1979 was a year of options for me. Options means choices. I also found out more about options as a financial tool. Jerry Syndorwicz, who was a furniture salesman at the Montgomery Ward Franklin Park Outlet Store, came up to me one day and asked me if I knew anything about Stock Options. I said that I had some basic idea that people had options to buy stocks. They could either use them or not. That was my limited knowledge. He told me that a classmate of his from Illinois State, was involved with Stock Options at the Chicago Board of Trade. He wanted to know if I was interested. I said that I would take a look at it. I tried to find some information about it, but it was scarce. The Chicago Board Options Exchange began in 1973 by the Chicago Board of Trade. Jerry said that his friend Marshall Katz would help us buy a seat on the Options exchange. It all seemed so simple. I thought about it for a little while and I told Jerry to explore it some more. I came to realize that the Chicago Board of Trade had spun off stock options and set up a whole floor for them. In fact, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), the University of Chicago Noble Peace Economist, wrote an article about the importance of stock options in 1971. Jerry and I finally decided to have a meeting with his friend and some bankers to see what was involved with buying a seat on the exchange. Everything was going fine with this meeting until we got to the question of financing. We could buy a seat on the exchange for $80,000, that meant that I had to come up with $40,000. Both Jerry and I assumed that the co-lateral for the seat would be the seat itself. That was the shocker. We had to put our houses up as co-lateral. That was a non-starter. We both said no. That seemed to put an end to this idea. Jerry was out. I thought that I was out also. How do you finance purchases?
The movie The China Syndrome
In a twist of fate, on March 15, 1979, twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island reactor meltdown, the movie The China Syndrome premiered. It initially met with backlash from the nuclear power industry, claiming it to be sheer fiction and a character assassination of an entire industry. In the film, television reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) and her cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) secretly film a major accident at a nuclear power plant while taping a series on nuclear power with plant supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon). At one point in the film, an official tells Wells that an explosion at the plant “could render an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” Michael Douglas also produced this film. After the release of this film, Fonda began lobbying against nuclear power. I remember seeing this film later in 1979. How ironic that they made a film about a nuclear meltdown before it actually happened. Thus, The China Syndrome became a critical and commercial success, as it grossed $51.7 million on a production budget of $5.9 million. The film received four nominations at the 52nd Academy Awards: Best Actor (for Lemmon), Best Actress (for Fonda), Best Original Screenplay and Best Art Direction, but did not win. Did you ever see the movie The China Syndrome?
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident
The worst accident in American nuclear power plant history took place at 4:00 AM on March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On the seven-point logarithmic International Nuclear Event Scale, this was rated Level 5, an “Accident with Wider Consequences,” a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor, so that radioactive gases and radioactive iodine were released into the environment. This accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of water to escape from the pressurized isolated coolant loop. The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of the plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident. Those inadequacies were compounded by design flaws, such as poor control design, the use of multiple similar alarms, and a failure of the equipment to indicate either the coolant-inventory level or the position of the stuck-open. An alarm sounded at 4:11 AM, but the operators ignored it. At 4:15 AM, the relief diaphragm of the pressurizer relief tank ruptured, and radioactive coolant began to leak into the general containment building. This radioactive coolant was pumped from the containment building to an auxiliary building, outside the main containment, until the sump pumps were stopped at 4:39 AM. At about 5:20 AM, the primary loop’s four main reactor coolant pumps began to cavitate, so that the pumps were shut down. Soon after 6:00 AM, the top of the reactor core was exposed, and the intense heat caused a reaction to occur between the steam forming in the reactor core and the zircaloy nuclear fuel rod cladding, yielding zirconium dioxide, hydrogen, and additional heat. This reaction melted the nuclear fuel rod cladding and damaged the fuel pellets, which released radioactive isotopes to the reactor coolant and produced hydrogen gas that is believed to have caused a small explosion in the containment building later that afternoon. It was not until 6:45 AM, that radiation alarms activated when the contaminated water reached a detector. However, by that time, the radiation levels in the primary coolant water were around 300 times expected levels. When the plant operator called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at about 8:00 AM, roughly half of the uranium fuel had already melted. The NRC then called the White House at 10:00 AM. There was some confusion about how bad this accident was. Thus, this accident heightened anti-nuclear safety concerns and led to new regulations for the nuclear industry. It accelerated the decline of efforts to build new nuclear reactors. Anti-nuclear movement activists expressed worries about regional health effects from this accident, but a causal connection linking the accident with cancer was difficult to prove. Cleanup at TMI-2 started in August 1979 and officially ended in December 1993, with a total cost of about $1 billion. TMI-1 was restarted in 1985, then retired in 2019 due to operating losses. Its decommissioning is expected to be complete in 2029 at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion. The most prominent investigation into this crisis was the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, created by U.S. President Jimmy Carter in April 1979. This Three Mile Island accident was a significant turning point in the global development of nuclear power. In total, 51 USA nuclear reactors were canceled between 1980 and 1984. Have you ever heard of Three Mile Island?
