40 years ago
Interim Review Managing Editor Larry Kaercher broke into print with his own column, “Your Editor Sez.” Though well-known and liked in town, he included a brief biography and told that he and new publisher Bob Haeger planned to continue and improve the reporting of local news and features, as had been handled by the recently deceased longtime editor and publisher Claude Walker. Sad times, yet hopeful times.
From the April 15 & May 5, 1970, Forest Park Review
30 years ago
A small sliver of fond memory might still stir at the name Franz Benteler; surely at the sound of some recording of his orchestra, the Royal Strings. His music was unrivalled throughout Chicagoland for nearly half a century. Benteler, from Hamburg, Germany, was a former concertmaster of the Chicago Civic Orchestra after conducting the San Antonio Symphony. He was designated by the (the senior) Mayor Daley as “Chicago’s Official Ambassador to Music.”
In April, 1980, when Triton College capped a weeklong celebration of the arts with a sumptuous outdoor dinner, Benteler and his Strings performed – after the aperitifs and chateaubriand were served – on into the night. The sounds were elegant old world pop and some perfectly aged champagne was popped. Benteler’s society orchestra performed several evenings a week at the Concert Room of the Continental Plaza in Chicago. It also played for visiting foreign dignitaries and several U.S. presidents. The maestro died about five years ago.
From the April 9, 1980, Forest Park Review
20 years ago
The Jackie Show Part II carries this headline: “Myrna Loy is alive and well and living on Ferdinand Avenue in Forest Park.” Followed by, “I see her everyday.” Maybe I should’ve gotten a life, but for months I couldn’t get it out of my mind that the famous ’30s and ’40s movie star Myrna Loy was a resident right here in little old Forest Park. Three things come to the same deficient mind. 1) It occurred to me that anyone under 40 reading this doesn’t have a clue, Myrna Loy-wise, and could not care less. 2) I’ve already confided in readers my gullibility; that I tend to believe anything anybody says as long as they say it with a pleasant face. And 3) that William Powell co-starred with Myrna in a series of Thin Man comedy mysteries, way back then, playing the roles of Nick and Nora Charles.
By the way, Mryna Loy was the name of a neighborhood cat who made social rounds almost every day.
From the March 21, 1990, Forest Park Review
10 years ago
Chris Broquet is a talented writer who 10 years ago put down words on paper almost always writing a thousand-word essay that carried her own brand of humor. The following on (Hollywood) was but one example. As usual, tight space truncates the piece and excerpts rule, yet the quoted words are all hers.
She begins with a vignette from one of a series of Chevy Chase movies, “Vegas Vacation,” where he plays the hapless yet dauntless father of a family on the road.
On a Hoover Dam bus tour, we hear the driver intoning these instructions: “Welcome to the dam tour. Everyone has to stay together with the dam group. Take all the dam pictures you want, and if you have any dam questions, ask the dam guide at the end of the dam tour.”
Broquet admitted the humor was sophomoric and predictable, yet her 8-year-old son nearly guffawed himself unconscious, repeating the instructions and taking full advantage of a repetition loophole that gave him free reign to “cuss.” She acknowledged that no one is exempt from encountering such mild cussing or the existence of foul language in and out of Hollywood; especially the variants of expression beginning with the sixth letter of the alphabet – and sometimes the punishment that may be exacted.
She cited Ralphy in Jean Shepard’s classic, “Christmas Story,” who, at one point, got to suck on a bar of bathroom soap for his felony – the utterance of the forbidden word.
From the March 22, 2000, Forest Park Review
