Swedish American: The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

 Swedish American: The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

Generations of Rockford residents have been born at SwedishAmerican Hospital, worked there, recovered there, and said goodbye to loved ones there. Its history is inseparable from the history of the city itself.

But SwedishAmerican began with something considerably smaller than a hospital: a single dollar enclosed in a letter to a Swedish-language newspaper.

SwedishAmerican Hospital in 2007. Photograph by IvoShandor

The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

On March 23, 1911, a Rockford mathematician named O. F. Nilson wrote a letter to Carl Hjalmar Lundquist, editor of the Swedish-language newspaper Svenska Posten.

Nilson believed Rockford needed a hospital established by its Swedish community. He proposed that every Swedish resident contribute one dollar a year toward the project. To demonstrate his commitment, he enclosed a dollar of his own.

Lundquist deposited the money at the Swedish-American National Bank and called a meeting of Swedish ministers to discuss the proposal.

From that single dollar, a hospital began to take shape.

On June 6, 1911, the Swedish-American Hospital Association received its charter from the State of Illinois.

Fundraising became a community undertaking. Letters circulated in Swedish and English, and residents organized picnics, bazaars, and concerts. By May 1912, the association had collected more than $4,000 in cash and secured another $8,000 in pledges.

A three-acre site on Charles Street was purchased for $11,500.

July 18, 1918: The First Patient

After seven years of organizing, fundraising, and construction, SwedishAmerican Hospital was completed on July 17, 1918.

The original building cost approximately $175,000 and contained 55 beds.

The following day, July 18, the hospital admitted its first patient, Mrs. J. G. Prowd. She underwent surgery and remained hospitalized for 11 days. Her bill came to $40.

On August 29, 1918, Clarence Pearson became the first baby born at SwedishAmerican.

Healthcare looked considerably different in those days. Antibiotics were not yet available. Pneumonia and other infectious diseases remained major threats. Private rooms with a bath cost approximately six dollars a day, and nurses at the top of the salary scale earned about $60 a month.

Within weeks of opening, the hospital would face an extraordinary test.

The Influenza Epidemic of 1918

In September 1918, the influenza pandemic struck Camp Grant, the enormous military training installation south of Rockford.

The outbreak spread rapidly through the camp and the surrounding community. Midway Village Museum's historical timeline records 323 civilian influenza deaths in Rockford.

SwedishAmerican had been open for only two months.

Its physicians and nurses were confronting a public health emergency at a time when effective treatments for many serious infections were extremely limited.

The epidemic demonstrated just how important additional hospital facilities had become to Rockford.

A School for Nurses and a Growing Hospital

SwedishAmerican established its nursing school in 1919, just one year after opening. Its first students graduated in 1922.

The school helped train generations of nurses who would serve Rockford and the surrounding region.

By the late 1930s, SwedishAmerican had become an established part of Rockford's medical and civic life.

In July 1938, the hospital celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a visit from Prince Bertil of Sweden, the son of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf.

Approximately 6,000 people gathered on the hospital lawn for the occasion.

For Rockford's Swedish-American community, the celebration marked how far the institution had come since Nilson mailed his dollar to the local newspaper.

Pehr August Peterson and the Hospital's Swedish Roots

The Lake–Peterson House, photographed in 2013. The house was owned by hospital co-founder Pehr August Peterson and later donated to SwedishAmerican. 

One of the important figures in the hospital's early development was Pehr August Peterson, a Swedish immigrant who became a prominent Rockford furniture manufacturer and civic leader.

Peterson served as chairman of the hospital's board of trustees when the institution opened in 1918.

His former residence, the Lake–Peterson House, remains an architectural reminder of the city's Swedish-American history.

Originally constructed in 1873, the house was purchased by Peterson in 1918 and donated to the hospital in 1919. It later served as a residence for students in the hospital's School of Medical Technology.

Expansion, Heart Surgery, and a Changing Neighborhood

As Rockford grew, SwedishAmerican grew with it.

A west-wing addition completed in 1942 increased capacity to approximately 125 beds. Construction began on a five-story east wing in 1947, followed by a ten-story addition in 1963.

The hospital also expanded its medical capabilities. Open-heart surgery was introduced in 1971, and a regional cancer center followed in 1974. A modern emergency facility opened in 1979.

SwedishAmerican Hospital in 2012. Photograph by Jim Simonson

During the 1990s, SwedishAmerican began planning a major modernization of its campus. The project included rerouting Charles Street, which ran through the hospital complex.

The city agreed to the changes on the condition that SwedishAmerican help revitalize the neighborhood south of the hospital.

The hospital acquired 31 properties in a six-block area and committed $2 million to neighborhood improvements. Working with the city and Habitat for Humanity, it helped bring new housing to the area.

In June 2006, SwedishAmerican opened a $44 million, 94-bed heart hospital, further expanding its cardiovascular services.

From SwedishAmerican to UW Health

In 2015, SwedishAmerican joined UW Health, the academic health system based in Madison, Wisconsin.

