rockford's Greenwich developed an identity entirely its own.

Today it is closely associated with Rockford Art Museum and is held on the museum grounds at 711 North Main Street along Rockford's riverfront.

Not Just Another Craft Fair

One thing that has helped Greenwich retain its identity is that it remains a juried art fair.

The artwork exhibited at Greenwich must be original and produced by the exhibiting artists themselves. That distinction matters.

You aren't just wandering through rows of mass-produced merchandise with an occasional painting thrown in. Greenwich remains centered on people who actually make things.

The 2026 participating artists represent ceramics, drawing, fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and wood. Artists are coming from around Illinois and the Midwest, but Rockford itself is well represented.

That's also one of the things I've always liked about art fairs. You don't have to know anything about art.

You can know everything about ceramics or nothing about ceramics. You can spend twenty minutes discussing technique with an artist or just point at something and say, "I like that."

Both are legitimate responses to art.

More Than Art

Over the years Greenwich has evolved into something larger than rows of artists' booths.

The 2026 fair will include live music, children's art activities, a local vendor marketplace, food trucks and cocktails along with the juried artists. Admission proceeds support Rockford Art Museum.

The music schedule alone is basically a small Rockford-area festival, with performers scheduled throughout both Saturday and Sunday.

And then there's the food.

The announced 2026 lineup includes local and regional vendors offering barbecue, bao buns, ice cream bars, coffee, kettle corn, baked goods and other things designed to destroy whatever disciplined nutritional program you had before entering the grounds.

As it should be.

The 78th Greenwich Village Art Fair

This year's Greenwich Village Art Fair will be held:

Saturday, September 19, 2026 — 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Sunday, September 20, 2026 — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission is $10, or $5 for Rockford Art Museum members, with children 12 and under admitted free. The fair is held at Rockford Art Museum, 711 N. Main Street. Well-behaved leashed dogs are also welcome.

Greenwich Village Art Fair official website

Seventy-Eight Years Later

There are flashier things a city can brag about than an art fair.

But longevity tells you something.

An event doesn't make it from 1948 to 2026 because somebody came up with a clever marketing campaign. It lasts because generation after generation of artists, volunteers, organizers and visitors decide it is still worth doing.

That's what makes Greenwich interesting beyond whatever happens to be hanging in the booths this year.

For one weekend every September, people gather beside the Rock River and look at things other people made with their hands.

They talk to artists.

They buy something strange to hang on a wall.

They eat something they probably didn't need to eat.

Kids make art.

Bands play.

Then everybody packs everything up.

And Rockford does it again the next year.

We've been doing that for 78 years.

That's not merely an art fair anymore.

That's part of the city.

 

Things You Might NOT Know About Cheap Trick

There are certain things you don't need to explain to people from Rockford.

We know what a sock monkey is. We know why there's a giant Symbol sitting by the river. We know Rockford used to make a lot of screws. And we certainly don't need anybody to tell us Cheap Trick is from Rockford.

Cheap Trick may be the most internationally famous thing Rockford ever produced that wasn't manufactured in a factory. The band has sold millions of records, played thousands of concerts, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and made At Budokan, one of the most famous live rock albums ever recorded.

You already know that stuff.

So let's try something harder.

Here are some things you might NOT know about Cheap Trick.

1. Cheap Trick wasn't really the beginning

Before Cheap Trick there was Fuse. Before Fuse there were still more Rockford bands.

Rick Nielsen played with a local group called the Grim Reapers, while Tom Petersson was associated with another Rockford band, Toast and Jam. In 1967, members of those groups came together as Fuse. Fuse actually got signed to Epic Records and released an album in 1969.

It didn't make them stars.

Fuse eventually relocated to Philadelphia and evolved into another band with the wonderfully cheerful name Sick Man of Europe. After that adventure ran its course, Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos returned to Rockford and started putting together what became Cheap Trick.

