I left a comment at Roger Ebert’s blog that I just felt like sharing: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/04/410_east_washington_street.html

Mr. Ebert, thank you for some fond memories of a different time. I too grew up in Urbana and was a former editor of the Echo. We had archives of past issues and I enjoyed reading your articles in those old issues, wondering if I’d be able to flourish in the same way as I grew as a writer. I also interned for the Daily Illini and News Gazette (the Courier was long gone by then, I’ve only ever known it as a restaurant). Journalism didn’t take for me though perhaps it would have had I been born ten years earlier. Perhaps this is because classical journalism is changing into something else and the writing was on the wall even 15 years ago.

I feel like I’m home when I go back to C-U every year or Thanksgiving. I always think of running as a boy through the trees in Orchard Downs being somewhere else, anywhere or everywhere. I don’t think there was a better place to grow up.

I don’t know if Kansas City will have the same richness for Nick and Zoey that Urbana did for me. I hope so, or perhaps wherever we end up will. No other place fuels more fundamentaly good and strong memories.