The ISU Annuitants Association (ISUAA) annual Holiday Luncheon will be from 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m. Wednesday, December 4, in Room 118 of the University’s Alumni Center.
The holiday meal will consist of a house salad with a variety of dressings, a choice of thinly sliced rib eye in a Merlot wine sauce, or pan-seared salmon with lemon tarragon sauce, vegetables, rolls and butter, dessert or a fruit cup, and coffee or iced tea. The cost for the meal is $20. Reservation forms are due by November 22 and may be accessed via the newsletter link on the front page of our website: Annuitants.IllinoisState.edu. Consider inviting a friend to join you at the luncheon. All are welcome, especially those who are employed at or have retired from ISU.
Rochelle Gridley will present “Picture This: Unseen Photos from The Pantagraph Collection!” Gridley describes her presentation by sharing that about eight years ago the McLean County Museum of History received a massive collection of negatives from The Pantagraph, representing the history of McLean County from the 1930s to the digital age.
Because of storage conditions, those negatives were endangered. A grant from the Illinois State Library made the digitization of a smaller subset of those negatives possible in 2018, and the negatives in the gravest danger were chosen for the project. These negatives represent our history from 1932 until the end of 1944, photographed by the reporters of the Pantagraph, soon available on the Illinois Digital Archive. Rochelle was hired in 2018 as a contract librarian to organize and apply metadata to the Pantagraph Negative Collection Digitization Project and continues to work on that Collection at this time.
Gridley has been a volunteer at the McLean County Museum of History for six years—helping with archive collections and reference questions. She also volunteers with the Cemetery Walk as a researcher and as a cemetery guide. Two of her presentations, “Orphan Train Riders of Illinois” and “McLean County Women in World War II,” are featured on the Speaker’s Bureau for the McLean County Museum of History. Other projects include “The 1938 Map Project,” “Founders’ Grove History in Maps,” and “100 Years Ago in McLean County.”
ISUAA is the local chapter of the State Universities Annuitants Association (SUAA) and serves employees of Illinois State University who participate in SURS, and retirees who receive a SURS pension, their spouses, and survivors. Current employees and retirees are encouraged to become members to support efforts of SUAA in protecting their benefits. ISUAA is not and never has been an organization just for retirees. Membership forms may be accessed through the following link: annuitants.illinoisstate.edu/membership/.