In other words, Cheap Trick wasn't four guys who suddenly decided to form a band and became famous. It was the result of years of Rockford bands forming, breaking up, recombining, leaving town, coming home and trying again.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

2. Robin Zander wasn't Cheap Trick's original singer

This one might surprise casual fans.

When Cheap Trick first came together, Robin Zander wasn't standing at the microphone. The band's original lead singer was Randy "Xeno" Hogan.

Zander had actually been approached earlier and declined. Hogan fronted the early version of Cheap Trick before leaving, and Zander finally joined in 1974.

It's difficult now to imagine Cheap Trick without Zander's voice, but for a brief period, that version of Cheap Trick existed.

Somewhere in the multiverse there is probably a Cheap Trick greatest-hits album sung by Xeno Hogan.

3. The name supposedly came from watching Slade

One of the best stories in Cheap Trick history involves British glam-rock band Slade.

According to the band's oft-repeated origin story, the future members of Cheap Trick were watching Slade perform when Tom Petersson remarked that the band used every cheap trick in the book.

A band name was born.

Cheap Trick adopted the name in August 1973.

Considering Rick Nielsen's later stage wardrobe, checkerboards, guitar picks, novelty guitars and general philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing with five guitar necks, the name turned out to be remarkably appropriate.

4. Three members went to Guilford

Here's a particularly Rockford fact.

Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson and Bun E. Carlos all attended Guilford High School. Robin Zander was the geographic outlier: he attended Harlem High School.

And Guilford looked considerably different then. The school that now sits in the middle of a heavily developed part of northeast Rockford was surrounded by cornfields when the future members of Cheap Trick attended in the 1960s.

Somewhere in those cornfields were three-fourths of a future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band.

5. Bun E. Carlos and Rick Nielsen's friendship reportedly started because Rick was throwing rocks at Bun's sister

Rock and roll friendships have begun in recording studios, nightclubs and backstage dressing rooms.

This one apparently began with projectile geology.

According to accounts of Bun E. Carlos's early life, he and Nielsen became friends in 1963 after Bun's sister came home from school and reported that Rick Nielsen had been throwing rocks at her.

That is an extremely Rockford origin story.

6. Bun E. Carlos bought his first drum kit from Rick Nielsen's family

It gets better.

When Carlos became interested in drums as a teenager, his mother bought him a drum kit for his 14th birthday.

The store?

Ralph Nielsen Music House in Rockford, owned by Rick Nielsen's father.

Years before Cheap Trick existed, the Nielsen family was therefore involved in putting drumsticks into the hands of the kid who would eventually sit behind Cheap Trick's drum kit.

Rockford can sometimes be a very small town disguised as a medium-sized city.

7. Bun E. Carlos had already made a record as a Rockford teenager

Before Cheap Trick, Carlos played in a local band called The Pagans.

The Pagans released a 45 featuring a cover of the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" backed with "I Can Only Give You Everything." According to biographical accounts, the record received airplay on WROK in Rockford and WCFL in Chicago and sold around 1,500 copies through local record stores.

And in 1967, The Pagans participated in a Battle of the Bands at Rockford's Sherwood Lodge.

One of their opponents?

Rick Nielsen's Grim Reapers.

Cheap Trick was apparently assembling itself before anybody realized it.

8. Rick Nielsen wasn't originally just "the guitar player"

Nielsen's identity is now so connected to guitars that this seems almost impossible.

But in Fuse, Nielsen served as a keyboard player and second guitarist. He didn't fully become the Rick-Nielsen-as-lead-guitarist figure we recognize today until Cheap Trick came together.

Which means somewhere in Cheap Trick's evolutionary tree is keyboard-player Rick Nielsen.

Sadly, there appears to have been no five-neck keyboard.

9. Rick bought one of his famous guitars in Rockford for $65

Nielsen's guitar collection became legendary, but one of the great stories goes back to Rockford in 1965.

He found a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop at a Rockford store called A Bookstore.

Price:

$65.

He still had the guitar decades later.

Nielsen also bought a 1951 Telecaster for $70. That guitar would eventually be played by Robin Zander during the At Budokan performances.

