FRIDAY
July 17, 2015 • $1.00
RACING TO THE FINISH
DAILY CHRONICLE
Cardboard boat race will close out Kingston Fest / A3
HIGH
89 68 Complete forecast on page A8
daily-chronicle.com
SERVING DEKALB COUNTY SINCE 1879
LOW
Facebook.com/dailychronicle
@dailychronicle
Guilty plea in sexual assault case Wisconsin man gets 10 years for 1999 assault of young girl in DeKalb By KATIE SMITH ksmith@shawmedia.com SYCAMORE – Family members cried and held hands in court Thursday as a Wisconsin man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to predatory criminal sexual assault of a child. Gerald A. Bieberitz, 75, for-
merly of the 800 block of North 19th Street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, was charged in December 2014 with two counts of predatory criminal sexual assault. The charges stem from two incidents in DeKalb involving a girl younger than 13 in 1999, when Bieberitz was 60, court records show. Under Illinois Truth in Sentencing Law, Bieberitz
must serve at ty jail to await transport to least 85 percent prison, said Clifford Lund, of his sentence, Bieberitz’s attorney. or eight and a Before Bieberitz was taken half years in into custody, the victim of the prison. Upon 1999 offense stood before him his release, Bie- Gerald A. and read a letter expressing beritz must reg- Bieberitz her struggle coming to terms ister as a sex ofwith having been sexually fender for life. abused. Bieberitz was handcuffed “For a while I thought I and taken to the DeKalb Coun- should tell someone, but I was
too embarrassed,” she said. “The longer I kept it a secret, the harder it was to say anything. ... Why did this have to happen? Why did you do this to me? ... You were supposed to be ... someone I could trust.” Now an adult and a mother, she sat both children down and explained to them the dangers of being alone with not only strangers, but also
Digital age looming for drive-in
people they might know, the woman said. “I did too good of a job with my daughter, and now she’s too afraid to be in or out of the house alone, but I don’t care. She needs to be safe,” she said. “If this man goes to jail then my little girl will be a little bit more safe.”
See BIEBERITZ, page A5
Ill. brings back the happy hour By DAVID MERCER The Associated Press
Photos by Monica Synett – msynett@shawmedia.com
Sisters Alyssa Edwards (left), 5, Jordan Edwards, 5, and Kailay Edwards (right), 7, all of Spring Valley, sport matching Minions shirts with capes attached July 10 at the Route 34 Drive-In Theater in Earlville – the opening night of “Minions,” paired with “Inside Out.” Owner Ron Magnoni Jr. still operates the drive-in using film and is hoping to raise $70,000 to make the transition to digital to keep up with the times.
Longtime Earlville business struggling to afford new projector By ADAM POULISSE apoulisse@shawmedia.com EARLVILLE – When the sun set last Friday, Ron Magnoni Jr. went into the projection booth of Route 34 DriveIn that’s been in his family for decades. With the film already loaded onto the projector, Magnoni fired it up and adjusted the lens, then voilà – a 60-foot by 40-foot white slab was covered with babbling yellow “Minions” in front of 350 carloads of families and friends. It’s like second nature to Magnoni. “I’ve been at this drive-in for 29 years, and since I was about 5 years old I’ve been in projection booths,” he said. “My dad was a union projectionist for Kerasotes.” But the movie business is changing. Time is running out for one of the state’s few remaining drive-ins, about 40 miles south of DeKalb in LaSalle County, to raise the funds to convert its film projector to a digital one. Eventually, the major movie studios will stop printing their movies on 35mm film and only provide theaters with digital copies. The drivein has raised $30,000 so far for
Owner Ron Magnoni Jr. makes adjustments to the film projector. “I’ve been at this drive-in for 29 years, and since I was about 5 years old I’ve been in projection booths,” he said. a $70,000 projector. A GoFundMe page has only generated $350 for the projector. The drive-in website also has a link to a PayPal account where donors can chip in. Magnoni already spent $10,000 renovating the projection booth for the digital projector, which includes adding glass and new projection windows to keep the booth climate-controlled. He said he doesn’t know when the movie business will go entirely digital, but it could potentially happen before next season.
