“Sports is one of the few ways I know to get a 17-year-old at 250 pounds and 6-foot-5 to listen respectfully to an adult and take it every day,” says Larry Hawkins, director of the University of Chicago’s Office of Special Programs and coach of the 1963 state champion Carver High School basketball team, in the U. of C. Chronicle (May 26). “The fact is that most kids give coaches much more credence than they deserve. It may not be right, but that’s how it is. I argue that it’s a resource, and as such it should be used. It costs nothing, because it’s already there. . . . You just have to teach the people who run it to . . . see themselves as teachers as well as coaches.”
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“I have a secret plan” for Chicago’s lakefront, architect-curmudgeon Harry Weese tells Chicago Enterprise’s Vicki Quade (June 1988): “I hope that all those ugly FHA buildings north of Hollywood Avenue on Sheridan Road would be undermined and they’d all fall down in a row. That’s what I call lakeshore protection. . . . Those rich people who live out there shouldn’t have built so close to the lake in the first place.”
Equality? Not yet, to judge from a study by University of Illinois sociologists Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky. Their national survey of 680 working couples, summarized in a U. of I. release, showed that women who work outside the home and who have trouble arranging child care (and who get little help from their husbands) experience at least twice as much depression as do employed women without child-care problems. On the other hand, “husbands’ mental health is not affected by children and their care.”
“The past 20 years have witnessed some profound gains for human freedom,” argues Robert W. Poole Jr., publisher of the 20-year-old libertarian magazine Reason. Hmm–Chicago has become more tolerant of antiestablishment demonstrations? Civil liberties are better protected? Oppressive dictators like Somoza and Marcos have been overthrown? Well, Poole’s idea of “profound gains” is a little different: in 1968, he says, “self-service gas stations were illegal in most places. And if you wanted cash, you had to go to a branch of your bank (between 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. on weekdays ) and stand in line for a teller.” Hey, that’s what 1776 was all about, right?