There are probably people reading this who remember when you could walk into a Rockford shop and find instruments like that.

Please don't tell the rest of us what you sold them for in 1974.

We don't want to know.

10. Rick Nielsen helped put some very famous guitars into some very famous hands

Nielsen wasn't merely accumulating guitars. He was buying and trading vintage instruments before guitar collecting became the enormous business it is today.

Among the more remarkable stories: Nielsen sold a 1959 Les Paul to Jeff Beck in 1968 after Beck's guitar had been damaged, and Nielsen later sold a left-handed 1960 Les Paul to Paul McCartney.

Imagine having enough legendary guitars pass through your hands that selling one to a Beatle becomes merely another story.

11. Cheap Trick helped make Hamer guitars famous

The connection between Cheap Trick and Hamer is much deeper than simply Rick Nielsen playing their guitars.

Nielsen knew Paul Hamer from the Illinois vintage-guitar world and became one of the company's earliest and most visible supporters. He acquired some of Hamer's earliest instruments and then began challenging the company with increasingly ridiculous ideas.

Checkerboard guitar?

Sure.

Five-neck guitar?

Why not?

A double-neck guitar shaped like Rick Nielsen himself?

Apparently somebody had to do it.

Cheap Trick didn't just use unusual guitars. Nielsen became part of the creative culture that produced them.

12. The five-neck guitar started as a joke

Before the famous five-neck Hamer existed, Nielsen had a stage routine in which he would hang several guitars around his neck simultaneously.

He'd play one, discard it, then move on to the guitar underneath.

Eventually a thought occurred to him:

Why not just make one guitar with all the necks?

Hamer constructed the original orange five-neck in 1981 by cutting apart five Hamer guitar bodies and joining them together. Nielsen wanted different sounds and configurations available on the same monstrous instrument, including a 12-string and fretless neck.

Nielsen had even contemplated a six-neck guitar that would rotate like a roulette wheel.

He abandoned that idea after ZZ Top started using spinning guitars because he didn't want people thinking he'd copied them.

There is a sentence you don't get to write very often.

13. Tom Petersson helped invent the 12-string bass

Rick Nielsen wasn't the only Cheap Trick member pushing instrument design into strange territory.

Tom Petersson became closely associated with the 12-string bass, an instrument he helped develop with Hamer.

Instead of the normal four strings, Petersson's instrument essentially paired each bass string with additional octave strings, producing the enormous, almost orchestral bass sound that became part of Cheap Trick's musical identity.

So one of rock music's strangest guitars and one of its strangest basses both emerged from the same band from Rockford.

Naturally.

14. Cheap Trick once played Rockford's Riverview Ice House at something called "Disco '77"

Yes.

Cheap Trick.

Disco.

On April 2, 1977, Cheap Trick headlined a WROK event at Rockford's Riverview Ice House called Disco '77.

Their debut album had just been released that year.

It's a nice reminder that history rarely looks like history while it's happening. Sometimes the future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band is simply playing the local ice rink at something called Disco '77.

15. One of the great Rockford concerts happened at the Armory

By 1979, things had changed considerably.

Cheap Trick returned home for a July 4 concert at the Rockford Armory.

Also on the bill:

AC/DC and Molly Hatchet.

Cheap Trick had gone from grinding through Midwestern clubs to international fame, but they came back to Rockford with one of the most formidable rock bills imaginable.

Anybody who attended that show now possesses one of the better "Yeah, I was there" cards available to a Rockford resident.

16. The Midway Theater became part of Cheap Trick history

Here's another piece of downtown Rockford embedded in the band's story.

In 1997, Cheap Trick used the historic Midway Theater to film the video for "Say Goodbye." Rick Nielsen also performed an electric concerto there with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra.

That's one of the things I love about Cheap Trick's relationship with Rockford. The band's history isn't confined to a plaque saying CHEAP TRICK WAS FROM HERE.

It's scattered all over town.