“Right now, they still make prints, but they don’t make a lot and they don’t make them for every movie,” he said. “But if something makes a lot of money, they come knocking on my door.”
Revving up business
Jason Ladson, his wife Shannon and his daughter Isabelle, all from Spring Valley, were the first car in line for the drive-in’s double feature last Friday, which included the opening night of “Minions,” followed by the latest Pixar hit “Inside Out.” “I’m excited about it,” Lad-
son said. “I enjoy the cartoons just like the kids do.” It’s been a blockbuster of a summer at the movies – at least at the indoor multiplexes. While movies like “Jurassic World,” “Inside Out” and “Minions” have seen huge numbers at the box office, the constant rain has kept business at bay for Route 34 Drive-In for most of the summer because it’s rained most weekends. The drive-in doesn’t operate on weekdays. “The season has not been good. It won’t stop raining on me,” Magnoni said. “It seems like every Saturday, it rains. Nobody wants to come in the rain. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to sit out there either.” So when the weather kept dry last Friday, families across the area showed up in droves, and Ladson ended up leading a line of cars that stretched down Route 34 and snaked around side streets. Magnoni let 350 cars into the drive-in Friday, but still had to turn 150 away, he said. Cars continued to pack the grounds and children threw balls and bounced around all the way up to showtime.
See DRIVE-IN, page A5
CHAMPAIGN – Happy hour is back in Illinois – but while some bars swiftly announced drink specials that would have been illegal a week ago, not all are saying “cheers” to the new law. And some bar owners point out that they’ve been able to discount drink prices in other ways for years. Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the change into law on Wednesday, legalizing happy hour in Illinois for the first time since it was banned in 1989 over concerns about excessive drinking and drunken driving. Proponents of the shift said it would boost alcohol sales – and in the process, tax revenues. By Thursday, some bars and restaurants had announced new specials. Frontier restaurant in Chicago, for example, said it will offer $4 sparkling wine and $5 Oskar Blues Pilsner on weekday afternoons starting next week. Pitchers Pub and Pizzeria in Belleville could soon join them. Owner Lloyd Cueto said his sports bar hasn’t been able to match competitors on the other side of the Mississippi River in Missouri, where happy hour has been legal. “So often people will say, ‘I went to Soulard, I went to St. Louis, why can’t you make those kind of deals?’” Cueto said, referring to a popular barstocked neighborhood near the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium. But in Champaign, Tobin Herges isn’t ready to start slashing drink prices at his Tumble Inn. “I’ve always thought that running specials and stuff was kind of insulting to the customers,” the owner of what he calls a townie bar near the University of Illinois campus said. “Why can’t you do it all the time?” He also said he wasn’t certain if offering the newly legal specials might create new liabilities for him. The law now allows drink specials up to four hours each day for a total of 15 hours a week, as long as the discounts end by 10 p.m. And restaurants will be able to offer meals that include alcoholic pairings for one price. Volume discounts such as two drinks for the price of one and specials allowing unlimited drinks for a fixed price remain illegal. So far there doesn’t appear to be strong opposition to the change.
AP photo
Pitchers Pub and Pizzeria owner Lloyd Cueto stands in his sports bar Wednesday in downtown Belleville near a sign celebrating the repeal of the state’s ban on happy hour promotions.
LOCAL
LOCAL
SPORTS
WHERE IT’S AT
The case continues
A safer passage
Reviving the course
Butler due back to court in August for trial on child porn charges / A4
Nonprofit trains salon, spa workers in domestic violence prevention / A3
Kishwaukee Country Club hosts Men’s Lincoln Highway Tourney for 1st time since 2005 / B1
Advice ................................ B6 Classified...................... B8-11 Comics ............................... B7 Local News.................... A3-5 Lottery................................ A2 Nation&World.............. A2, 6
Obituaries .........................A4 Opinion...............................A7 Puzzles ............................... B6 Sports..............................B1-4 State ...................................A2 Weather .............................A8