Trackless trolley cars remained in service on a few North Side routes into the early 1970s, by which time holding up bus drivers for their coin changers had become frequent enough that the transit companies went to exact fare (in those days, that meant keeping coins on hand) and this car is running in its as retired livery.
There are collectors who have preserved a variety of external and internal transit advertising cards, and the Illinois Railway Museum have enough such cards to provide era-and-locality correct cards for Chicago, Milwaukee, or Cleveland cars, to name three. It's the specific dash card on 9631 that provides the transfer to the Fairness Doctrine.
In Milwaukee, adolescents of the late Sixties and early Seventies likely had their transistor radio tuned to WOKY or WRIT for all Beatles, all the time, although some of the more adventurous music fans would tune in WLS for their offerings. Before the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee, if you wanted baseball the Cubs were on WGN, just like the song once went, and the Sox were on WMAQ. "Easy listening" on WAIT might have referred to elevator music, or to the sentimental ballads of the Forties and early Fifties that were the background music for whelping the Baby Boom.
A lot has changed in sixty years. The one constant has been WTMJ carrying the Milwaukee Brewers. The Sox were on WGN briefly, and they're now somewhere else on the AM dial. The Cubs are on what was WMAQ: that frequency is now 670 WSCR "The Score." The Packer games are on WOKY, and WRIT sold their AM frequency to WJYI. Adventurous Milwaukee music fans don't tune in WLS as that's political talk, generally of the Rush Limbaugh school. And WAIT some time ago sold that frequency to WCPT, Chicago's Progressive Talk.
And thus, dear reader, do we catch the bus to the irrelevance of the Fairness Doctrine. "Now that distinctions among the various uses of the spectrum are subject to fewer technical constraints, and that server and network capacity is relatively cheap, perhaps there is sufficient capacity for handling information that a 'fairness doctrine' from an era of tighter constraints is no longer necessary."
Not that the concept doesn't still have its advocates. There are people who will complain that the absence of a Fairness Doctrine made it possible for Rush Limbaugh to spout off without the carrying stations having to offer time for "significant opposing viewpoints." The absence of that doctrine also makes it possible for Thom Hartmann to spout off without his carrying station incurring that obligation. It was the popularity of Rush Limbaugh's arguments, many of which were inconvenient to Establishmentarian Wisdom, that led some people to address what they thought was a symptom, the absence of a Fairness Doctrine, rather than what was the cause, namely that Mr Limbaugh was calling attention to things a lot of people perceived but that did not have a champion: to an extent, the Donald Trump appeal is similar.
In the years since Mr Limbaugh crossed the final summit, the calls for a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine have become less frequent. It's possible that Mr Limbaugh was sui generis, and most of the ideological yakkers to the right are a depressing mix of the angry and the boring. The two guys who have the Excellence in Broadcasting portfolio are uneven, sometimes predictable, and on occasion soporific. Dan Bongino has the 11 am to 2 pm slot on WLS, and he's often angry. I suspect that Mr Limbaugh would have modelled ways to offer more than Trump trials and Trump apologetics and Biden is senile in his three daily hours. It is, additionally, a truth universally accepted that the ideological yakkers to the left are a depressing mix of the freaky and the boring and the presence of that capacity to make possible a private-sector network for ideological yakkers to the left even at distress prices did nothing to overcome the disadvantages that come with being boring with content lacking general appeal.
It's probably too much to ask, though, that "Easy Listening" or "Forties Ballads" become formats for radio stations again, not with make-your-own-collection capabilities on line and in the cloud.
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