Education: Try School Today

With accompanying gusts of self-congratulation, Chicago's high-velocity radio station WIND was noisily blowing good toward an unaccustomed quadrant—the city's high schools. Teen-agers got a daily earful of such airborne blasts as: "Want to hear about a contest that's fantabulous? Then, guys and gals, listen! Just write, in 50 words or less, a statement saying 'I am going back to school because.' Enter today—that sawbuck will look pretty sharp in your pocketbook! The grand prize winner will win $100 in loot. Take part in all these kicks!" Sample promotion tagline: "The little red school house is—well—like wow!"

The problem attacked by WIND and three other Westinghouse stations is real enough: 40% of ninth-graders in Chicago —and in the rest of the U.S.—do not go on to graduate from high school. But WIND, puffing a popular cause, peddles education with an announcer's No-Cal heartiness. The push began three weeks ago, winds up this week as school starts. Says the station's Program Manager David Croninger: "We put on a saturation campaign much like an ad agency would schedule to sell cigarettes." Hard-selling its product, the station each day broadcast a windbag of "Hi, kids" spot announcements by such notables as White Sox Manager Al Lopez, Singer Tommy Sands and Inland Steel President Joseph Block. At a monster rally last week (17 cops and a turn-away crowd of 2,500 teeners), Deejay Howard Miller paraded an in-person menagerie of teen-rage songbirds, drew from Singer Eddy Arnold the admission that he quit high school in the tenth grade and wishes he had not. When the din quieted, School Superintendent's Assistant Francis McKeag told the summer-happy youngsters that school would help them find a career and a mate.

Whatever the campaign's effect on Chicago schoolchildren (about 300 a day wrote in for a chance at $10 daily prizes and a $100 grand prize), it should draw from their parents large quantities of good will for WIND. Last week, while patting his station warmly on the back, WIND's Miller indicated that he is well aware of this: "In this day of lip service to the FCC policy of public service by radio stations, it is refreshing to see a station do a dynamic, positive good for a community. Of course if it gets the kids back to school, that's wonderful. What I think is interesting is that we prove the station has an adult appeal. A parent might be disgusted because of a station's playing Elvis Presley or Ricky Nelson. She'll say, 'Go out and play. Turn off the damn radio. Stop listening to that junk.' Now she hears that station telling that kid to go back to school. She says, 'Listen.' "