Brian Lamb (1941-) and Book Notes
Brian Lamb is an American journalist and founder CEO of C-SPAN. He is far and away, the best-ever interviewer that I have heard on his show “Book Notes.” For years, on Sunday nights, “Book Notes” was my favorite TV show. He was the founder, executive chairman, and the now-retired CEO of C-SPAN. In 2007, Lamb was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush and received the National Humanities Medal the following year. Prior to launching C-SPAN in 1979, Lamb held various communication roles including that of a telecommunications policy staffer for the White House. He also served as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy for four years. Lamb has conducted thousands of interviews, including those on C-SPAN’s “Book Notes.” He had a unique interview style that focused on short, direct questions. Lamb was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and lived there until he was 22 years old. He graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts in speech from Purdue University. Following his graduation, Lamb was accepted into the Navy’s Officer Candidate School. Upon completion of his training, he served 18 months on the attack cargo ship USS Thuban, and then moved to the Pentagon where he served in the audio/visual office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Lamb took up this role midway through the Vietnam War, so that he attended press briefings with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He worked for President Lyndon Johnson, and as a personal aide to President Richard Nixon, and Senator Peter H. Dominick. He became the Washington bureau chief of the trade magazine Cablevision for four years. During this time, he developed his idea of creating a public affairs-oriented cable network. By 2010, C-SPAN reached over 100 million households, and the network employed 275 individuals in Washington D.C. with its archives in West Lafayette, Indiana. On C-SPAN, Lamb hosted “Washington Journal,” and “Book Notes,” my favorite. He had a distinctive interview style. He learned the basics of broadcasting and interviewing from his high school broadcasting teacher, Bill Fraser, who taught him to “stay out of the way” while he conducted interviews. According to “The Advocate,” his style of interviewing is “Spartan.” Lamb explained his style, “Too many interviewers intrude too much. They try to make us think they are smarter than the person they are interviewing. Well, I assume I am not smarter, and if I am smarter, I do not want the audience to find out.” Thus, in his 35 years at C-SPAN, Lamb has conducted thousands of interviews, including 801 editions of “Book Notes,” a weekly program he hosted, focusing on nonfiction books. I probably saw at least half of them, if not more. Lamb interviewed non-fiction authors, politicians, and world leaders. Each program was one author, one book, and one hour. Lamb stated that he spent an average of 20 hours reading and preparing for each interview, though he spoke for less than five minutes over the course of each program. Lamb has published five books based on these “Book Notes” interviews. The books focused on writing itself, biographies of figures from American history, American history stories, American characters, and the life of Abraham Lincoln. Lamb has spent most of his life in Washington, D.C. “Book Notes” was originally broadcast from 1989 to 2004, as a one-hour one-on-one interview of a non-fiction author. Repeats of the interviews remain a regular part of the Book TV schedule with the title “Encore Book Notes.” What do you know about Brian Lamb?