The partnership connected Rockford patients with a broader network of medical specialists and services while retaining the hospital's presence in northern Illinois.

In September 2021, SwedishAmerican Health System announced that it would adopt the UW Health brand.

The original Rockford hospital retained its historic identity in its new name: UW Health SwedishAmerican Hospital.

The hospital remains at 1401 East State Street, continuing to serve patients throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

The Dollar That Became a Hospital

It is difficult to imagine that a hospital of this size began with a single dollar enclosed in a letter to a Swedish-language newspaper.

But that is precisely how SwedishAmerican's story began.

The institution has changed enormously since 1918. Buildings have been added, medical treatments have advanced, and the hospital has become part of a much larger healthcare organization.

Yet the story of its founding remains distinctly Rockford: a community recognized a need, organized its resources, and built something intended to serve generations beyond its own.

O. F. Nilson's dollar did not build a hospital by itself.

It persuaded other people to contribute theirs.

And on February 7, 1969, one of the babies born at SwedishAmerican Hospital was me.

— Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

Charlotte’s Web: The Rockford Music Venue That Once Housed the City’s First Jewish Congregation

Rockford History | Music, architecture, and a vanished cultural landmark

There was a time when some of the most interesting music in Rockford could be heard inside an old church at 728 First Avenue. The building was home to Charlotte’s Web, a music venue that brought nationally known performers and local audiences together in an intimate setting.

But the history of Charlotte’s Web began nearly a century before its first concert.

Before it became a music venue, the building had served as a Swedish Methodist church and, later, as a synagogue for Rockford’s first Jewish congregation. Its history tells a story about immigration, religion, music, and the changing cultural life of the city.

From Swedish church to Jewish synagogue

The building that would eventually become Charlotte’s Web was erected in 1877 for a Swedish Methodist congregation. According to the Rockford Historical Society, the congregation later became known as Bethany Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church and constructed a new sanctuary at 402 Eighth Street.

Rockford’s Jewish community was also establishing its place in the growing city.

In 1898, the congregation Ohave Sholon was formed. Ten years later, in 1908, it purchased the former church building at 728 First Avenue for use as a synagogue.

This distinction is important: the building was not constructed as Rockford’s first synagogue, but it became a place of worship for the city’s first Jewish congregation.

For decades, the building's purpose was religious. Eventually, however, it would become a gathering place for an entirely different community.

The birth of Charlotte’s Web

In 1972, Karen Howard and Stephen Powers opened Charlotte’s Web in downtown Rockford. The venue became associated with folk music and a commitment to bringing a wide variety of performers to the city.

Charlotte’s Web was not simply another nightclub. Its programming encompassed folk, blues, roots music, and artists whose work did not always fit neatly into commercial categories.

The former house of worship offered something that larger concert halls could not easily reproduce: the experience of hearing a performer in a relatively intimate space.

For Rockford audiences, it meant that nationally recognized musicians could appear in a setting where the distance between artist and listener was unusually small.

The musicians who came to Rockford

                          

                          

                          

The list of performers associated with Charlotte’s Web demonstrates just how adventurous its programming could be.

Concert records document appearances by Cheap Trick in 1974, John Hartford and the Runaways in 1976, Asleep at the Wheel in 1979, and Loudon Wainwright III in 1980.

These were musicians from strikingly different traditions. Hartford was associated with bluegrass and American roots music. The Runaways were a young, all-female rock band. Cheap Trick was developing the sound that would eventually make the Rockford group internationally famous.

The variety was part of what made Charlotte’s Web distinctive. A listener might encounter a folk singer, a blues musician, or a rock band in the same room.

For a city better known nationally for manufacturing than for its music scene, Charlotte’s Web helped create a place where audiences could experience a much wider musical world.

Karen Howard and the people behind the music

Charlotte’s Web was also the product of sustained personal commitment.

Karen Howard led the organization for much of its existence. Her daughter, Lani Richardson, eventually succeeded her as executive director.

By 2012, Charlotte’s Web had operated independently for more than 40 years. That September, Northern Public Radio reported that the organization was becoming a division of the Mendelssohn Performing Arts Center.

Richardson explained that the partnership would help preserve Charlotte’s Web without requiring her family to continue handling nearly every aspect of its operations.

The arrangement represented another chapter in the organization’s history. Charlotte’s Web had grown beyond the old building on First Avenue, but its mission of bringing music to Rockford continued.

The building disappears

The original Charlotte’s Web building did not survive.

A November 10, 2019, account documented its demolition, including photographs of the former venue at 728 First Avenue.

With its disappearance, Rockford lost a building that had served several generations of residents in very different ways.

It had been a Swedish Methodist church, a synagogue, and a music venue. Each community had found its own reasons to gather there.

The history of the building also illustrates something easily overlooked about Rockford: its cultural life has always been shaped by people who created institutions for themselves, often adapting existing spaces to new purposes.

A building with more than one life

The story of Charlotte’s Web is about more than the famous musicians who performed there.

