:: By Mary Ruth Yoe

:: Photography by Dan Dry

In Every Issue ::

From the editor’s scrapbook: items that couldn’t be squeezed into the rest of this issue but merit sharing.

It’s easy to figure out when the motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print” first made it into the public eye (the same day—September 18, 1851—that the inaugural issue of the New York Times appeared). But the DOB of the motto’s variant, “All the News That Fits, We Print,” is shrouded in smoke, like post-deadline reporters kicking back in some dim and well-worn bar. Most probably the phrase-fiddler was a cynical editor, but perhaps he or she was simply reflecting on the fact that sometimes there isn’t room for everything you’d like to cram into a particular issue.

Take the photo at right. How often do you see a semi backed up to a neo-Gothic cathedral? And how better to describe the girth of Rockefeller Chapel’s E. M. Skinner organ than to note that its pieces, disassembled for renovation, filled four such trucks? Yet when art director Allen Carroll had finished the layout for a photo essay on the organ’s removal, the Dan Dry image didn’t make the cut. Nor did an explanation from organist Thomas Weisflog, SM’69, on why the Skinner organ won’t be returned to its original state: “In a university chapel, that’s a mistake. Rockefeller’s organ is used for so many different kinds of events, from contemporary concerts to silent-film series,” that a more versatile sound makes sense. Both the image and the explanation seemed worth salvaging.

And while the masthead had room to record the names of this summer’s student interns, Hassan Ali and Jenny Fisher, both ’07, it didn’t have space to mention that Ali took a few days off from his Magazine job to head to California to help write and film ads for Current TV’s partnership with an Internet company. Or that Fisher, like the rest of Chicago’s women’s cross-country team, runs “year-round. Forty-five miles a week, rain or shine.” So, duly noted.

Then there’s the interns’ reportage for the Magazine’s Web log, UChiBLOGo. Not included in this issue’s “Chicago Journal” are items like these: Valerie Lynch, a third-year in the Law School, took time from her job as a summer associate at a Washington, D.C., law firm to compete for the 2006 Miss Illinois crown. Competition of another sort capped the Lab Schools’ Adventure Kids Day Camp. In “Camp Idol,” kids age 6 to 14 took to the stage. Everyone was a winner as the show ended with this announcement: “Popsicles will be handed out outside.”

Who were the winners and losers in this year’s Supreme Court decisions? Law professors Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, and Richard Epstein led a July discussion on that topic at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum. Their verdicts differed. “We have an extraordinarily conservative Supreme Court,” Stone said—despite, he conceded, what some feel are politically balanced outcomes decided by a 5–4 vote. Epstein saw the future differently: “It’s a court that’s going to move further to the left.”

And that’s all the news that fits.