The beginning of C-SPAN
One of my favorite channels on TV Cable was and is the Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN), an American cable and satellite television network, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. C-SPAN televises proceedings of the United States federal government and other public affairs programming, as a private, nonprofit organization funded by its cable and satellite affiliates. It does not have advertisements on any of its television networks or radio stations, nor does it solicit donations or pledges on-air. The network operates independently, since the cable industry and the U.S. Congress have no control over its programming content. Today it includes C-SPAN, focusing on the U.S. House of Representatives, C-SPAN2, focusing on the U.S. Senate, and C-SPAN3, airing other government hearings and related programming. C-SPAN’s television channels are available to approximately 100 million cable and satellite households within the United States. The network televises U.S. political events, particularly live and “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the U.S. Congress, as well as other major events worldwide. Coverage of political and policy events is unmoderated, providing the audience with unfiltered information about politics and government. Non-political coverage includes historical programming, programs dedicated to non-fiction books, and interview programs with noteworthy individuals associated with public policy. Brian Lamb, C-SPAN’s chairman and former CEO, conceived C-SPAN in 1975 while working in Washington, D.C., as bureau chief of Cablevision. Cable television was a rapidly growing industry, and Lamb envisioned a non-profit network, financed by the cable industry, that televised Congressional sessions, public affairs events, and policy discussions. Lamb promised that the network would be non-political, which helped override broadcast and local network resistance. Thus, C-SPAN launched on March 19, 1979, with the first televised session made available by the House of Representatives, beginning with a speech by then-Tennessee representative Al Gore. Upon its debut, only 3.5 million homes were wired for C-SPAN, and the network had just three employees. For the first few years C-SPAN leased satellite time from the USA Network and had approximately 9 hours of daily programming. On February 1, 1982, C-SPAN launched its own transponder and expanded programming to 16 hours a day. Thus, C-SPAN began full-time operations on September 13, 1982. C-SPAN2 launched on June 2, 1986, to cover Senate proceedings, and began full-time operations on January 5, 1987. In 1992, Congress passed must-carry regulations, which required cable carriers to allocate spectrum to local broadcasters. This affected the availability of C-SPAN, especially C-SPAN2, in some areas as some providers chose to discontinue carriage of the channel altogether. C-SPAN availability was broadly restored when technological improvements expanded channel capacity and allowed for both mandatory stations and the C-SPAN networks to be broadcast. C-SPAN3, the most recent expansion channel, began full-time operations on January 22, 2001. It airs public policy and government-related events on weekdays, historical programming on weeknights and weekends, and sometimes serves as an overflow channel for live programming conflicts on C-SPAN and C-SPAN2. Lamb semi-retired in March 2012 and gave executive control of the network to his two lieutenants, Rob Kennedy, and Susan Swain. On May 14, 2024, the C-SPAN board of directors announced that longtime CNN executive Sam Feist would become the new CEO. This announcement followed a national search initiated after Swain and Kennedy announced they would be retiring. Do you ever watch C-SPAN?
Grammy Awards in February 1979
The 21st Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 15, 1979, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. This was the last time that John Denver hosted the Grammys, as this show recognized the accomplishments by musicians from the year 1978. This was the epitome, the height, and yet the end of the Disco era, since the Bee Gees were the darlings of the night, winning best album with the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, featuring the song “Stayin’ Alive,” one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time. Billy Joel won both Song of the Year and Record of the Year for “Just the Way You Are,” signifying his ascent as a major artist. The first country rap song, “Convoy” by C.W. McCall, was nominated but did not win. Many consider this spoken song to be a predecessor to the modern country rap genre. Otherwise, Jim Henson won for “The Muppet Show.” Classical awards were won by Luciano Pavarotti, Georg Solti & the Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Eugene Ormandy, Vladimir Horowitz & the New York Philharmonic, and Itzhak Perlman. Best Comedy Recording went to Steve Martin for “A Wild and Crazy Guy.” Best Instrumental Composition went to John Williams for “Theme From Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Best Female Country Vocal Performance went to Dolly Parton for “Here You Come Again.” Best Male Country Vocal Performance went to Willie Nelson for “Georgia on My Mind.” Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group went to Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson for “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Best Single Country Song went to “The Gambler,” performed by Kenny Rogers. Best Female Pop Vocal Performance went to Anne Murray for “You Needed Me.” Best Male Pop Vocal Performance went to Barry Manilow for “Copacabana (At the Copa).” Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group went to The Bee Gees for Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack. Best Female R&B Vocal Performance went to Donna Summer for “Last Dance.” Best Male R&B Vocal Performance went to George Benson for “On Broadway.” Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus went to Earth, Wind & Fire for “All ‘n All.” It was a mixed bag for music in 1979. Do you have a favorite song from 1979?