It is also the story of a Swedish immigrant congregation that built a church in the nineteenth century, a Jewish community that established a permanent place of worship in the early twentieth century, and a group of music lovers who transformed that same space into a gathering place for artists and audiences.

The building at 728 First Avenue is gone, but the history of what happened inside it remains part of Rockford’s story.

For a time, one old church held several different versions of the city’s cultural life.

And for those who remember Charlotte’s Web, the music is still there.

 

Rockford on Eight Wheels: A Short History of the City’s Roller-Skating Rinks

Before roller skating became birthday-party entertainment, it was one of Rockford’s great social rituals. The city once had large skating palaces where teenagers dressed carefully, listened to live organ music, drank cherry Cokes afterward, competed in races and dances, and discovered who was willing to skate with whom when the lights went down.

The Ing

Rockford’s association with roller skating reaches back at least to Harlem Park, the amusement park that operated along the Rock River from 1891 until 1928. Among its roller coaster, carousel, dance pavilion, swimming pool and other attractions was a roller-skating palace. Very little appears to survive about the rink itself, but its presence shows that Rockford was already participating in America’s first great roller-skating craze before automobiles had taken over the city.

The most storied Rockford rink was the Ing Skating Palace at 115 North Second Street. The building began life in 1918 as the Inglaterra Dance Hall and became the Inglaterra Ballroom in 1935. In 1939 it was converted into the Ing Skating Palace, beginning a remarkably long run as one of the city’s gathering places.

The Ing was not merely a big empty room where people went around in circles. It had a maple floor, an Art Deco interior and balconies that reportedly gave it something of the appearance of a theater. At one time the building contained two skating floors: the large main rink and a smaller rink toward the rear. The smaller floor was later converted into a dance area with strobe lights.

In the 1940s, around 150 teenagers reportedly skated regularly at the Ing. They came from 7 to 10 p.m., knew one another and often finished the night at a soda bar with Green Rivers or cherry Cokes. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect surviving picture of teenage Rockford before television, shopping malls and phones became the principal forms of recreation.

Skating also involved more ceremony than most people would expect today. David Machek, who purchased the Ing in 1960, remembered boys arriving in black pants, white shirts and ties while girls wore dresses. An organist supplied the music, and the rink hosted both skating and dance competitions. Machek also discovered old photographs of the building’s marquee advertising Lawrence Welk and Jimmy Dorsey, reminders of its earlier ballroom life.

The Ing became less active during the late twentieth century. From 1987 through 1993 it was used primarily for private functions. Charles Rankin purchased it from David and Katherine Machek in 1993 and reopened it for weekend skating, although its busiest decades were behind it. The building survived into the 2000s but eventually deteriorated beyond repair. Today the rink is gone and the property is a parking lot.

Another rink remembered by longtime residents was the Johnson Roller Rink, reportedly built around 1946 at 1823 Cleveland Avenue. Its history is harder to document online than the Ing’s, and even its name sometimes appears as Johnson Rink or Rockford Lane Roller Rink in personal recollections. That uncertainty is part of the problem with recovering the history of everyday places: people rarely preserve the buildings where ordinary happiness happened. By the time historians become interested, the programs, photographs and admission tickets have often disappeared.

The roller rink nevertheless remained an important part of Rockford adolescence. It was a place children could occupy independently but under loose adult supervision—a temporary world of loud music, dim lights, rental skates, snack counters and continuous motion. Nearly everyone experienced the same hierarchy. Good skaters moved through the crowd as if gravity had made a special exception for them. Everyone else hugged the rail, fell publicly or tried to look casual while waiting for the next couples skate.

Two Rockford rinks continue that tradition. SkateCo operates at 3209 North Main Street with a 75-by-180-foot skating floor. Skateland operates at 4843 Stenstrom Road. Phil and Susie Smalley, who came to the Rockford area in 1992 and operated Skateland for 33 years, announced their retirement and the rink’s sale to a new family in late 2025. The business remained a skating rink—a reassuringly rare case in which a Rockford institution changed hands without immediately becoming a parking lot, warehouse or dollar store.

Roller rinks endure because they provide something increasingly difficult to find: public life without much purpose beyond being together. Skating takes just enough concentration to keep people in the moment, but not so much that they cannot talk, flirt, show off, listen to music or laugh when somebody falls. The building may be plain from the outside, but inside it becomes its own small illuminated city.

Rockford has lost the Ing, the Johnson and the skating palace at Harlem Park. Their maple floors, music and crowds have mostly passed into private memory. But the basic ritual survives at SkateCo and Skateland. The wheels have changed, the music has changed and nobody is required to wear a tie, but Rockford is still going around in circles—and, in this particular case, that is something worth preserving.

