200,000 Jitterbugs

Chicago newspapers have a hardheaded, warm-hearted habit of giving free entertainment to Chicago's populace. Last fortnight the Chicago Tribune held its annual Chicagoland Music Festival (classic music; attendance, 85,000) in Soldier Field on the lakefront. This week it sponsored an All-Star football game on the Field. Calculating that it would be too expensive to dismantle a loudspeaker system on the Field between the two events, the Tribune agreed to let a rival, the tabloid Daily Times, use the equipment last week for a free entertainment of its own--a "Swing Jam Session" of five "name" bands from Chicago nightspots, and, according to plans, of 50 amateur swing groups. This gesture, the Tribune claimed, proved somewhat costly.

At 6 p. m., 70,000 jitterbugs filled the seats in Soldier Field. Police closed the gates, but reopened them under pressure from a mob outside. At 7 p. m. there were 100,000, average age 18. By the time the swing session began, 200,000 screaming, jittering, snake-dancing, stampeding youngsters were at large in the stadium, and hell was loose.

The turf and the Tribune's loudspeaker wires were quickly trampled to bits. Only those near the orchestra platforms could hear any music, and a competition among the 50 amateur bands was called off. No one minded. The young jitterbugs danced to their own mouth organs and to 10-c- saxophones, to no music at all, voicing the appalling floy floys, shim shams and swizzle-swipes which are the lingo of swing. Four hundred extra policemen marveled that no one was hurt. It was, in the words of Chicago Daily Newsman Gene Morgan, "the strangest manifestation of youthful exuberance perhaps ever witnessed since the Middle Ages' ill-fated Children's Crusade."

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