Saturday in the Arts is a weekly feature covering a trend, subject, event or personality of local interest. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for the best entertainment and arts coverage in the area, QuadCities.com! If it wasn’t for a man who later became WQPT-TV general manager, National Public Radio (NPR) likely would never have started. This past week, NPR celebrated its 50th anniversary. Jerrold Sandler — who died in Moline Feb. 24, 1995 at age 64, from a heart attack after cancer surgery – got public radio added to the mission of the then-new Corporation for Public Broadcasting... Read More

And so the saga sort-of, maybe, kinda, possibly, ends. Or not. We’ll see. The Rock Island County courthouse saga has gone on for a couple of years now, with the county wanting to demolish the building and repurpose the spot just off Centennial Bridge, and a growing number of citizens calling for it to be sold to local developer Joe Lemon, who has been trying to buy it for over a year. We at QuadCities.com have covered this issue extensively, and if you want to get more of the details, I encourage you to listen to my various QCUncut podcasts of a meeting about the issue, an interview... Read More

In a bitter, divisive time – just two days before inauguration of the 46th U.S. President – the 38th-annual memorial service honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday held special resonance. Livestreamed on YouTube from Rock Island’s Martin Luther King,. Jr. Community Center, the nearly hour-long service spoke to the ideals of the late civil-rights leader (who was assassinated in 1968) and how far the nation still has to go to achieve his dream of peace, unity and justice. MLK Center executive director Jerry Jones noted at the outset that theme of the service was King’s quote,... Read More