Editor's note: This is the first in a series of articles on new developments on Quad Cities-area downtowns. When you have a lot of dreams, it's sometimes difficult to prioritize them. Karen Pohl didn't have to.
There are a lot of festivals that piggyback a culture or holiday to cash in. This weekend's Ya Maka My Weekend, though, isn't one of them. The Jamaica-themed festival in The District of Rock Island has the seal of approval of the Jamaican Tourist Board.

Taming Cable

The current franchise agreement between the City of Davenport and the city's provider of cable-television services was drafted in 1974. Nixon resigned that year. Pong was a state-of-the-art video game. Of course, nobody had even heard then of terms such as fiber optics, digital cable, or the Internet, or had any conception of how they would impact the way people watch television or communicate in the 1990s and beyond.
In its third year, organizers of the ArtStroll street festival have stopped making predictions. After drawing an estimated 2,000 people at the inaugural event two years ago, planners expected 4,000 last year. They think they ended up with about 5,000.
A look at Linda Downs' career shows one thing for certain: She knows how to stick with her jobs. After getting her Master of Arts in art history at the University of Michigan in 1973, she was an adjunct faculty member in that field from 1976 to 1989 at Wayne State University.
This is the situation that Linda Downs is jumping into. When the Davenport Museum of Art began raising money for a new facility, it bypassed the charitable Friends of the Davenport Museum of Art for the job.
When public-radio station KUNI finished last month's "Drive to Survive" having raised $106,000 over five days, it didn't see the total as a failure even though it fell far short of the massive budget cut it was about to endure.
When Charles Ara fell in love, at the age of 39, he faced an anguished choice. As a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, he had taken a vow of celibacy. But after working alongside the 28-year-old religion educator in his parish for almost three years, he felt that his vows had become impossible to live out honestly.
If you want to get excited about politics again, join Scott County's Democrat and Republican Chairwomen's energy in getting their candidates elected, generating broader awareness of the issues, and motivating voters to the polls next November.
When it became public in late May that Compass Facility Management had discovered $14,000 in misappropriated funds in its management of the RiverCenter/Adler Theatre in Davenport, the timing could scarcely have been worse for the Ames-based company.

Pages