Dick Durbin: “2 weeks ago I lost a dear friend and my hometown of Springfield, IL, lost one of its best. His name was Earl Wallace…”

“2 weeks ago I lost a dear friend and my hometown of Springfield, IL, lost one of its best. His name was Earl Wallace Henderson, but everyone knew him as Wally. He was an acclaimed architect who helped design Springfield's future while, at the same time, preserving its priceless past as the hometown of President Abraham Lincoln. In the 1960s, Ferry & Henderson, the architectural firm he co- founded, took on one of its most important projects: expanding Illinois' historic old State capitol building to include underground parking, room for the State historical library, and other modern amenities. The concept of architectural preservation was relatively at that time, and Wally became one of its pioneering leaders. Expanding the old State capitol involved taking the building apart piece by piece, cataloguing and moving more than 3,300 stones to the Illinois fairground, and then painstakingly rebuilding the structure over the new parking garage and library. Wally's decades of innovative work in architectural preservation earned him admission in 2011 to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows, one of the highest honors in his field. Interestingly, Wally became an architect almost by accident. What he wanted to be all through high school was an astronaut. More to the point, he wanted to be the first man to walk on the moon. This was back in the late 1940s, which gives you an idea of Wally's ability to imagine a future that few others could see.…”