Marriages made in (yuppie) heaven. “Big weddings are back,” writes Jenifer Blackman in Today’s Chicago Woman (January 1988). “Even couples where one or both partners were previously married are opting for the two to three hundred person guest list,” and a reception costing as much as $15,000. Many dual-career couples have more money than time and so hire wedding consultants. “Even engagements have become longer in order to accommodate the long-range planning, a reasonable decision considering Chicago’s luxury hotels, churches and temples can be booked solid years in advance.” Don’t you just love those traditional values?
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“We may have to dynamite people out of their cars” to solve the city-suburban traffic crunch, says Dennis McKinney, van-pool coordinator at Allstate Insurance Company in Northbrook. “But if the public sector will take the lead, the private sector will fall in line.” The public sector is trying: according to Patrick Barry in Chicago Enterprise (January 1988), Metra will spend $9.4 million this year “just to get people to like shorter drives.” But the region’s mass transit agencies have yet to recover fully from the early-1980s fare increases.
“There are those who believe victory is achieved by the candidate who distributes the greatest number of match books, rain hats, ball-point pens, pot holders, or emery boards,” complains the Elgin-based Midwest Political Consultant (December 1987). “Their argument is that the usefulness of the item will assure its retention. It is difficult to imagine a person whose vote is influenced by what he reads on the cover of a book of matches.” Maybe so, but after 1984, not much would surprise us.
