Blast from the past

I enjoy checking out my hometown newspaper. It's called the Galesburg Register-Mail. I worked there one summer while I was in college. It was just as a circulation clerk (Sure Ma'am, I can give you a vacation hold!) but it cemented my desire to go into journalism. I flirted with the idea of being a pharmacist my freshman year of college. Bad idea. Chemistry is fun, but not the right fit for me. Anyhow, back to the story at hand.


After perusing the news section, I generally check out the lifestyles section to see if any of my classmates (or kids I used to babysit… man am I old) got engaged or married. I check out the birth announcements and the obituaries.

Normally I don’t pay much attention to the ads, but today one caught my eye. It was for a bed and breakfast in one of Galesburg’s historic homes. The Carr House has quite a history. http://www.thecarrhouse.com/

My friend Amy and I have quite a history with the Carr house as well. When we were juniors in high school, we paired up for our first project in our American Studies class.

We decided to do a “walking tour” of Galesburg’s historic homes. We dug up a lot of cool books in the special collections section at the public library. We drove around looking for these homes, planning to videotape some of them as they appeared at the time. (Do you see the journalism theme? And that wasn't even the first time I did a project involving me playing reporter!)

Some of these homes were run down, others were in great shape. Time was not on our side, and the sun was rapidly setting. We had a flood light that plugged into the lighter of my trusty Plymouth Horizon (I loved that car, by the way. Wish I still had it!!!) and we tried to get some video of the Carr House.

Well, two kids with a flood light and a video camera as the sun is setting is probably a little disconcerting to a homeowner. The house never had any porch lights on or anything… until we paid it a visit that fateful early fall night. I’m sure we really scared the poor woman living there by herself. From that time forward the porch light was always on and the front part of that house was lit up like it was expecting visitors.

I always felt kind of bad about that… but it certainly makes for a great story. Amy and I still talk about that story today more than 16 years later. I would LOVE to check out the B&B that this house has become!