This is the latitude where the pronounciation of "sodie-pop" begins.
Yep, thereabouts. I'm of course familiar with Belleville from my time working the St Louis downstate area for the Chicago Daily News and for the year or so I was with the short-lived St Louis Sun, as well as my associations with Scott Air Force Base and the St Louis-area raiolroads' Gateway Yard facility.
But I go back a bit before that, too: I was born in Urbana when my dad was an Illini engineering student at the UofI, and went to a Catholic grade school in Lawrenceville on the Indiana state line across from St Louis on Illinois 50 after our family returned from Cuba just before the Castro takeover, dad having worked at the Santa Clara CalTex/Texaco refinery there. The Lawrenceville *Indian Plant* was at the timer Texaco's third largest producer, though we'd moved nearer the town of Bridgeport by the time I started high school.
My first time as a newspaperman was as a photographer, covering spot news downstate from the Cairo-St. Louis-Lawrenceville triangle, then I later moved up to the Chicago area [McCook] and Milwaukee while working photo jobs for the Daily Noise and later paycheck providers. I spent a little time as a railroader as well, working for the C&EI, The Big Four/NYC and Illinois Central in Illinois, and the Southern and Pennsylvania railroads in Indiana.
I spent nearly as much time in Indiana, or maybe a little more, and the *sodie-pop* flows there too. But if you spill any on yourself, a warshrag will take care of it.
-archy-/-