End of Enterprise
Chicago Enterprise will publish one more issue and disappear. It’s useful, but it’s expensive, and the sense of purpose of its founders has trickled away into the sands.
But fervor ebbs. Committed CEOs such as Motorola’s George Fisher and United’s Stephen Wolf were giving way to less interested successors, and executive director Lawrence Howe looked twice at the magazine’s $300,000 budget. “You can’t go on forever with a major budget commitment without something tangible in the way of results,” Howe told us. “And there’s no way to get tangible results with a publication.”
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This isn’t the first time the Civic Committee has trimmed its sails. A few months ago, it shrank the staff and cut the budget of Leadership for Quality Education, a school-reform group. Its major program still intact is a behind-the-scenes consulting service called the Financial Research and Advisory Committee that also is heavily involved in education.
In the big league baseball strike of ’94, the owners are mulish hypocrites and the players pampered gluttons; but the fans are blameless victims of senseless combat, and the season’s a thing of beauty sacrificed to human folly.
The tables invited an ambivalent response: sheer bitterness that anyone so handsomely paid could remain unsatisfied, and awe at the money these athletes were kissing off. But it was easy to interpret the publishing of the salaries as a hostile act. The numbers put the game’s humblest yeomen on financial strata as far above our heads as Jack was when he climbed the bean stalk.
“I am appalled regarding the coverage given to the possible upcoming baseball strike . . . ” begins a letter dated August 11. “Even our dear President, Mr. Clinton appeared briefly to say a few words on the subject. This aids in showing the decline of the mentality of the American people who are swayed by the media in believing this is important news, that will effect their everyday lives. . . . Since when is the loss of sports related millions more important than the income of the average working man that makes this country function.”
The baseball and Soo Line strikes are not the two and only. Central Illinois is dotted with labor strife: between the Staley and Caterpillar plants in Decatur, 7 percent of that city’s work force has hit the bricks.