Schools. Bars. Music stores. The Armory. The Ice House. The Midway. Places that disappeared and places still standing.

Cheap Trick Is Part of the Geography

That's probably the thing outsiders don't completely understand.

Cheap Trick isn't merely a famous band whose biography happens to list "Rockford, Illinois" as its place of origin.

For people here, Cheap Trick exists in the geography.

You can drive past the schools they attended. You can find buildings where they played before most of the world knew who they were. Rick Nielsen found guitars in Rockford shops that became part of rock history. Bun E. Carlos bought his first drums from Nielsen's family. Their teenage bands competed against each other before Cheap Trick even existed.

Then those kids from Rockford went out into the world.

Japan went crazy for them. At Budokan became a landmark live album. "I Want You to Want Me" became one of those songs almost everybody knows whether they own a Cheap Trick record or not. Eventually the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came calling.

But follow the story backward far enough and you keep ending up in the same place.

Rockford, Illinois.

 

Appletree Records: When Rockford Had a Record Store That Could Change Your Life

There was a time when discovering music required leaving the house.

You couldn't hear thirty seconds of every record ever made while sitting on the toilet. There was no Spotify algorithm waiting to decide that because you listened to the Ramones you might enjoy the Dead Boys. If you wanted to discover something strange, loud, imported, independent, or completely unlike anything being played on Rockford radio, somebody had to put it in front of you.

For a generation of Rockford music fans, one of those places was Appletree Records.

Appletree was located in Edgebrook Shopping Center and survived into the 1990s. People remember the records, tapes and eventually CDs, but describing it simply as a place that sold recorded music misses what record stores actually did before the Internet. They were information exchanges. You went there because you knew what you wanted, but also because you didn't know what you wanted yet.

And Appletree was particularly good at the second thing.

The store carried the major-label releases you'd expect, but its reputation was built partly on an unusually deep inventory of imports, independent records, punk, metal and other music that could be difficult to find in a Midwestern city during the 1980s.

Dan Kubinski, later of the influential Milwaukee punk band Die Kreuzen, remembered Appletree as essential to his musical education while growing up in the Rockford area. He recalled discovering X there and buying his first Damned singles at the store. For a kid trying to figure out what punk music existed beyond the handful of records available through mainstream outlets, Appletree provided a doorway.

That wasn't unusual.

Another recollection of Rockford's 1980s punk and metal scene describes Appletree's inventory of underground and imported punk and metal as staggering. Records were only part of it. There were tapes, zines, concert shirts and the accumulated debris of music culture that told teenagers there was an entire world happening somewhere beyond whatever was being played on commercial radio.

Sometimes that world came directly into the store.

On June 16, 1986, Black Flag and Gone held an autograph signing at Appletree Records before playing The Channel in Rockford.

Think about that for a moment.

Black Flag wasn't an archaeological artifact yet. Henry Rollins wasn't a television personality or spoken-word institution. This was the actual American underground passing through Rockford, Illinois, and before the show you could apparently walk into the local record store and meet them.

That tells us something important about what Appletree was.

It wasn't merely retail.

Record stores like Appletree were part of the infrastructure of local music. They sold concert tickets and local products. Flyers accumulated there. Musicians met other musicians. Somebody behind the counter recommended something you'd never heard before. You bought it because the cover looked interesting or because somebody whose taste you trusted said, "You need to hear this."

Then you took it home.

And sometimes your life was slightly different afterward.

Appletree itself wasn't merely a single Rockford curiosity. Contemporary records show AppleTree operating elsewhere in Illinois, including DeKalb, where a store at 1022 W. Lincoln Highway was documented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An industry directory from 1989 listed Appletree Records in DeKalb as dealing in records, prerecorded tapes and video. The company appears to have deliberately operated in Illinois college towns and regional cities rather than behaving like the giant mall chains that eventually dominated music retail.

But the Rockford store developed its own place in the city's cultural memory.

That's probably why people still mention it decades after it disappeared.

