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Michael G. Glab

Michael G. Glab

Michael G. Glab has been an independent writer since 1983 when he wrote his first article for the Chicago Reader about professional wrestlers. His in-depth personality profiles became a staple in the Reader over the next two decades. Today, he hosts a WFHB radio interview feature called “Big Talk” and is the brain behind the blog, The Electron Pencil. WFIU’s David Brent Johnson has described Big Mike as “a hip town crier” who writes “in a colorful, intelligent working class vernacular.”

Posts by this contributor 29 results
Jean Magrane (left), who became Bloomington's first woman firefighter in 1987, with Greg Lucas at the “Jiffy Treat training day” in 2006. The fire department is often allowed to use condemned buildings for training purposes before the buildings are destroyed, such as the old Jiffy Treat on Kirkwood Avenue. | Courtesy photo

Big Mike’s B-town: Jean Magrane, Firefighter
Michael G. Glab
After Jean Magrane became the city’s first female firefighter in 1987, it took years for most of her male colleagues to accept her as an equal. But she persevered because she valued the work more than any other job she’d had. Writer Michael G. Glab tells the story of this barrier-breaking firefighter. Click here to read the full story
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Pat East, founder of Hanapin Marketing and an investor in local tech start-ups, mentors local entrepreneurs to help them avoid the pitfalls he encountered along the road to success. | Courtesy photo

Big Mike’s B-town: Pat East, Tech Guru
Michael G. Glab
LP columnist Michael G. Glab goes high tech! Well, at least, he talks to high-tech guru Pat East, who co-founded Hanapin Marketing and works with local start-ups and organizations such as Dimension Mill, Inc. East also mentors local entrepreneurs hoping to avoid the pitfalls he encountered along the road to success. Click here to read the full story.
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William Morris, the attorney, radio DJ, and aspiring Episcopal deacon, says the foundation of all his work is teaching. Even on his radio show, "The Soul Kitchen," he says, "I'm teaching people different kinds of music." | Limestone Post

Big Mike’s B-town: William Morris, ‘Always Teaching’
Michael G. Glab
William Morris, the attorney, radio DJ, and aspiring Episcopal deacon, says the foundation of all his work is teaching. Even on his radio show, The Soul Kitchen, “I’m teaching people different kinds of music,” he says. Michael G. Glab writes about Morris’s rich and varied life in his column, Big Mike’s B-town. Click here to read the full story.
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The conference, festival, and symposium called Wounded Galaxies 1968 intersects with Bloomington’s orbit next month. The event looks at the tumultuous year 1968, which included the Chicago protests and riots during the Democratic National Convention. (Pictured here is an anit-war march prior to the convention in 1968.) Wounded Galaxies organizer Joan Hawkins says the event will be more than a museum piece: “We want to confront the whole concept of revolutionary aesthetics, and ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’” | Photo by David Wilson, Creative Commons

Big Mike’s B-town: Wounded Galaxies, Where 1968 Intersects with 2018
Michael G. Glab
Wounded Galaxies 1968 — a conference, festival, and symposium including art exhibits, film screenings, and music performances — intersects with Bloomington’s orbit next month. LP columnist Michael G. Glab spoke to Joan Hawkins, a founder of the group that’s organizing the event. While Wounded Galaxies looks at the tumultuous year 1968, Hawkins says the event will be more than a museum piece: “We want to confront the whole concept of revolutionary aesthetics, and ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’” Click here to read the full story.
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Dr. Maria Hamilton Abegunde is a scholar, an egungun (an ancestral priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition), a healer, a poet, a teacher, and a birth and postpartum doula. | Courtesy photo

