40 years ago

Two weeks ago, Senator Ted Kennedy was the focus of national and international news by dint of his death. He was the subject of Claude Walker’s column in 1969, a week after the tragedy at Chappaquiddick when a young lady – Mary Jo Kopechne – had drowned in a car driven by Kennedy. Virtually everybody had his or her entitled reaction to the incident, including Walker. The accident occupied half his column, and – without employing the 20/20 hindsight of 40 years, I’d say Walker came down lightly on the side of the senator.

Without resurrecting the matter too much, I’d like to distinguish between judgment and opinion on the part of the media. Newspapers try to absolutely separate fact from fiction in the form of a reporter and a columnist, knowing there is no 100 percent in the real world. The columnist is not anointed, but expected, to furnish opinion with fact – while with the reporter, the story is total business. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Detective Joe Friday put it on television’s Dragnet 40 years ago.

From the July 30, 1969, Forest Park Review

30 years ago

Ed Lambke was a village commissioner here, serving three terms. He did a lot for Forest Park and may be best remembered for conceiving and carrying out the idea of our community’s very popular vegetable and flower garden in the 1980s in the available space south of Industrial Road. – itself south of Greenburg Road, aka 16th Street. (Tap that sentence on one end and it might never stop rocking.)

It happened that public service and Lambke blood must’ve run in the same veins, because Ed’s uncle, Mike, retired in 1979 after serving three terms a generation before. Four years after retiring, Mike suffered a heart attack at his winter home in Florida. Released from the hospital, he wrote this note to the Letters section acknowledging Jackie Schulz’s warm wishes for a complete recovery: “Since that good-looking blonde columnist of yours put those words in the paper, I’ve heard from friends I thought were out of my life. That’s the best therapy I could ever have.”

And the blonde? The hair has transmuted to a soft silver … it happens after 40 years in the column game. Sometimes after a year or two.

From the May 16, 1979, Forest Park Review

20 years ago

Back in the ‘8os it was the custom after greeting someone, often at a singles bar, to ask one’s zodiac sign. Earlier than that – by about 2,000 years – there were signs that served other purposes. Rev. Doctor Charles Cairo, of the Fire Sign Ministry, an offshoot of the Baptist Church, chose biblical and religious signs as his theme for an article in the Review.

Under the headline, “Meaningful Symbols of Christianity,” he opened with the Fish symbol, which originated as a password of the earliest persecuted Christians. One meeting another in the marketplace or open road would trace the outline of the top of a fish on the ground. If the other completed the drawing with the bottom half, a bond was established. Other Christian signs included in Cairo’s article were the Butterfly, symbolic of metamorphosis and by extension, representative of the Resurrection.

From the June 28, 1989, Forest Park Review

10 years ago

Daryl Buchholz, of the 300 block of Desplaines Avenue, was arrested to the sound of music – his own. Police received calls from his neighbors complaining about all that jazz from speakers propped outside his apartment’s balcony. Fifteen or 20 neighbors witnessed the cops megaphone Buchholz to by all means, “DO touch that dial” and turn the radio off. He complied, to cheering and a round of applause.

While being charged with disorderly conduct, Buchholz told police he was retaliating for all the noise his neighbors had made in the past, and that he wanted to give them a taste of their own.

From the May 19, 1999, Forest Park Review