 

When the AWA Came to Boylan: Rockford’s Forgotten Wrestling History

When I was a kid, professional wrestling belonged to weekend mornings. Before wrestling became a billion-dollar national entertainment industry, it arrived in the house through a local television station with a relatively simple proposition: watch these men threaten, boast, cheat, bleed, and settle their grudges in the ring. The heroes and villains seemed enormous on television, but they were not impossibly far away. The same wrestlers we watched on Saturday morning could turn up a few miles away at the gymnasium of Boylan Catholic High School.

For many Rockford residents who grew up during the 1970s and early 1980s, this was professional wrestling: Verne Gagne, Nick Bockwinkel, The Crusher, Baron von Raschke, Mad Dog Vachon, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Greg Gagne, Jim Brunzell, Ken Patera, Bobby Duncum, Larry Zbyszko and a succession of other strange, colorful men passing through town. Long before WrestleMania transformed wrestling into a national spectacle, Rockford was a regular stop in the territory of the American Wrestling Association.

Before Wrestling Went National

The American Wrestling Association was founded in Minneapolis in 1960 by wrestler and promoter Verne Gagne. At the time, professional wrestling did not operate as one national business. The country was divided into regional territories, each with its own television program, champions, arenas and recognizable group of wrestlers. Promoters generally respected one another’s geographic areas, allowing each organization to develop a loyal local audience.

The AWA’s territory was centered in Minnesota but extended across much of the Upper Midwest. Minneapolis and St. Paul were its heart, while Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Winnipeg, Omaha and numerous smaller Midwestern cities formed a network of recurring stops. Rockford’s location made it a natural part of that circuit. It was close enough to Chicago and Milwaukee to fit conveniently into the wrestlers’ traveling schedule, yet large enough to support its own audience.

The AWA’s weekly syndicated television program supplied the stories. Television matches introduced the wrestlers, established rivalries and usually gave the stars an opportunity to demolish lesser opponents. Interviews intensified the feuds and promised revenge. The program was not the final product so much as an advertisement for the next live card. After watching the conflict develop on television, fans could purchase a ticket and see it continue at Boylan.

This relationship between television and the local arena was the foundation of territorial wrestling. The performers on the screen were neither distant movie stars nor characters who existed only inside the television. They traveled to the communities watching them. In Rockford, they stepped into a ring constructed on the floor of a Catholic high school gymnasium.

Boylan Catholic High School Becomes an AWA Stop

Boylan Catholic High School opened in 1960 at 4000 St. Francis Drive. Its gym was designed for school athletics, but it also provided the kind of practical, midsized building regional wrestling promoters needed. It could accommodate a substantial crowd without requiring the expense of a major arena. The wooden bleachers placed spectators close to the ring, where every shouted insult, referee’s warning and impact on the canvas could be heard.

Surviving wrestling records indicate that the AWA was holding events at Boylan by 1970. The promotion continued returning through the 1970s and well into the 1980s. That makes Boylan more than the site of an isolated wrestling exhibition. It was an established AWA venue and part of the promotion’s regular Midwestern route.

The surviving online record is incomplete. House shows were working events rather than programs created for permanent preservation. Results were reported unevenly, newspaper advertisements disappeared, and many cards were never filmed. Dates and match listings preserved by wrestling historians therefore represent only part of what occurred at Boylan. Nevertheless, the surviving records are enough to establish that nationally known wrestlers appeared in Rockford repeatedly over a period of at least fourteen years.

One surviving early Boylan lineup featured Larry “The Axe” Hennig defeating Billy Red Cloud, Don Muraco defeating Jack Bence, and the celebrated team of Nick Bockwinkel and Ray Stevens appearing on the card. These were not unknown performers assigned to an insignificant stop. Hennig was one of the AWA’s most imposing stars. Muraco would later become nationally famous in the WWF. Bockwinkel and Stevens, managed by Bobby Heenan, were among the most accomplished and despised tag teams of the era.

The Crusher Comes to Rockford

No wrestler represented the Upper Midwest more completely than The Crusher. Born Reginald Lisowski in Milwaukee, he fashioned himself into a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking workingman who trained by carrying beer barrels and dancing the polka. He referred to opponents as “bumps” and promised to pound them until they became “da woist.”

The character was exaggerated, but it was perfectly suited to places such as Milwaukee, Chicago and Rockford. The Crusher did not present himself as an untouchable celebrity. He was the loudest man at the neighborhood tavern, transformed into a folk hero. A working-class crowd could understand him immediately.

On January 10, 1975, The Crusher teamed with Ivan Putski at Boylan to challenge AWA World Tag Team Champions Nick Bockwinkel and Ray Stevens. Bockwinkel and Stevens retained their championship. Even in the fragmentary record, the match illustrates the quality of wrestling Rockford received: four major stars contesting the promotion’s world tag-team title in a high school gym.

Bockwinkel and Stevens embodied everything The Crusher opposed. They were composed, technically proficient and openly superior. With Bobby Heenan speaking on their behalf and interfering whenever necessary, they were ideal villains. Their victory did not end the argument. It gave the audience another reason to return.

