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1913 “Marshall
Field” had just been redubbed “The University of Chicago
Athletic Field,” but the November Magazine noted
a reason to change the name again. Many at the University suggested
“Stagg Field,” arguing that “to call the exercise-ground
of our young soldiers of sport by the name of their honored general
would be appropriate, and wise.” The writer supported naming
the field after Amos Alonzo Stagg, Chicago’s football coach
since 1892, but noted that the change did not have to occur immediately.
“That some day it will be ‘Stagg Field’ a great
many people believe. Perhaps as long as we are privileged to have
the ‘Old Man’ actively engaged among us, ‘The
Athletic Field’ will serve as well as any other name.”
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Cultural
Studies
Dig the dug look
As new piping was threaded through the quads,
photographer Lloyd DeGrane chronicled the temporary checkerboard
of chain-link fencing and ragged trenches that hemmed in even the
most sophisticated quads-walker. Through this latest phase of the
master plan, campus’s summer activities continued unchecked,
though often in the shadow of massive machinery. Despite the extensive
excavations, all was more or less back in place for the first-years’
debut.
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C.Vitae
Curing the world, one epidemic
at a time
A Chicago-trained physician applies his public-health
expertise globally, tackling TB, AIDS, and even youth violence.
Gary Slutkin, MD’75, has made
a career of halting epidemics. His crusade began during San Francisco’s
early-1980s tuberculosis outbreak, spread to Somalia’s refugee
TB problem, then to Central and East Africa’s AIDS crisis.
In the mid-1990s Slutkin returned to the U.S. and his native Chicago,
where the worst epidemic, he found, wasn’t a disease but urban
youth violence.
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In Stereo
The old world can rock out too
The strange musical journey of The
Polkaholics, a Chicago polka-punk band, continues with Polka
Can’t Die, their self-released third album. Led by Don
Hedeker, AB’80, PhD’89,
a biostatistics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
the three-man band plays a weird but thrilling hybrid of traditional
German-Polish polka and Anglo-American punk rock—on electric
guitars rather than accordions.
First exposed to old-style
polka by his Eastern-European parents, Hedeker spent much of his
life in musical rebellion, listening to the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop,
and the Clash, before rediscovering Chicago’s polka
legacy in the ‘80s and ‘90s. After years of playing
guitar for local pop-punk and art-rock bands, in 1997 he was inspired
to form a polka-rock fusion band with drummer Mike Werner and bassist
George Kraynak, and the Polkaholics have since found a cult following
among Chicago clubgoers.
Recorded with a new drummer and bassist,
Jackson Wilson and James Wallace, the twelve tracks of Polka
Can’t Die feature straightforward romps like “May
Miss a Note (but we never miss a party)” along with curiosities
like the yodeled Aerosmith cover “Dude Looks Like a Lady-hoo.”—J.N.L.
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