Judge Richard LeFevour was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the Greylord scandal, which revealed corruption within Cook County’s court system. He was convicted of taking thousands of dollars in bribes to fix traffic cases. Photo: Frank Hanes/Chicago Tribune August 5, 1983 The FBI probe into corruption in the Cook County … Read more
Photo: Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune October 26, 2005 Some saw the team’s 88-year world-championship hiatus as divine punishment for 1919, when Sox players threw the World Series. When the South Siders finally claimed the crown with a four-game sweep of the Astros, long-suffering fans ecstatically sang “Na Na Hey Hey.” “The Sox have been the stepchild … Read more
Photo: Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune August 25, 1976 Conceived half a century ago and not scheduled for completion until 2029, it’s one of the biggest civil engineering projects ever undertaken. Engineers called this superhighway of sewers and reservoirs a “storm bottle,” designed to solve one of the most intractable problems of our low-lying waterfront city: street … Read more
Photo: Library of Congress September 4, 1975 Filmed inside a WTTW studio, the local monthly show Opening Soon at a Theater Near You — which later morphed into Sneak Previews and then At the Movies — would make two Chicago newspapermen into the nation’s most recognizable film critics. Their weird chemistry, at turns chummy and openly acrimonious, was “not … Read more
Photo: Frank Hanes/Chicago Tribune August 8, 1988 “We believe that baseball is a day time sport and will continue to play it in the sunshine as long as we can,” owner Philip K. Wrigley declared in 1945. His team held out another 43 years, making his namesake park the last in the major league to … Read more
Photo: Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune June 9, 2010 ESPN had named Chicago’s perennial hockey losers “the worst franchise in sports” in 2004. But when Rocky Wirtz became the team’s owner three years later after the death of his father, Bill, who was hated by fans as a penny pincher, he ushered in a new regime that … Read more
Photo: Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune February 24, 2015 Although he ultimately lost to Rahm, the Mexican American politician’s remarkable showing in the first round of voting put the incumbent back on his heels, despite García’s being outspent 12 to 1, and issued a wake-up call to the administration that the city’s growing Latino community didn’t … Read more
Photo: Jose More/Chicago Tribune June 4, 1998 It wasn’t the first time the city had fiddled with its most famous ribbon of asphalt — a realignment in the mid-1980s smoothed out the deadly S-curve — but it was certainly the most auspicious. By moving the northbound lanes to the west of Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which had … Read more
Photo: Candice C. Cusic/Chicago Tribune June 10, 1971 With 130 restaurants and 7,500 employees at its 2019 peak, Rich Melman’s Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises is the King Kong of Chicago restaurant groups. And it all started in Lincoln Park with burgers, a salad bar (some say the country’s first), and a name composed of the … Read more
Photo: Soul Train Holdings October 2, 1971 Until Entertainment Tonight surpassed it in 2016, Don Cornelius’s Chicago-born music-and-dance showcase — billed memorably as “sixty nonstop minutes across the tracks of your mind” — was the longest-running syndicated program in American TV history. By the time it went national a year after premiering on WCIU, it was already a huge … Read more