Nick Bockwinkel: The Champion Rockford Loved to Hate

Nick Bockwinkel eventually became the defining AWA champion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the AWA World Heavyweight Championship from Verne Gagne in 1975 and held the title four times. Bockwinkel was unusual among wrestling villains. He seldom needed to scream. Wearing tailored suits and choosing elaborate words, he calmly explained why he was wealthier, more intelligent and more accomplished than the people booing him.

He was also one of the finest technical wrestlers of his era. That combination made him an especially effective champion. The audience might despise his arrogance and Bobby Heenan’s interference, but it could not easily dismiss his ability.

One documented Boylan card placed Bockwinkel in the main event as AWA World Heavyweight Champion, evidence that Rockford was included in the championship circuit. The AWA did not merely send an assortment of preliminary wrestlers to Boylan. Its principal championship and leading performers came with them.

Bockwinkel’s presence also connects the Boylan story to a major turning point in wrestling history. During the early 1980s, Hulk Hogan became the AWA’s most popular hero and repeatedly challenged Bockwinkel. Hogan appeared to win the championship on more than one occasion, only for the decision to be reversed. Hogan left for the World Wrestling Federation in late 1983 and soon became the face of wrestling’s national expansion.

The stars Rockford fans knew from the AWA did not disappear. Many of them became central figures in the WWF’s rise. Hogan, Bobby Heenan, Gene Okerlund, Jesse Ventura, Adrian Adonis, Ken Patera and numerous others had already learned their craft and developed their characters in the AWA.

A Packed Gym in 1980

One of the best-documented Boylan events occurred on March 8, 1980. Promotional records identify a four-match AWA card at the school and report attendance of 3,168—an impressive crowd for a high school gymnasium.

One of the advertised matches placed Dino Bravo against Chris Markoff. Bravo was a powerful young wrestler who would later become a prominent WWF villain. Markoff was a veteran who worked a Russian character during the Cold War era. The card was promoted with the phrase “The Mad Dog Bites Again,” indicating that Mad Dog Vachon was another featured attraction.

Vachon was among the most recognizable figures in AWA history. Bald, scarred and wild-eyed, he seemed genuinely dangerous in a way few later television wrestlers could duplicate. He snarled through interviews, attacked opponents without warning and looked as if he had wandered into the building from somewhere wrestling rules did not exist.

A crowd of more than 3,000 at Boylan shows how deeply the AWA was embedded in Rockford entertainment. This was not a handful of enthusiasts gathered in a nearly empty building. The gym was filled by people who had followed the wrestlers on television and wanted to experience the spectacle in person.

Another surviving database entry documents an AWA card at Boylan on September 27, 1980. The individual results available online remain incomplete, but the date confirms that the March event was not a one-time visit. The promotion returned to the same building later that year, continuing the familiar cycle of televised provocation and live resolution.

The Boylan Cards During the 1980s

The AWA continued promoting events at Boylan as wrestling entered its national boom. By this period, the roster contained a mixture of established veterans and younger wrestlers who would soon become nationally famous.

A particularly strong card took place on July 20, 1984. Tony Atlas defeated Larry Zbyszko in 12 minutes and 14 seconds. Billy Robinson wrestled Curt Hennig to a twenty-minute time-limit draw. That pairing alone is historically remarkable. Robinson was internationally respected as one of wrestling’s greatest technical practitioners. Hennig, the son of Larry “The Axe” Hennig, was still developing into the performer later known nationally as “Mr. Perfect.”

Another documented 1984 visit featured a nine-team battle royal won by The Crusher and Baron von Raschke. The same card included Jimmy Garvin defeating Raschke. Battle royals were ideal attractions for local shows because they placed a large portion of the roster into the ring at once. For a child sitting in the Boylan bleachers, nearly every wrestler seen on television could suddenly be present in the same chaotic match.

The partnership of The Crusher and Baron von Raschke was especially memorable. Raschke had spent years terrifying audiences as a goose-stepping German villain who incapacitated opponents with “the claw.” By the 1980s, he had become a beloved eccentric. In 1984, Raschke and The Crusher won the AWA World Tag Team Championship, turning two of the promotion’s most recognizable veterans into an unlikely heroic team.

Other stars who passed through the AWA during Boylan’s wrestling years included the High Flyers—Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell—along with Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bobby Duncum, Ken Patera, Jerry Blackwell, Rick Martel, Brad Rheingans, The Road Warriors, Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty. Not every one of them can presently be placed on a surviving Boylan card, but together they formed the television world Rockford viewers associated with AWA wrestling.

Why a High School Gym Worked

Looking back from the era of stadium shows, elaborate entrance videos and international streaming, a professional wrestling card in a school gym may sound small. In practice, the building’s limitations created much of its power.

There was no great distance between the audience and the performers. Spectators could see the wrestlers’ expressions, hear what they said to one another and watch Bobby Heenan look over his shoulder before committing some act of treachery. Children could crowd near the aisle as their heroes entered. Villains had to walk through the same hostile audience they had spent weeks insulting on television.

