User:Klooka

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Klooka is a username, a handle, George Spink often uses on the Internet. It is short for Klookamop, the nickname of the legendary jazz drummer Kenny Clarke.

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George Spink (born Sept. 19, 1940 in Berwyn, Illinois, a Chicago suburb) is a freelance writer, web site designer and builder, blogger, and former radio program host from Chicago. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1990.

Spink attended St. Leonard's Catholic School in Berwyn, graduating in June 1954. He went to Fenwick High School, a Dominican college prep school in neighboring Oak Park for two years. Spink transferred to J. Sterling Morton High School in Cicero, between Berwyn and Chicago, graduating in June 1958.

In June 1963, he earned a B.A. degree with department honors from Northwestern University. He was awarded the Edwin Shuman Literary Prize from the Department of English for the academic year 1962-1963. The prize came with a full tuition scholarship. Spink was recognized by the Department of English for his writing ability based on three essays he submitted. The essay subjects were Karl Marx, Blaise Pascal, and Suzanne Langer.

Spink did a year of graduate study in political science at Stanford University (1963-1964). He didn't like some of the faculty members in Stanford's political science department and considered their graduate program as sophomoric compared to Northwestern's undergraduate program. At the end of four quarters of study, his adviser, Jan Triska, suggested Spink take a leave of absence. "You've been working so hard for so long," Triska told him. "Take a break! Get the feel of your generation!"

Spink did just that. He bought an old 1956 Meteor (a Canadian Ford) station wagon and drove back to Chicago. He spent a week there, sleeping in his car on the Northwestern Campus in Evanston and showering in a men's dorm every day. At night, a friend of his from his undergraduate days, introduced him to a blues club called Big John's in Chicago's Old Town Neighborhood.

Spink ended up working at Big John's from December 1964 until it closed in September 1966. He checked ID's, seated customers, served drinks, tended bar, and sometimes broke up fights. Young white blues musicians Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, and Barry Goldberg and Steve Miller launched their careers at Big John's. Black blues bands from the South Side soon worked there, too, alternating two or three week engagements with the white blues bands and working on Monday and Tuesday nights. Big John's was packed almost every night.

In September 1966, the two owners of Big John's were charged with bribery, serving an underage customer, gambling, and soliciting. All but the bribery charge were dismissed. The club lost its liquor licensed and closed. During the next three months, the building housing Big John's and three neighboring buildings were condemned. By spring, all four buildings were cleared and a high-rise apartment building called Americana Towers rose in its place.

Chicago, the city that worked had worked again.

Spink began his professional writing career in December 1966 as features editor for Institutions Magazine, then the leading trade magazine for hotels and restaurants. In May 1968, Spink joined the American Hospital Association as senior editor of its Journal of the American Hospital Association. He left a year later to work in the editorial services division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons, working for James Ward, who had been his editor and mentor at Institutions Magazine. Spink wrote a variety of editorial materials, including travel guides for Chrysler-Plymouth and American Oil, an owners manual for Plymouth automobiles, and edited a history of the American Housewares Association.

In May 1972, R.R. Donnelley had its first layoff in its 100-plus years, the result of both Life and Look magazines ceasing weekly publication. They were two of Donnelly's biggest customers. More than 500 Donnelley employees were laid off, including Spink. Fortunately, a Donnelley prinitng salesman introduced Spink to one of his clients, the public affairs director, Joseph Labine, at Continental Bank in Chicago. Labine hired Spink to write and edit quarterly and annual reports for the bank's parent company, Continental Illinois Corporation. Labine encouraged Spink to take advantage of the bank's tuition refund program to earn an M.B.A. at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago's downtown evening campus. Spink began in September 1973.

The quarterly reports always contained three four-page feature articles. Spink wrote most of them and sometimes found outside contributors, such as Don Jacobs, then Dean of Northwestern's Business School. Jacobs wanted Spink to get his M.B.A. at Northwestern's evening program. Spink tried it for two quarters during the winter quarter of 1972 and the spring quarters of 1973, then switched to the University of Chicago's evening program in September 1973.

While living in Chicago, he freelanced articles about jazz, big band, and folk music for the former Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Maroon (the student newspaper at the University of Chicago, where Spink earned an M.B.A. with a specialization in finance from the Graduate School of Business in June 1976.

From the time he was a boy, Spink has had a strong interest in jazz and big band music, something he attributes to his parents and his mother's two younger sisters who lived with his family when he was a boy in the 1940s and early 1950s.

"They listened to the radio all day long," Spink recalls. "I heard big band music constantly from the time I was in my swaddling cloths. In 1949, one of my aunts finally married. She took her beautiful RCA Victor radio-phonograph console and several dozen albums of 78 rpm records with her.

"My parents bought a portable Webcor record player for me, one of the first three-speed units on the market," Spink says. I used money I earned from cutting grass, washing cars, and shoveling snow to buy my own records. I purchased most of them from Kral's Music Store in neighboring Cicero. It was my favorite store around.

"Beginning with my ninth birthday in September 1949, my parents allowed me to take the CB&Q (later Burlington, and now Metra) commuter train from Berwyn to Union Station in downtown Chicago. Sometimes I met my dad for lunch. He worked at 9 South Clinton at Madison as the chief accountant for a small housing and feeding firm. We walked a block west to the Streamliner, a popular restaurant at noon and a jazz club in the evening.

"I frequently visited the Hudson-Ross records store at Madison and Wells and their much larger store on Wabash near Van Buren. One day, a black salesman I came to know at the Madison Street store suggested I hop on the "El" on the corner and get off at 63rd and Woodlawn on the South Side. The salesman told me there was a great jazz record store on the corner that carried many more jazz and big band records than Hudson-Ross's downtown stores and Kral's in Cicero.

"I followed his suggestion and visited that store often. The black owner and I hit it off. He introduced me to 78's by Jimmie Lunceford, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, and other black bands. He also had a great selection of 78s by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and other white bands."

After earning his M.B.A. at the University of Chicago, Spink worked at the University for three years, first as a fund-raiser and then as a writer and media relations representative for the Graduate School of Business. In September 1976, following an article he wrote about the Robert De Niro - Liza Minnelli big band music for the Chicago Daily News, he accepted an invitation from the student-managed radio station WHPK-FM to host his own radio show. Spink called it "The Saturday Swing Shift." It aired from 9 AM to 1 PM on Saturdays. His show became quite popular in Hyde Park and throughout the South Side of Chicago. However, WHPK-FM only had a 10-watt transmitter and a small broadcast radius.

Spink's articles about jazz and big band music brought him to the attention of WBEZ-FM, the National Public Radio station in Chicago that then offered considering jazz programming. From July 1978 until September 1981, Spink broadcast "The Saturday Swing Shift" on WBEZ-FM on Saturday afternoons from 1 PM until 5 PM, preceding Garrison Keilor's popular "Prairie Home Companion."

In 1979, Chicago Tribune Media Critic Gary Deeb wrote a glowing review of Spink's radio program. His article surprised no one more than Spink, because Deeb had a reputation of being a tough critic who often wrote caustic reviews of Chicago radio and TV personalities. Deeb pointed out that Spink's Saturday afternoon big band show consistently ranked in the top five AM and FM radio shows during every 15-minute interval it was on the air

Spink had no idea Deeb even knew about his show. A friend called Spink at his Hyde Park apartment about 6 o'clock in the morning to tell him Deeb's column that day was about his "The Saturday Swing Shift" show.