Rockford has been fortunate to retain part of its record-store tradition. Toad Hall survived. Other independent shops have carried the physical-media tradition forward. Vinyl itself performed the unlikely trick of coming back from the dead.

But something about the old record-store experience can't really be reconstructed.

Scarcity was part of the magic.

You couldn't instantly obtain everything. You couldn't instantly know everything. A record could be rumored to exist for months before you finally saw one. Imports really were imports. A weird seven-inch single could become an object of obsession because there wasn't another copy waiting to be delivered to your door tomorrow morning.

Places like Appletree served as portals through that scarcity.

A kid in Rockford could walk into Edgebrook looking for one record and walk out having discovered an entirely different idea of what music could be.

That's a pretty good legacy for a store that sold records.

The Time I Wrote About Dog Poop on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

 

The Time I Wrote About Dog Poop on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

In 2017, the Rockford Art Museum allowed me to spend two days writing children's poems directly onto its gallery walls.

All twenty-six of them.

This was not vandalism. I want to establish that immediately.

Nobody chased me down East State Street. The police were not summoned. The Rockford Art Museum knew exactly what I was doing. In fact, they supplied me with a large assortment of expensive art markers with which to do it.

What I'm less certain about is whether they had completely considered the implications of saying yes.

Because one of the poems was called “D is for Dog Poop.”

I wrote that one in brown.

Another was “U is for Urination.”

Yellow.

Welcome to the arts in Rockford, Illinois.

Bittersweet Observations

The occasion was Bittersweet Observations, a 2017 exhibition at the Rockford Art Museum that included work by my partner, artist Jenny Mathews. Jenny had been creating paintings and illustrations that revisited childhood stories and imagery, and our children's book Atrocious Poems A to Z fit naturally into the world of the exhibition.

Atrocious Poems A To Z

The book had been nearly eight years in the making. I wrote the poems and Jenny created the illustrations. Its premise was “poems about all the things kids love to hate”: bullies, vegetables, inoculations, sharing, monsters, liver, dog poop, and the other catastrophes adults dismiss because we've forgotten how enormous small problems can feel when you're a child.

The book was funny, but the idea underneath it wasn't entirely a joke. Children have anxieties adults frequently regard as trivial because adults know those things will pass. Children don't necessarily know that yet.

The kids who visited the museum seemed to understand the premise immediately.

Some adults needed a little more convincing.

I Had an Idea

The idea of writing all twenty-six poems directly onto the museum walls was mine.

I admired the Dadaists and Surrealists, and somewhere along the way I realized I had an unusual opportunity. If I could convince a respectable American art museum to let me write the poems directly onto its walls, I could quietly introduce a little Dada into an otherwise straight exhibition.

For children.

The Dadaists usually had the courtesy to announce they were doing Dada.

I didn't.

I proposed writing the poems on the walls. The museum said yes.

The gates were open.

Two Days on the Museum Wall

It sounded easier than it was.

The installation took two days. It was around 100 degrees outside and considerably colder inside the museum, where temperatures have to be maintained for the artwork.

Jenny's illustrations were displayed along the wall, and I wrote each corresponding poem beside them by hand. The museum had a wide selection of art markers because it also conducted art classes, so I tried to choose colors that complemented the individual illustrations while also making the entire wall work visually.

Sometimes this required aesthetic judgment.

Sometimes the poem was called “D is for Dog Poop.”

Brown.

I don't remember every color I used, but “O is for Orange” wasn't a particularly difficult decision either. And when I reached “U is for Urination,” there was really only one responsible choice.

Yellow.

There was no accompanying artist statement explaining that yellow represented the existential condition of childhood urination.

Pee is yellow.

The installation process became surprisingly physical. Writing an entire book vertically on a museum wall is hard on the hands and arms. I periodically did yoga on the gallery floor to loosen myself up. Other people were working around me because part of the larger installation involved constructing a small forest inside the museum, and I'd take breaks from writing to help with that.

I believe I made at least one mistake substantial enough that part of the wall had to be painted over so I could write it again.

