By Michael Miner
Bro. 1 White Folks for sale! White Folks for sale!
WVON is a call-in station on which white folks are pilloried from dawn to dusk. “If you took that out of the content of WVON there wouldn’t be a WVON,” Thompson observed. But station manager Melody Spann stressed to me that WVON protects itself with the disclaimer that the audience’s calumnies don’t necessarily reflect the station’s views. With commercials, she draws a line.
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“I know a lot of white people who would be incensed by it,” she said. “It’s only fair I take that into consideration. If I put anything knowingly on the air that’s inciteful, inflammatory, offensive to any race of people, then I don’t think I’m being a responsible broadcaster.”
Says Thompson, “This bourgeois black fear–it’s amazing how afraid black people are in 1996 of white displeasure. And this is a station that makes its living by dealing with racial issues all the time. It’s a farce. It’s amazing.”
But credit where it’s due. The main man behind the airstrip on Northerly Island wasn’t Meigs but Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Lloyd Wendt recalled in his history Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper that the Tribune’s publisher and aviation editor, Wayne Thomis (who doubled as McCormick’s pilot), decided Northerly Island “would make an excellent downtown airport for Chicago.” Whether or not Chicago stood to gain from such an airport, McCormick certainly did. He already had both an Aero Commander and an airstrip at Cantigny, his estate west of Chicago. Now Thomis could fly him in to work each day.
With its wits still about it, the Tribune remarked, “The ‘Plan of Chicago’ is an attractive and impressive presentment of what the city might be if it had the purse of Fortunatus.”