The smell of the gym, the squeak of shoes on the floor, the folding chairs, the concession stand and the school bleachers were all part of the experience. Wrestling inserted its imaginary world into an entirely familiar Rockford setting. For a few hours, the Boylan gym was no longer primarily a place for basketball games and school assemblies. It was an arena where world championships, revenge and personal honor were supposedly at stake.

Territorial wrestling also depended upon repetition. The AWA came back. Wrestlers returned with different partners, championships and grudges. A young Curt Hennig could appear before becoming a champion. A hated Baron von Raschke could return years later as a hero. The audience aged along with the performers and carried the history of earlier matches into every new card.

Television Made the World; Boylan Made It Real

For those of us who watched the AWA on weekend mornings, the television program established a complete moral universe. The Crusher was right. Nick Bockwinkel was smug. Bobby Heenan was lying. The referee had somehow failed to see the most obvious act of cheating in the building. Next week, perhaps, justice would finally be served.

Boylan made that world tangible. The people inside the television arrived in Rockford, climbed into a ring and performed only a few feet from the audience. This was the great strength of territorial wrestling: it was both imaginary and intensely local.

Rockford was not watching a generic national product manufactured somewhere else. It occupied a real place on the AWA map. The city’s fans were part of the circuit that sustained the promotion, and Boylan Catholic High School was one of the buildings where the weekly television stories became live community events.

The End of the Territory

By the middle of the 1980s, the territorial system was collapsing. Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation used cable television, aggressive syndication and nationally promoted events to enter markets that had once belonged to regional companies. Many of the AWA’s most valuable performers left for the WWF, where they became familiar to a much larger audience.

The AWA attempted to compete with major events such as SuperClash and WrestleRock, but it could not reproduce the WWF’s national momentum. Attendance declined, television distribution weakened and the company ceased operations in 1991.

What disappeared was not simply one wrestling promotion. An entire relationship between television, geography and community disappeared with it. Wrestling became larger, more polished and more widely available, but it became less local. The chances that the world champion seen on television would appear a few weeks later in a nearby high school gym diminished dramatically.

Remembering AWA Wrestling at Boylan

Today, Boylan Catholic High School remains one of Rockford’s most familiar institutions, but its role in professional wrestling history is rarely mentioned. For more than a decade, however, its gymnasium hosted some of the most important performers of the territorial era. The Crusher, Nick Bockwinkel, Ray Stevens, Ivan Putski, Mad Dog Vachon, Dino Bravo, Tony Atlas, Larry Zbyszko, Billy Robinson, Curt Hennig and Baron von Raschke are among the names connected to surviving Boylan records.

There are almost certainly more cards still waiting to be reconstructed from newspaper advertisements, programs, ticket stubs and the memories of people who attended. Wrestling’s local history often survives in fragments because no one thought a handbill or newspaper advertisement would someday become historical evidence.

But the larger story is already clear. Rockford had a regular place in one of professional wrestling’s most important regional territories. Thousands of local fans watched the AWA on weekend mornings, then had the opportunity to see those same wrestlers in person at Boylan.

For the children watching at home, the distance between ordinary Rockford and the fantastic world of professional wrestling was not very great. It was only a drive across town.

SECOND NATURE Brings Salvaged-Metal Animals and Haiku to Rockford Art Deli

Rockford sculptor Michael Zant, artist and poet Tré, and Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg will present SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku at Rockford Art Deli during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026.

SECOND NATURE brings together Zant’s salvaged-metal animal sculptures and original haiku by Tré and Vaultonburg. Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each sculpture will be accompanied by two poems—one written by each poet in response to the animal it depicts.

The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden in discarded materials, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature. Zant’s weathered metal animals are joined by the compressed observations of haiku, allowing sculpture and poetry to approach the same creature from different directions.

The presentation will remain deliberately simple. Each poem will be printed in black Garamond on cream paper and mounted on a small pale wood tile placed beside the sculpture. The repeated combination of salvaged metal, unfinished wood, cream paper, and black type allows the poems to become part of the exhibition without altering or competing with Zant’s sculptures.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots, a Rockford-area organization working to preserve and promote the region’s native prairie. Ten dollars from every copy of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, sold at Rockford Art Deli during the exhibition will be donated to Wild Roots.

Vaultonburg is the founder of Rockford’s Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books with Tré. His recent haiku have appeared in journals in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Tré created the cover and interior illustrations for Vanished Roads and is now contributing original haiku to SECOND NATURE.

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal SculptureMetal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Z Zant + Tré + + Thomas L L. Vault Vaultonburg
Rockford Art Deli
402 East State Street, Rockford, Illinois
October 2–3, 2026
5–9 p.m. both evenings
Free admission
A benefit for for Wild Roots

 

The Mystery of the Harvey Wallbangers Toaster

For nearly two years, one of the strangest little mysteries in downtown Rockford kept repeating itself in a tiny garden outside Harvey Wallbangers. I would be walking past and notice that somebody had found a discarded household appliance, carried it to the garden, and plugged it in. Not merely dumped it there or arranged it as some sort of joke. They plugged the thing in, and it would be running.

