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'A real cultural loss': Augustana Professor Roald Tweet inspired students in and out of the classroom Jim Meenan, Thomas Geyer and Courtney Crowder © TODD MIZENER/Quad-City Times Roald Tweet, retired Augustana College professor and aviation enthusiast, led model-airplane building classes at Putnam Museum in Davenport. If students wanted to skate through Freshman Rhetoric — a requirement at Augustana College — they better hope they weren’t in Roald Tweet’s class. The longtime professor was known for giving out “legendary” assignments, former Rock Island Mayor Mar...

Jim Meenan, Thomas Geyer and Courtney Crowder If students wanted to skate through Freshman Rhetoric — a requirement at Augustana College — they better hope they weren’t in Roald Tweet’s class. The longtime professor was known for giving out “legendary” assignments, former Rock Island Mayor Mark Schwiebert told the Quad-City Times. An essay in which only three multi-syllabic words were used. A paper in which the letter “E” only appeared a select number of times. A poem about a single word. They were the sort of exercises that made one consider the craft of writing, the kind tha...

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The City of Rock Island might well have become the chair capitol of the world, had it not been for an actress named Lilian Lewis. A Swiss Canadian, C. C. Knell, moved to Rock Island in 1876 and opened a furniture store on the ground floor of the new three-story Harper's Opera House on second avenue and sixteenth street. In 1883, Knell changed the world of chairs forever. At that time, America was a land of uncomfortable, straight backed, hard-seated kitchen and dining room chairs. Women had the rocking chair—invented by Benjamin Franklin—for their babie...

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If the following story is not true, it should be. It involves two Illinois folk heroes, Abraham Lincoln and the traveling evangelist, Peter Cartwright. Most counties in Illinois have Lincoln and Cartwright stories. We Rock Islanders deserve ours. The story began as unsubstantiated rumor, but by the time Carl Sandburg wrote his biography of Lincoln, it had become fact. If the story did happen, it took place in a Methodist campground in a grove south of Camden (now Milan) Illinois. Cartwright was preaching at the campground in 1846, and Lincoln decided to att...

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Safe in the Vatican, Pope Leo the Thirteenth was probably not aware in the spring of 1887 that a stack of lumber in front of the W. J. Young Lumber Company in Clinton, Iowa, was about to cause him some grief. That lumber was the first domino in a chain of bigotry that got out of hand. A popular Clinton mayor, Arnold Wallicker, had been defeated after refusing to let the lumber company continue to pile its lumber in the street. The company's Irish employees had voted against him, and the Irish were Roman Catholics.