“Whether the motivation is to control nature, bring order to chaos or to leave one’s mark on the face of this planet, we salute America’s passion for the yard–its private kingdoms,” writes Bruce W. Pepich, director of the Wustum Museum of Fine Arts (Racine, Wisconsin) in the catalog for its current exhibition, “Artists and the American Yard: Lawn Gnomes, Pink Flamingos and Bathtub Grottos.” “In fact, the decoration and maintenance of one’s yard or property is the major personal aesthetic statement most Americans make in public.”
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“Social problems are created by those who decide what is to be problematic rather than by those who are declared to behave in a problematic fashion,” writes sociologist Herbert Gans in his new book People, Plans, and Policies. He therefore wonders “why illegitimacy, the single-parent family, and adolescent motherhood have become such urgent social problems–and more important, to what extent these phenomena are actually harmful and for whom…. There is no reason to believe that growing up in a single-parent family is problematic above and beyond the obviously problematic poverty in which the growing up takes place….We do not know whether a twenty-six-year-old poor unmarried mother without parental training will be a better mother because she is ten years older than a sixteen-year-old with the same attributes. In an era in which professional people–who are the primary definers of social problems–have their babies in their thirties, the fact that increasing numbers of poor women will have them in their teens is understandably disconcerting, but that still does not prove that the practice is harmful.”
From the eye of the storm. Dr. Kenneth B. Smith, recalling in the Trust Quarterly (Spring) his year as president of the Chicago Board of Education under Jane Byrne: “I felt uncomfortable having to be careful of everything I said–me, a preacher! Looking out over the congregation I used to serve, I would observe reporters present hoping that I would say something about the Board of Education… Well, that was unnerving, to say the least.”