Mayor Jane Byrne (1933-2014)
The new mayor of Chicago in 1979 was Jane Byrne, who was born and raised in the Lake View neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. Her father, William Patrick Burke was vice president of Inland Steel. Mayor Jane Byrne graduated from Saint Scholastica High School and then Barat College in 1955. The next year, in 1956, she married William P. Byrne, a Marine. They had one daughter, Katherine C. Byrne, born in 1957. However, on May 31, 1959, Lieutenant Byrne died in a plane crash. Thus, Jane Byrne was a young widow until she married journalist Jay McMullen in 1978, nearly twenty years later. Jane Byrne entered politics to volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s campaign for president in 1960. During that campaign, she first met Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley appointed her to several positions, beginning in 1964 with a city anti-poverty program, the Chicago Committee of Urban Opportunity. In 1968, Daley appointed Byrne the head of the City of Chicago’s Consumer Affairs Department. Then Byrne was appointed co-chairperson of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee by Daley, over the objection of many other Democratic leaders in 1975. However, the committee ousted Byrne shortly after Daley’s death in late 1976. Byrne was then dismissed from her post of the head of consumer affairs by Mayor Bilandic. Months after her firing, Byrne challenged Bilandic in the 1979 Democratic mayoral primary. As Mayor, she hired the city’s first African-American and female school superintendent. She was the first mayor to recognize the gay community, by declaring the city’s first official “Gay Pride Parade Day” in 1981. She also appointed the first African American to serve as head of the Chicago Police Department. Byrne allowed Chicago to be used as a filming location, with such movies as The Blues Brothers. On March 26, 1981, Byrne stayed at the crime-ridden Cabrini–Green Homes housing project for a month. Of course, there were major shortages of funds in both the municipal government and the Chicago Board of Education. In 1982, Byrne proposed an ordinance effectively banning new handgun registration, but that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010. Byrne used special events, such as Chicago Fest, and the Taste of Chicago to revitalize Navy Pier and downtown Chicago. We loved the Taste of Chicago and got to see Frank Sinatra outdoors at Navy Pier. However, she also faced strikes by local labor unions. She modernized the elevated trains, instead of tearing them down. She initiated the idea for creating a unified lakefront Museum Campus. When she tried for a second term in 1983, Richard M. Daley, the son of the former Mayor Daley and the Cook County State’s Attorney, entered the race, but Harold Washington, an African-American congressman, just beat both Daley and Byrne. In 2014, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn renamed the Circle Interchange in Chicago, the Jane Byrne Interchange. Have you ever heard of Mayor Jane Byrne?
The Chicago Democratic mayoral election of 1979
Chicago’s inadequate response to the blizzard was blamed primarily on new Mayor Michael Bilandic, who had ordered trains to bypass many intermediate stops, particularly affecting black neighborhoods on the South Side of the city, and angering that large voter base. I remember watching on local TV how Bilandic said that the streets were being cleared, while the TV cameras were showing streets unpassable with huge snow piles. The former head of Chicago’s Consumer Affairs Department, Jane Byrne, who had been fired by Bilandic in 1977, ran against the mayor in the 1979 Democratic mayoral primary. Thus, months after her firing, Byrne challenged Bilandic in the Democratic primary, the real contest in heavily Democratic Chicago. Although Byrne had little chance to win, the January 1979 Chicago Blizzard paralyzed the city and caused Bilandic to be seen as an ineffective leader. Besides dissatisfaction with the city’s handling of the snowstorm, other issues hindered Bilandic’s mayoral reelection campaign. Jane Byrne, Bilandic’s main opposition in the Democratic primary, capitalized on this botched snowstorm response. This time, the few Republicans in Chicago voted in the Democratic primary against Mayor Bilandic to defeat the Democratic machine that had dominated Chicago politics for decades. Reverend Jesse Jackson also endorsed Byrne for mayor. North Side and Northwest Side voters voted for Byrne because they were angered by the Democratic leadership’s slating only South Side and Southwest Side candidates for mayor, clerk, and treasurer. Byrne barely won the Democratic primary 51% to 49% on February 27, 1979. However, then she won 82% of the vote in the general election on April 3, 1979, still the largest margin in a Chicago mayoral election. She was the first woman to be elected mayor of a major city in the United States, as Chicago was the second largest city in the United States at that time. Do you remember the first female mayor of Chicago?