Big Mike’s B-town: Abegunde, Writing to Heal
Michael G. Glab
Dr. Maria Hamilton Abegunde has been given many names, each one representative of her own history, her family’s history, and her Yoruba cultural heritage. And, like her names, Abegunde’s work represents the personal and the historical. LP columnist Michael G. Glab talks with the poet and scholar about her work with healing and social justice. Click here to read the full story.
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For Kate Hess Pace, founder of the progressive grassroots group Hoosier Action, voting matters, but there are also “many, many other ways for people to build power for change.” Pictured here, members of Hoosier Action gather outside of Senator Joe Donnelly's office before meeting with his state director to discuss health care. | Courtesy photo

Big Mike’s B-town: Kate Hess Pace, Building Power for Change
Michael G. Glab
For Kate Hess Pace, founder of the progressive grassroots group Hoosier Action, voting matters, but there are also “many, many other ways for people to build power for change.” She spoke about empowering people with Michael G. Glab on his WFHB show Big Talk, and here, in Glab’s LP column Big Mike’s B-town. Click here to read the full story.
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Peggy talks to columnist Michael G. Glab about experiencing homelessness in Bloomington for nearly two years. | Photo by Michael G. Glab

Big Mike’s B-town: Peggy
Michael G. Glab
Some folks just won’t stay down. Peggy is one of them. Through an abusive past — and a challenging present — Peggy persists. In Big Mike’s B-town, Michael G. Glab talks to someone who has experienced homelessness for almost two years. Although life always seems to knock her down, “I get back on my feet,” Peggy says. Click here to read the full story.
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Big Mike’s B-town: Michael Waterford, Adventurer
Michael G. Glab
This month, adventurer and Bloomington native Michael Waterford will attempt to solo kayak the full length of the Mississippi River in record time — fewer than 42 days. Limestone Post columnist Michael G. Glab spoke to Waterford about his “Race to the Gulf” and the many trials he’ll face on the “big water.” Limestone Post will publish regular updates of Waterford’s journey. Click here to read the full story.
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Big Mike’s B-town: Annette Oppenlander, Historical Novelist
Michael G. Glab
Author Annette Oppenlander thrives on historical fiction. “I must have my feet on the ground where these things happen,” she says in this installment of Michael G. Glab’s Big Mike’s B-town. Born in Germany and raised by a family that struggled to survive World War II, Oppenlander tells their stories in her fifth book, Surviving the Fatherland. Click here to read the full story.
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Journalist Doug Wissing has become something of a hands-on scholar of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. After embedding with several military units and speaking with the people of Afghanistan, Wissing says he was able to see “every aspect of the war.” | Photo courtesy of US Army, Major Denton Smith

Big Mike’s B-town: Doug Wissing, Embedded Journalist
Michael G. Glab
Journalist Doug Wissing has become something of a hands-on scholar of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. After embedding with several military units, Wissing says he was able to see “every aspect of the war.” He shared his observations on the U.S. conflict in the war-torn country with Michael G. Glab. Read all about it in Glab’s column, Big Mike’s B-town.
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Photo by Jim Krause, Tabletop Productions ttop.com

Big Mike’s B-town: Nancy Hiller, Cabinetmaker and Author
Michael G. Glab
Nancy Hiller went from “cobbling together” scraps of wood in her dining room in England to owning a successful woodworking studio in Bloomington. She has also written several noteworthy books about her craft, including her latest, Making Things Work: Tales from A Cabinetmaker’s Life. Read more about Hiller and her many talents in Michael G. Glab’s column, Big Mike’s B-town.
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Hoagy Carmichael sits at the piano surrounded by friends in the Book Nook on Indiana Avenue, sometime in the 1920s. | Photo courtesy of Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music

Dada a la Bloomington — a 1920s ‘Anti-Art’ Hotbed
Michael G. Glab
When the absurdist art movement known as Dada began spreading to major cities around the world in the 1920s, it rarely found its way to sleepy Midwestern towns. But writer Michael G. Glab looks into how a soda shop in Bloomington became a hotbed of Dada, courtesy of favorite son Hoagy Carmichael and his friends. Click here to read the full story.
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