Lundin’s quiet passion pushed Rockford forward

I was going to call Jon Lundin on Friday to check on the progress of his negotiations with the state’s highway overlords, who plan to bulldoze several houses on Kishwaukee Street that he worked to refurbish for low-income people, some of whom work at Abilities Center across the street. Lundin directed the skills-training center until he abruptly left the planet Thursday night.

The state wants to widen Kishwaukee Street to handle all the phantom traffic from the closed factories. When last we talked at Octane, his morning coffee place, Lundin was aggravated at how much land the road builders wanted. It amounted to destroying a neighborhood in order to save it, I suggested. He did not disagree.

Lundin, 64, died Thursday night from an apparent heart attack. Nobody expected it. He had a full agenda set for Friday, his friends told me.

But there are no more meetings. No more coffee at Octane. Jon’s gone. And that means the progressive doers have lost a quiet strategist, a visionary, a general in the battle to pull the Forest City out of its blue funk over losing all those factory jobs, and moving the city into a 21st century of high-tech research and manufacturing, quality education, affordable and decent neighborhoods. Oh, and a vibrant downtown. He was working on all of it, and all at once.


Webbs Norman said famously that being called a “visionary” in Rockford can get you kicked out of town. Lundin managed to be one, though, and the CAVE people couldn’t boot him. The man left on his own terms.

Lundin was the behind-the-scenes prodder, suggestion-maker, cajoler and deal-assembler who understood the quirky local custom of holding important meetings at 6 and 7 a.m. to decide the really big stuff. He knew where all the bones were buried, and where the unheeded road maps to the future — like The Rockford Plan of 1918 — were stored.

Since crusading journalist Bob Stone died in 2000, Lundin was the only person with whom I could have an energetic conversation about Herman Hallstrom and C. Henry Bloom, Rockford’s socialist/progressive mayors of the 1920s through the 1940s, or P.A. Peterson, the man who saved the city’s furniture industry when the economy turned sour in 1893, or Walter Colman, the genius inventor killed in a car crash, or Oscar Sundstrand, whose adding machine firm now makes parts for spaceships and jets.


Lundin wrote “Rockford, an Illustrated History,” but he didn’t dwell in the past. Rather, his keen analysis of serious, difficult issues facing today’s Rockford was better than anyone else’s, precisely because he knew the background and what would have to be done to change. He also knew that moving Rockford forward is an extremely difficult task. But he was fully committed to doing it. I think the enormous task of getting Rockfordians off the dime excited him.

Lundin and I often talked about big issues, such as EIGERlab, which he envisioned and helped mightily to create, and his passionate belief that manufacturing must not die here, lest the essence of the city evaporate. Some of those conversations about Rockford’s soul, its problems and its potential, became my columns. You didn’t know it, because Jon hardly ever wanted to be quoted, or even named in them.

He’d say, “You just get the idea out there,” and then grin mischievously.

Jon Lundin. Made in Rockford.

Reach political editor Chuck Sweeny at 815-987-1372 or csweeny@rrstar.com.