Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 45

I Chicago Tribune, Sunday, December 2, 1973 Section 1 45 Gas and tax woes plague suburb airports i a. if George Priester commenting on the fuel shortage and how Palwaukee operations may have to be cut back. T- By Robert Reiss ALTIIO MORE private planes are touching down on suburban runways these days, increasing tax rates and the fuel shortage are making the future uncertain for Chicago's suburban airports. "The trend is towards turning airport land into something else," said a Federal Aviation Administration official. "We've lost Sky Harbor and Hinsdale Airports in the last year, and Mitchell Field, Lombard, before that." Other private airports that have shut down recently are Wings Field near Richton Park and Prosperi Airport near Tinley Park.

Wings Field owners fought a losing battle with Richton Park officials for the right to expand runways to accommodate business Jets. Finally, in frustration, they sold out and moved their operation to the airport in Gary. THE CLOSINGS are not due to lack of customers. Crystal Lake Airport, which will shortly be opening three new hangars, reports all spaces filled already and a waiting list for more. Grayslake, Lansing, Elgin, Schaum-burg, and Howell private airports all report business is good.

"It's getting harder and harder for corporate and private planes to get into O'Hare and Midway," said Gloria Corder, assistant manager of the Waukegan Memorial Airport. "More are looking for places to move that have less traffic." Those places are suburban airports. Waukegan, which is a municipal airport, is tax exempt. Private airports are another story. Trlbunt Phofoi by Jxnes Mays The numerous planes at Palwaukee Airport include single and multi-prop craft as well as small jets.

SMro Reports on the Chicago metropolitan regionits people and its issues. Kir 1 i) "THE VALUE of land out here has gone crazy," said George Priester, owner of Palwaukee Airport, the world's busiest private airport. "In 1053 we had a $4,100 real estate bill. Now the bill is $80,000." Priester said the airport acreage had doubled since 1953. "Also, a private airport is nothing more than a glorified gas station.

And we know what's happening to fuel." Current fuel allocations allow suburban aiiports only a percentage of the fuel they pumped last year. Even if more planes come in, less gas gets pumped. The fuel shortage has aircraft com panies worried, too. A spokesman at Beech Aircraft Co. In Wichita, who had predicted a 20 per cent increase in domestic sales this year now says there is no way to predict sales.

Beech's domestic sales for 1972 increased 40 per cent last year over the year before, he said. "An airport is not a high return business," said Priester, whose Palwaukee runways handle 22,000 flights a month, including occasional overflow from O'Hare. "Overall, our profit is about 1 per cent of our investment. If I sold the airport and put the money into bonds, I could get a better return." But Priester doesn't want to sell the airport, altho he has had offers up to $8 million for it. "People who work for private aviation are dedicated people," he said.

"IF WE could get away from taxes and insurance, we could be self-sustaining," said Priester. "We get taxed, and then public airports get the money. If they're going to tax us, let us get some of the money back." Twenty states, not including Illinois, exempt privately owned, publicly used airports from property taxes. "Bankers have told me it's ridiculous to compete with municipalities," Pries- A mechanic works under the wing of a plane in a Palwaukee hangar. ter said.

"It's like setting up a fire department to compete with the public one." A number of studies, including ones in Elgin and Schaumburg, are currently under way on changing private airports into municipal airports. In addition, spokesmen at the Illinois Department of Aeronautics report they will soon be meeting with FAA and local transportation officials to study ways of subsidizing private airports in order to keep them open. MARK COOPER, chief of the safety division at the Illinois Department of Aeronautics, says the department has received preliminary inquiries from a developer thinking of building a new private airport 3.5 miles west of St. Charles. "There's been talk of taking over Palwaukee," said an official of the department.

"We need two more airports the size of Du Page and Aurora." Headed Housing Council The 1st lady of slum clearance is saying goodby Council plays key role here her fellow workers, she was finally cajoled into speaking about herself. "It started in 1942 when I'd been active in the PTA and was a member of the Women's Joint Committee on Adequate Housing, which is how I wound up as a delegate to the MHPC," she recalled. "You wouldn't believe how bad the slums were then. I remember seeing them for the first time. I saw families living in basements with wet dirt floors and six-foot ceilings.

No heat, no electric lights, nothing. People were living in coal sheds and shacks and under-stairways. There were rats FOUNDED 39 YEARS ago, the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council has played a substantial role In many of the Chicago area's most important improvement and conservation programs. Among other things, it has helped enact key state and federal housing legislation, originated Chicago's slum clearance procedures, pioneered in THE TENEMENT fires were cata-strophic in those days children burning to death and people jumping out of windows. And when we went to the inquests afterward, there was nothing but buck-passing.

Nobody even knew who owned the buildings." The women's committee tried to track down some of the slumlords. "We found one manager of several buildings, a woman, sitting in a sort of crypt in a basement," Mrs. Rubel said. She was wearing veils and burning incense. A real weirdo." The bizarre and brutalizing conditions in the slums were matched by the unbelievable inadequacy of the city's means of dealing with them.

"There were only 12 housing inspectors, and they worked for the Board of Health, so they spent half of their time on quarantine work and things like that," Mrs. Rubel said. "LESS THAN three per cent of the buiMings were covered by the housing code, because it had been changed so many times and not made retroactive. Housing cases were tried in a kind of catchall court and slumlords just got wrist-slaps, if anything. I spent a lot of time as a court observer when I started out." The first three MHPC directors, who Continued on following page neighborhood conservation, developed the city's first workable housing code, initiated metropolitan-wide planning, it I 1 1 By Paul Gapp Urban affairs editor TO FIND DOROTHY Rubel, you ride an elevator to the third floor of the Monadnock Building and enter a small suite of offices that have exquisite wall decorations: wrought iron doors from the Old Chicago Stock Exchange and framed sections of plaster ornamentation from the Garrick Theater symbols of defeat, for both landmarks have been demolished.