The January blizzard of 1979
In January 1979, Chicagoland started out with some snowy, windy, and cold weather. The Chicago blizzard of 1979 affected northern Illinois and northwest Indiana on January 13–14, one of the largest Chicago snowstorms with 21 inches of snowfall in that two-day period. Although only a couple of inches had been expected, by the end of Sunday, the depth of snow on the ground peaked at 29 inches in a blizzard that lasted for 38 hours. At its peak, wind gusts reached 39 miles per hour. Five people died during the blizzard, with approximately 15 others seriously injured due to conditions created by the storm. One of the five deaths came when a snowplow driver went berserk, hitting 34 cars and ramming a man. O’Hare Airport was closed and all flights were grounded for 96 hours, from January 13 to 15. The cold weather and snowfall throughout the rest of January and February resulted in many frozen train tracks throughout the Chicago “L” system. Thus, commuters overwhelmed the capacity of the CTA buses, causing bus commutes to take up to several hours. To avoid huge snowdrifts in many of the streets, the overcrowded buses were obligated to take numerous detours, adding additional time to the commute. Snow remained on the ground until March 6, a full fifty-one days since deployment of the city snow plows, who were significantly delayed at the start because of a weekend holiday. When the snow plows originally appeared, they struggled to keep up with the snowfall. Much of the snow remained unmoved throughout the next two months, causing significant problems with trash collection. We had gone to Rockford for the weekend, so that the snow was piled up when we got back. I was surprised how much snow was in our driveway so that we just parked out in the cul-de-sac until we could clear the driveway to get into the garage. I could remember only one snowfall growing up in New Jersey during the 1940s that was like this one. Everything was closed-down for a couple of days. Eventually, the major roads were cleared and I was able to get back and forth from work in Franklin Park. In Matteson, we only had the inconvenience of our mail service being inconsistent. What is the biggest snowfall that you ever seen?
TV in 1978
ABC celebrated its silver anniversary in 1978 with a retrospective special. CBS also commemorated its golden anniversary in radio and TV broadcasting with a 9½-hour retrospective special airing over 7 nights. Showtime went nationwide on the air. “Holocaust,” starring James Woods and Meryl Streep first aired on NBC. Robin Williams made his first appearance as Mork from Ork on an episode of “Happy Days” on ABC. The episode proved to be such a success, that it would soon give way to a spin-off starring Williams entitled “Mork & Mindy.” The Blues Brothers, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd made their first appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Ringo Starr’s, “Ringo,” a musical version of The Prince and the Pauper, aired on NBC, with Starr’s fellow former Beatle, George Harrison, providing the narration. The ABC Evening News was revamped to become “ABC World News Tonight,” with a unique three-anchor setup of Frank Reynolds, Max Robinson, and Peter Jennings. Harry Reasoner returned to CBS, eventually rejoining “60 Minutes,” the program he anchored with Mike Wallace from its 1968 premiere until he joined ABC News in 1970. The ceremony formalizing the success of the peace talks between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, the Camp David accords, was televised live from the White House East Room. The chairs on which Archie and Edith Bunker sat through eight seasons of the CBS comedy “All in the Family” were presented to the Smithsonian Institution. On NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” The Rolling Stones became the first and only band to serve as both hosts and musical guests in the same episode. New shows debuting in 1978 were “Fantasy Island,” “How the West Was Won,” “Project U.F.O.,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Dallas,” “Pass the Buck,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Card Sharks,” “Vega$,” “20/20,” “Tic Tac Dough, “Fantastic Four,” “Godzilla,” “Fangface,” “The All New Popeye Hour,” “The Paper Chase,” “Tarzan and the Super 7,” “Sword of Justice,” “Taxi,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Lifeline,” “WKRP in Cincinnati,” “The Waverly Wonders,” “Who’s Watching the Kids,” “Apple Pie,” “The American Girls,” “Mary,” “Centennial,” “David Cassidy: Man Undercover,” “Different Strokes,” and “The White Shadow.” Going off TV were the following shows: “The Six Million Dollar Man” after five years; “The Carol Burnett Show” after eleven years; “Police Woman” after four years; “Tattletales” after four years; “The Bob Newhart Show” after six years; “Baretta” after three years; “C.P.O. Sharkey” after two years; “Chico and the Man after four years; “Columbo” after seven years, “Fred Flintstone and Friends” after two years; “Maude” after six years; “Police Woman” after four years; “Rhoda” after four years; and “The Bionic Woman” after two years. There were some interesting made-for-TV movies, like “King,” “Centennial,” “Donner Pass: The Road to Survival,” “The Time Machine,” and “Someone’s Watching Me!” The top rated TV shows of 1978 that I watched were “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Happy Days,” “60 Minutes,” “M*A*S*H,” “The Ropers,” “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Eight Is Enough,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “Barney Miller,” “The Love Boat,” “One Day at a Time,” “Fantasy Island,” “Barnaby Jones, ” and “Different Strokes.” What were you watching on TV in 1978?
Gene Finnegan Remembers Living Eighty Wonderful Years 