Over those two years I saw fans, heaters, dehumidifiers, radios and even a mini refrigerator. Every couple of weeks, it seemed, another orphaned appliance would appear and be given one final, inexplicable tour of duty in this little patch of downtown Rockford. The strangest part was that I never once saw the person doing it. I walked through this area constantly, often enough that you would think eventually I would catch the mysterious appliance operator in the act, but I never did. I would simply arrive one day and discover that the garden had acquired another machine. It would remain there humming, blowing, heating, cooling or playing until somebody unplugged it or the thing finally shorted out. Then it would disappear, and eventually something else would take its place.

One day it was a toaster. My friend and Hike You! collaborator, photographer Ryan Davis, took the photograph reproduced here. The toaster sits in the foreground, filthy and weather-beaten, with downtown Rockford rising behind it. There is one important detail that isn't readily apparent in the photograph: the toaster was on. Its little indicator light was glowing. There was something simultaneously ridiculous and strangely moving about it—a toaster sitting outside in a garden, nowhere near a kitchen, without bread or breakfast or any conceivable reason to exist there, nevertheless continuing to perform the job it had been manufactured to perform. Someone had plugged it in, so it toasted.

Ryan and I eventually paired the photograph with the haiku, “power outage— / the stars resume / their old jobs.” It became one of the 24 pieces in our exhibition Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford. In some ways, this photograph gets very close to what the entire project is about. For more than six years, Ryan and I have walked Rockford and paid attention to things that would be incredibly easy not to notice. We weren't particularly interested in documenting the city's official landmarks. Plenty of people can photograph a building and tell you when it was constructed. We became interested in what happens when you walk through the same place long enough that the ordinary begins to become mysterious.

That might mean a bicycle dredged out of the Rock River, an abandoned office chair on Broadway, something left in an alley, weeds reclaiming an object, or some accidental arrangement nobody intended anyone to regard as meaningful. They are little pieces of evidence that somebody was here five minutes ago or twenty years ago, moments in which the city seems briefly to rearrange itself into a poem. And sometimes, apparently, the poem is an electric toaster sitting in a garden.

The toaster also illustrates something I've come to believe after years of walking these same streets: familiarity and attention aren't opposites. You don't necessarily exhaust a place by returning to it. Sometimes you begin seeing more of it. That's also an important part of the Prairie Zen idea that has gradually developed around much of my recent haiku. You don't have to travel to some officially designated beautiful wilderness to encounter mystery. The strange, funny, melancholy or beautiful thing worth noticing might be sitting beside a sidewalk you've walked a hundred times. The trick is noticing it before it disappears.

Ryan Davis and I have selected 24 of these encounters for Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, which will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026. The exhibition combines Ryan's photographs with my haiku and short texts, following six years of walking through Rockford and watching the familiar city gradually become new, strange and occasionally magical. The exhibition also offers a preview of our forthcoming Hike You! book.

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, I have a particular affection for the toaster because I still don't know the answer to the most obvious question. For almost two years, somebody maintained this peculiar little ritual in downtown Rockford, bringing abandoned appliances to this garden and plugging them in, and despite all the miles we walked, I never caught them doing it. I don't know who they were, what they thought they were doing, or whether there was any explanation beyond their own amusement.

Maybe that's better. Rockford has explained enough of itself already. It can keep the toaster.

 

Three Shows, One Fall ArtScene: Haiku, Rockford Streets, and Salvaged Nature

I wasn't planning to have three shows in Rockford Fall ArtScene this year. These things have a way of accumulating. One project leads to another person, one conversation opens another door, and suddenly what began as a few photographs and haiku made while walking around Rockford has expanded into three different exhibitions involving photography, poetry, salvaged metal sculpture, the prairie, and several years of looking closely at the place where I live.

For Fall ArtScene 2026, my work will appear in three separate exhibitions around Rockford: Hike You! at RevHaus, a collaborative salvaged-metal sculpture at the Rockford Public Library, and SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli. Although the three projects developed independently, they've ended up telling different parts of essentially the same story. All of them are about paying attention to ordinary things, reconsidering objects and places we normally overlook, and discovering that the familiar can become strange again if you look at it long enough.

Hike You! — photograph by Ryan Davis, haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Hike You!: Six Years of Walking Rockford

The largest and longest-running of these projects is Hike You!, a collaboration with photographer Ryan Davis that grew out of six years of walking Rockford. We didn't begin with the idea of making an art exhibition. We walked. Ryan carried a camera and I wrote haiku. We wandered outward from the center of the city through downtown streets, alleys, neighborhoods, riverbanks and commercial strips, paying attention to things that most people—including us, ordinarily—would simply pass without giving them much thought.