And there she is, waiting for you in a small conference room: Dorothy Rubel, director of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council MHPC, do-gooder extraordinary, and Clucago's veteran First Lady of slum clearance, housing code reform, conservation, and a dozen other endeavors which aim at cleansing the city of blight and preserving its amenities. GETTING Mrs. Rubel to talk about herself is difficult, for she wears a cloak of self-effacement. But it is surely time to do so, for she is retiring this month after 31 years of service. The privately supported council has long been comprised of some of the city's brainiest, most effective workers in the cause of physical and social change.

They have included lawyers, architects, educators, bankers, real estate developers, and other big-ego people, all of whom work for nothing. Mrs. 4 i W9v rate r' Sears -Sale! Our Best Automatic and conceived the now nationally used rent supplement technique for low income housing. THE COUNCIL has been most controversial as a guardian of lakefront and other park land. It has been accused of near-fanaticism in its zeal to prevent infringement on open space.

Proposals to build a music bowl in Grant Park have been repeatedly and successfully fought by the group. It also counts as victories the city's decision to forgo building an airport in the lake and abandonment of a plan to build a new stadium in the vicinity of Soldier Field. The council has 800 members, a paid staff of eight, and an annual budget of less than $100,000. Tribune Pdolo by Jck Muluhy Dorothy Rubel "Citizens' groups aren't always welcome. Like Caesar's wife, they must be above reproach.

That means they must present unquestionably accurate facts." Rubel, in her low-key way, has managed to keep the council stuck together and make things happen. After two hours of conversation, in which she insisted on describing the selflessness and collectve victories of Garage Door OpenerCloser Regularly S189.93 L-. 4 I mt ft Vi 1 15 years since fire killed 95 at Our Lady of Angels School D)99 classrooms. In one room children died at their desks, the victims of superheated air from the fire. li Here's a great gift you can open more than once.

A most appreciated convenience in cold, snow, rain or darkness. The quiet Va-IIP motor raises your garage door and turns on the light all at the touch of a transmitter button and from the comfort and security of your car! Two-direction reverse automatically reverses door if obstructed while opening or closing. -v' I 4 1 Sister Mary Helaine's 8th grade class had time to rush to the windows when smoke engulfed their room, but half of the 50 pupils died before rescuers reached them. Sister Helaine was overcome by smoke and remained in critical condition for weeks. Witnesses recalled scenes of nearly superhuman heroism, pain, grief, and occasionally joy for those survivors who were reunited with their families.

One nun rescued dozens of children, but her most disturbing memory is of her futile attempts to console grief-stricken parents at the morgue. Many observed that the victims, all between 8 and 14 at the time, would be young adults today had they lived. 4 t. -f A Other Openers Priced As Low As 99.93 By Joseph Sjostrom IT HAS BEEN 15 years now, but Mrs. Lillian Stachura remembers the fire at Our Lady of the Angels School as if it were yesterday.

She lived at 918 N. Hamlin Av. in those days, right behind the school. And her two young sons were in classrooms there that raw Monday afternoon of Dec. 1, 1958, when Mrs.

Stachura saw black smoke pouring from the school building, at 909 N. Avers Av. One son, John, then a 1st grader, got out alive, but a second son, Mark, a 9-year-old 4th grader, was among the. 92 pupils and three nuns to die in this worst school fire in Chicago's history. "My husband, Max, could see Mark in his classroom and tried to save him by climbing up our own long ladder," Mrs.

Stachura recalled from her present home in Barrington. "Suddenly there was some kind of explosion that knocked my husband to the ground. Actually the roof had just caved in on Mark's room. It wasn't until later, when we were looking for him in hospitals, that I realized that children I had actually died in the fire." CAPT. JOHN Wendell, com- mander of Fire Department Snorkel Squad 1, was then a young lieutenant who found himself operating the powerful hose on a snorkel for the first time at the fire.

"We set up a Vater screen Installation of Openers 1'rieed Extra Tribune Pnoio by wauer Kait Mrs. Lillian Stachura "My husband, Max, could sec Mark in his classroom and tried to save him." IN TERMS of lives lost, Our Lady of the Angels ranks behind the Chicago Fire of 1871 which wiped out most of the city and killed 230 persons, Sears lias a Credit Plan to Suit Most Every Need and the Iroquois Theater fire of 19C3, which killed 602. The school fire occurred just 20 minutes before classes were to be dismissed for the day. For some families of victims, the loss is so painful they won't discuss it, even after 13 years. "I've never been bitter about it," Mrs.

Stachura said. "But I'll never forget it." from abfve to keep the fire from spreading further and to let rescuers get in," Capt. Wendell said. "The thing I remember is the women running hysterically after ambulances taking dead and injured away to see if their children were Inside. And then there were the bodies in the school.

He didn't finish the sentence. The fire apparently began near a stairwell In the 48-year-old building. Smoke, quickly followed by flames, poured un the stairs, filling a second floor corridor and bringing confusion, panic, and death. MOST OF THOSE who died were trapped in second floor lltiililiiif! Materials Drpurtinvnt CHICAGOLAND STORES Including Aurora, Elgin, Jolict, Waukegan and Gary. Sears IEARS.

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