Salvete, Comites,

Dear Colleagues, my support and encouragement these last three years, how can I express to you what an honor and pleasure it has been to correspond and collaborate with you, to get to know you and your good work?  Someone more skilled with words might compose an encomium of your virtues.  A tapestry representing your collective ICC life might be the product of the weaver more skilled than Penelope, and more clever.  No one could persuade the  metal worker and the stone mason--once they learned of you--not to pay homage to you with inscriptions in Latin, to be read and interpreted by scholars as long as men and women read about the Vestal Virgins climbing the Capitoline Hill.  My way is simpler.  I will send in my $150. And if Ray Heisler and Vicki Wine will enroll me among the life members, I will strike the stars with my uplifted head.

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I call your urgent attention to the proposed revised bylaws, printed in this issue.  The revision subcommittee (Marilyn Brusherd, Steve Pilewski, Don Sprague and Jane Borelli) will bring a motion--at our general meeting on October 19--to approve the revision.  Would you please bring this AUGUR with you to the general meeting, so that you can have the wording at hand.  The current bylaws are posted on our web site (www.illinoisclassics.org), and have been printed in the May and September 2001 issues of the  AUGUR. 

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The October conference at Monmouth is nearly at hand.  Laurie Jolicoeur and our Monmouth hosts have put together an exciting program, one whose formal sessions focus on teaching and on students.  Continuing education credits will be available through Monmouth College .   Laurie has also scheduled time for talking together, for looking backward and forward together.  And Virginia Hellenga has invited us to her home--for toasts!

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ICC has applied to the Illinois Department of Education to be a provider of CEU's and CPDU's.  The application was submitted in June; we should hear soon whether we are successful. 

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The Advisory Council would be pleased to have invitations from schools that would like to host the 2003 and 2004 conferences.  The typical rotation would have the 2003 conference in the Chicago area, with the 2004 conference in another part of the state. 

Curate omnes ut valeatis,

Jane Borelli