WFMT on the Move
What WFMT gains may be nothing less than its salvation. “Being able to get out from under the rent at 303 E. Wacker,” Schmidt says. “We were paying something short of $500,000 a year. I figure we’re saving $300,000 a year [of a $5 million budget]. It’s given us the ability to step back from the edge a little bit. We’re able to take that savings and put it into making radio instead of rent payments. It looks like we’ll be able to offer the entire Lyric Opera opening night series again. We had a major sponsor pull out last year.”
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The last ten years of WFMT history helped prepare the staff for its poignant uprooting, delivering a series of shocks from which the station’s old sense of splendid otherworldliness never recovered. The parent Chicago Educational Television Association–personified by its president William McCarter, general manager of WTTW–stepped in to set things right that weren’t widely believed to be wrong. Managerial changes were made, Chicago magazine, which WFMT had nurtured from a thin program guide, was sold off, devoted employees were fired, and the station’s format was changed to allow prerecorded commercials. Aghast loyalists formed Friends of WFMT and went to court alleging mismanagement. An accommodation restored the old commercial format, and the Friends haven’t met in years. Nevertheless, WFMT had been taught the sort of lesson in who’s boss that Mexico learns whenever the marines drop into Vera Cruz.
As for getting to work, “it’s the eighth test of Hercules,” Terkel says. “I take the Foster 146. Then I change and take the Foster 92 bus and then comes the walk, about three good blocks. Picture that on a cold, blizzardly day. I count the steps. So I find myself a frontiersman. Gary Cooper. More like Gabby Hayes.”
Whenever God’s work must truly be our own, we’re usually in big trouble. But a superboard of public school educators stepped in this summer to do the job right, and the Tribune marveled.
Dold’s column last month had praised the General Assembly’s Republican leadership, Senate president James “Pate” Philip in particular, for giving Mayor Daley “the power to stage a coup” against the school system’s bureaucracy. Dold went on, “It’s too bad that the coup wasn’t staged two years ago, when the school board cried poor and the legislature allowed it to sell [$427 million in bonds] to close the deficit. Did they pour those bond proceeds down a rat hole? The ease with which Vallas and company balanced the budget this year makes you wonder.”
Lenz applauds the board’s new flexibility, but not as a cure for what ails the school system. The General Assembly tossed Chicago a meaty bone to chew on for four years, and her enthusiasm for that bone is conditioned by her faith that serious reform will come before the city starves again. “We hope that sometime in the next four years the state will revamp how it funds schools and will increase funding for low-income schools,” she says. “Edgar has a task force at work on it. Presumably more districts outside Chicago will feel the pinch. Nothing will happen with state funding until more districts start screaming.”