Living with a visual artist had already taught me something useful.

Everything can be repainted.

The Kids Got It

One of my favorite memories of the exhibition is that children generally didn't require much explanation.

Adults sometimes seemed to need permission to understand what we were doing. Was a poem about stepping in dog poop really supposed to be hanging in an art museum? Was it serious? Was it a joke?

The answer was yes.

To an adult, stepping in dog poop is an annoyance. To a child, it can be the worst thing that has happened since Tuesday.

That's what the book was about.

Rockford children walked into the museum, saw the illustrations and poems, and generally understood the arrangement immediately.

Perhaps children are naturally better Dadaists.

The Part Where I Wasn't an Artist

There is one more absurd detail.

I specifically asked the Rockford Art Museum not to list me as one of the exhibiting artists.

At that point Jenny and I were involved in what felt like three to five public events every week. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted and couldn't find enough corners to hide in.

I wanted to do the work and skip the rest.

So there I was, spending two days physically writing twenty-six poems across an entire wall of the Rockford Art Museum, while insisting I wasn't one of the exhibiting artists.

There are photographs of me standing beneath the finished installation.

Photo by Ryan Davis

My name appears above me in enormous letters.

I didn't ask to be listed in the exhibition, but I did manage to get my misspelled name displayed across an entire museum wall.

That's difficult to improve upon.

From Byron to Rockford

There was another reason the installation meant something to me.

The ancestor of Atrocious Poems A to Z began when I was a fifth grader at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron. Our class was assigned to create a children's book. I procrastinated until two days before it was due and finally threw together an alphabet book called The Monster Dictionary.

My teacher gave me a B.

Her written assessment began:

“Not colored. Excellent ideas!”

She told me that if I'd put more effort into the project, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress.

A B for effort 

That bothered me for decades.

Eventually I met Jenny in Rockford, asked her to illustrate my new version of the alphabet-book idea, and we spent eight years finishing Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Then something happened that my fifth-grade teacher probably couldn't have predicted.

I took the descendant of that unfinished little alphabet book and wrote all twenty-six poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum.

And this time I colored it.

Dog poop was brown.

Pee was yellow.

After three months, Bittersweet Observations came down. The walls were painted over and another exhibition took its place. I believe the next one involved motorcycles.

That's what museums do. One Rockford story disappears and another takes its place.

But for three months in 2017, children could walk into the Rockford Art Museum and find a grown man had written a poem about dog poop on the wall in brown marker.

And nobody threw him out.

Rockford had given him permission.

Fifty Years of TWATS: The Surprisingly Long History of the Rockford Ravens Rugby Club

 Rockford has never had much trouble finding sports to call its own.

We had the Rockford Peaches. We have the IceHogs. We have the Ski Broncs building improbable human pyramids on the Rock River. We have golf courses, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, bowling alleys, and enough sports complexes that at some point somebody apparently decided our most renewable natural resource was athletic fields.

And for the last fifty years, we've also had rugby.

The Rockford Ravens Rugby Football Club was established in 1976, which means the Ravens are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026. That's half a century of Rockford men and women voluntarily running toward other large human beings without the benefit of shoulder pads, helmets, or the good sense to throw the ball forward.

That deserves some recognition.

How the Ravens Got Here

The early history has acquired a little bit of legend.

According to a 2016 history of the club, the Ravens were reportedly started by an Englishman who moved to the area in 1976. The club was originally associated with Oregon, Illinois, then Kishwaukee, before eventually settling permanently in Rockford.

Whatever the exact circumstances of its birth, the Rockford Ravens survived.

That's significant.

Sports teams come and go. Recreational leagues form, flourish for a few years, lose players, lose fields, lose organizers, and disappear. Maintaining any volunteer athletic organization for fifty years requires something considerably stronger than enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon exercise.

The Ravens developed a culture.

Today the club operates under the Forest City Rugby Union, a nonprofit organization, and includes men's, women's, and youth rugby. The men's and women's first sides compete at the Division III level.