Over time, that act of looking became the project. A discarded office chair in the window of the old Zant Office Equipment building on Broadway could suddenly evoke an entire vanished era. A mud-covered bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building became an accidental monument to lives in transition. Weather, abandoned objects, signs, animals, buildings, weeds and the strange little collisions between nature and the constructed city became our subjects. None of these things announced themselves as art. They were simply there.

Ryan's photographs and my haiku eventually began functioning as pairs. Neither necessarily explains the other, and that became important to the way the project developed. The photograph provides one way of encountering a moment while the poem opens another. Sometimes the connection is immediately apparent and sometimes it isn't. That little space between the photograph and the poem gives the viewer somewhere to enter the work and make an association of their own.

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026. The exhibition contains 24 pieces, but behind those finished works are years of walking and thousands of moments that never became anything at all. That's part of the idea, too. Art doesn't necessarily require traveling somewhere exotic in search of a subject. Sometimes you walk out the door, pay attention to your own neighborhood, and keep walking until the familiar becomes unfamiliar again.

A Possum Climbs Onto the Library Terrace

The second project took some of those same ideas somewhere completely different. For the Rockford Public Library Terrace, I collaborated with Rockford artist and fabricator Michael Zant on a reclaimed-metal opossum sculpture paired with one of my haiku. Michael makes animals from salvaged metal, taking objects that already had previous purposes and previous lives and reassembling them into something recognizable as a living creature. Nuts, bolts, scraps, machine parts and discarded pieces of the industrial world become fur, legs, faces and bodies.

That immediately struck a chord with me because Rockford is a city that knows something about metal, but it also knows something about reuse, survival and adaptation. The industrial landscape and the natural landscape aren't really separate here. You can walk from old factories to the Rock River, from machine shops to prairie remnants, and watch plants and animals continually working their way through the human structures we've put in their path.

The opossum seemed like an especially appropriate creature for that intersection. It is one of nature's great survivors: ancient, adaptable, routinely misunderstood and remarkably good at continuing to exist under circumstances that might suggest otherwise. It's simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent, which is probably part of the reason I've always liked it. As a subject for a sculpture made from the leftovers of human industry and paired with a haiku, the possum seemed almost inevitable.

Working on that collaboration also produced something neither of us had initially anticipated. Once Michael had made one salvaged-metal animal and I had written a poem to accompany it, there was an obvious question sitting there waiting for us: why stop at one?

SECOND NATURE

That question became SECOND NATURE — Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku, featuring Michael Zant and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at Rockford Art Deli for Fall ArtScene. SECOND NATURE brings together a collection of Michael's small reclaimed-metal animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the animals, their materials and the larger ideas surrounding them. The industrial and natural worlds occupy the same space: discarded metal becomes wildlife while poetry provides another way into the creatures and their environments.

A salvaged-metal animal sculpture takes shape in Michael Zant’s workshop for SECOND NATURE, his Fall ArtScene collaboration with haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

The exhibition is also a benefit for Wild Roots, connecting the work to the prairie and to an organization devoted to promoting it. That gives the exhibition another dimension because the animals aren't simply whimsical sculptures made from junk. They point outward toward an actual landscape and toward questions about what we preserve, what we discard and what can return after we think we've lost it.

There is something wonderfully Rockford about the whole arrangement. This is a manufacturing city surrounded by prairie country, so metal and milkweed aren't really opposites here. They're neighbors. Michael's sculptures make that relationship literal by taking the remnants of one environment and turning them into inhabitants of another. Human artifacts that might otherwise have become waste are transformed back into animals. The artificial becomes natural again—or at least begins pretending to be. Hence SECOND NATURE.

The Thread Connecting All Three

Only after the three exhibitions came together did I realize how closely related they actually are. Hike You! begins with walking and noticing. The Rockford Public Library collaboration takes something discarded and asks us to see another possibility inside it. SECOND NATURE expands that transformation into an entire little ecosystem of salvaged animals and poems. They weren't designed as three pieces of a larger project, but they somehow became one anyway.

Running underneath all three is something I've increasingly come to think of as Prairie Zen. I don't mean Zen as decoration or as a philosophy imported wholesale from somewhere else. I mean something closer to a Midwestern practice of attention: walking slowly enough to notice what's actually there and resisting the temptation to dismiss something because it appears ordinary, ugly, broken, industrial or commonplace. A bicycle dragged out of the Rock River, an old office chair on Broadway, a discarded piece of metal transformed into a possum, weeds pushing through concrete and a three-line poem can all occupy the same landscape and become part of the same conversation.

Rockford provides an almost inexhaustible supply of these things because the city is constantly revealing layers of what it was, what it is and what nature is trying to make of it now. Six years of walking around here has convinced me that finding interesting things isn't particularly difficult. The harder part is learning not to walk past them.

Somehow, that practice of noticing has turned into three Fall ArtScene exhibitions this year. I certainly didn't plan it that way when Ryan and I started walking around Rockford six years ago, and Michael and I didn't plan it when we started talking about a metal possum. But that may be the most appropriate thing about all of it. None of these projects began with a grand plan. We found them by paying attention to what was already there.