“I knew a foreign woman who moved to Chicago back in the 1960’s. When she moved back home, she asked me how she could take WFMT with her,” writes William J. Leahy in Leahy’s Corner (July 1989). “Well she might ask. When I later lived in London, Dublin, Paris, Cairo, and elsewhere, I found that only Chicago had a 24-hour classical music station. The BBC has a radio channel playing such music, but it signs off at night. France has the same, but you hear much more Debussy and Rampal than anyone can take. . . . This city surely has the largest population of musically literate people anywhere, as a direct result of the efforts of WFMT. I am grateful. And it has all been free.”
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Say yes to bureaucracy. “It is time to turn the corner in the war on drugs,” says U.S. Senator Alan Dixon. His, er, prescription? “Include the Director of National Drug Control Policy, or ‘drug czar,’ in the White House Cabinet” (Report to Chicago, June 1989).
Demography is not destiny–stick ’em up! “The ‘crime-prone’ years were always thought to be the late teens and early 20s,” writes Teresa Vlasak in the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s Compiler (Summer 1989), “which led some experts to predict a drop in prison populations during the 1980s and 1990s as the ‘baby boom’ generation aged. But the increase in [prison] admissions from the over-30 group–the largest age group in the general population–and the corresponding rise in prison population are proving the experts wrong.”
