Chicago: culture, Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, and GSB
By John Temple Ligon
Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Culture

About a month ago, I took a weekend to visit Chicago. Following the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms, the big meal of the trip was Saturday night at Everest, 40 stories above the Chicago Board of Trade, where Hillary made a mysteriously well- informed killing in cattle futures.

The first night's lodging was on the top floor of the Intercontinental on the Magnificent Mile - Michigan Avenue - next door to the Chicago Tribune Tower, the result of an early 1920s worldwide architectural design competition still studied in architecture schools. The second night was spent in The Drake, again on the top floor but this time with an open view of Lake Michigan and the Gold Coast, Chicago's toniest neighborhood.

Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap

The real purpose of the trip was to have a beer at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, corner of Woodlawn and 55th Street. I learned about Jimmy's (aka simply Woodlawn Tap in the phone book) in an economics course at Duke 14 years ago. The professor was an envious admirer of economics Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his successes with altering the economies of Chile and other client countries.

Beginning in 1948, Friedman and his fellow professors were regular conversationalists at Jimmy's, the University of Chicago's closest bar, and they established what the world's economists call the Chicago Oral Tradition.

The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB)

The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB) sits on the main campus with its main degree program, the full- time MBA. There is no undergraduate degree in business. The weekend and evening MBA programs are in a downtown classroom building called the Gleacher Center, which sits on the Chicago River behind the Tribune Tower.

The GSB does all right in the rankings: No. 1 in the world, full- time MBA program ( BusinessWeek ); No. 2, part- time MBA program ( BusinessWeek, US News and World Report ); No. 3, executive MBA program ( BusinessWeek, US News and World Report ); No. 1 in a new ranking based on the impact of business and economic research (Science Watch).

Across the street from the GSB on the main campus is Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, his best Prairie School work, finished in 1910.

Wright, however, didn't finish the Robie House. Just before 1910, he left his Chicago practice and his employees and his wife and his six children. He took his client's money and his client's wife and absconded for Europe, where he stayed in Fiesole, Italy, overlooking Florence and cranking out drawings of his Prairie Style works for German publication.

Wright, the genius, is all that matters, and the Robie House across the street from the GSB is something of a dream site for anyone with an education in architecture and a budding bent for business.

Inside the GSB on the right- hand wall in the foyer is a bronze display of the lifetime contributors of $500,000 or more. At the top left- hand corner is memorialized a group of five in the $10 million class. Chicago Tribune that day reported: "The man who brought you Healthy Choice meals after he suffered a heart attack is giving the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business one of the largest cash gifts in the school's history, the university announced Friday."

Chicago GSB alumnus Charles M. "Mike" Harper was CEO at Con Agra Foods and also at RJR Nabisco. His gift was suggested to float above the previous large gifts of about $25 million. He graduated in 1950 after he was taught by Milton Friedman and other economists known as The Chicago Boys, free- market advocates who really took hold in the 1970s. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. He died last November.

Today, the GSB faculty includes six Nobel Laureates, and they putatively all go drinking at Jimmy's. Even the novelist Saul Bellow (Nobel Prize in literature) was seen escorting anthropologist Margaret Mead into the back rooms at Jimmy's.

Chicago is a perfect place to take in all the culture time allows and all the talk at Jimmy's.

Interestingly, the GSB's most recent and likely largest donation is maybe more than $25 million. Darla Moore's gifts total $90 million to her eponymous business school at USC.