Their home field is at Lyran Park on South Bend Road, where the Ravens also hold their annual Luck of the Draw rugby tournament.

But understanding the Ravens requires understanding something about rugby itself.

A Hooligan's Game Played by Gentlemen

American football has whistles.

Rugby seems to regard whistles mostly as irritating interruptions to what everyone came there to do.

Players run, kick, tackle, scrum and pass the ball across the field, with one particularly confusing rule for Americans: the ball cannot simply be thrown forward toward the goal line. Rugby players advance while passing laterally or backward, although they can kick the ball forward.

There are no helmets and no shoulder pads.

This occasionally produces exactly the results you would imagine.

But one of the fascinating things about rugby is the contrast between the violence of the game and the culture surrounding it. A 2016 interview with a Ravens captain used the old description of rugby as "a hooligan's game played by gentlemen."

That seems particularly appropriate here.

After spending a match tackling one another into the ground, rugby teams traditionally socialize together. The home team feeds the visitors. Players share drinks, tell stories, sing songs and generally behave as though the people attempting to flatten them an hour earlier are now old friends.

For the Ravens, that social tradition isn't incidental.

The club describes camaraderie as one of its greatest strengths. Former players don't necessarily disappear when their playing days end. They become officers, organizers and social members. The club holds picnics, parties, breakfasts and banquets and participates in charitable and community activities.

In other words, joining the Ravens has traditionally meant joining something larger than a team.

The Girls Brought Home a State Championship

The Ravens' history isn't merely longevity.

Rockford has also produced championship rugby.

According to Rugby Illinois records, the Rockford Ravens girls won the Illinois high school rugby championship in 2010, defeating Plainfield for the title.

That wasn't an isolated appearance near the top of Illinois rugby. Rockford returned to the championship match several times, finishing second in 2012 and 2015 and sharing a runner-up listing in 2013.

Rugby Illinois credits Rockford with four girls' state title-match appearances.

For a sport that still exists somewhere outside the consciousness of many local sports fans, Rockford rugby has quietly accumulated a respectable history.

Then There Are the TWATS

Eventually, playing rugby in Illinois apparently wasn't enough.

The Ravens also developed a tradition of international touring.

Every few years members travel overseas as the Wild American Touring Side.

Yes.

The acronym is TWATS.

I have checked this.

In 2022, sixty-two people representing ten different rugby clubs traveled across Scotland with the Ravens touring side. They played three matches, defeating Isle of Islay 12-7 and Moray 30-25 before losing to Lochaber 24-12.

They returned to Rockford with a winning international record of 2-1 and, presumably, several stories unsuitable for inclusion in a respectable local history blog.

The Scottish clubs also participated fully in rugby's social traditions. On Islay, the home club fed the entire traveling party after the match, and the visitors toured local distilleries. In Elgin, Moray Rugby Club presented the Americans with homemade haggis.

There are worse ways for a Rockford sports team to spend an afternoon.

Fifty Years and Still Running

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Rockford Ravens isn't a championship, a Scottish tour or even surviving fifty years.

It's that the basic idea still works.

The club continues to invite people who have never played rugby before to come out and learn. Its current men's, women's and youth programs keep alive something that began locally in 1976, when rugby was considerably more exotic to the average American than it is today.

There is something very Rockford about that persistence.

This city has always accumulated strange and wonderful institutions around its edges. Some become famous. Others simply keep doing what they do decade after decade until suddenly you look up and realize they've become part of the history of the place.

The Rockford Ravens are one of those institutions.

For fifty years they've practiced, traveled, competed, won championships, thrown parties, recruited newcomers, welcomed old players back, toured foreign countries and tackled one another into the grass.

The Peaches got a movie.

The IceHogs get an arena.

The Ski Broncs get the Rock River.

But somewhere in Rockford, there has been a rugby match going on since 1976.

Happy 50th anniversary to the Rockford Ravens.

Not bad for a bunch of TWATS.