Editor’s note: This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Chicago newspaper and syndicated columnist Mike Royko, a fixture of the Windy City’s media for more than three decades. The Chicago Tribune, Royko’s final professional stop, called him the “voice” of the city in its obituary; Studs Terkel once said, “Mike was Chicago.”
THE WEEKLY STANDARD’S Andrew Ferguson, a former Chicago resident, remembered Royko in an article entitled “S.O.B., R.I.P.” from the magazine’s May 12, 1997, issue. The text is reposted below.
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Of the many reminiscences that have poured out since the death of Mike Royko last Tuesday, my favorite came from one of his fellow columnists, Rheta Grimsley Johnson of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Royko was a hero to Johnson, as he was to many people who grind out copy for a living, and she finally laid eyes on him during a Democratic National Convention a few years ago. He was sitting alone in a hotel coffee shop. She couldn’t quite bring herself to walk up and speak to the great man, and she wrote a column about it.
But before I go on with Johnson’s story, I would like to interject one of my own. (Johnson’s story is better than mine, and one thing you learned reading Royko was to save your best stuff for the kicker.) Royko was my hero, too. I grew up reading him in the Chicago Daily News (d. 1978). He brought news from a world that was only dimly imaginable from the outer suburbs of the city — the now much-mourned world of ethnic neighborhoods and two-flats and corner taverns, where everybody smoked and worked with his hands and didn’t take no guff. I don’t know whether that world ever existed in the romantic version recollected these days by its survivors, but Royko made it vividly real, and very funny, and sometimes, but not too often, poignant.
Even when he wasn’t writing about those neighborhoods they lurked in his columns somewhere — he wrote from them, I mean, even when he didn’t write about them. Like all newspaper columnists with too much space to fill, he could summon various emotions at will for the purposes of that day’s column: high dudgeon on Monday, weepy sentimentality on Tuesday, ironic detachment for the middle of the week, and so on. Unlike his colleagues, though, he almost never struck a false note. The gift of his invention seemed bottomless. It dazzled me as a boy, and never stopped dazzling me.
When I was in my twenties and had moved to the city, I started hanging out at the Billy Goat Tavern below Michigan Avenue, fabled already in the early ’80s as the quintessential “shot-and-beer” joint. Yuppies liked the Billy Goat. We could breathe in the fumes of ethnic-neighborhood Chicago without venturing out to an actual ethnic neighborhood, which might have been yucky. We probably ruined the bar as a result. Wizened Chicagoans say the Billy Goat is no longer the “real Chicago”: It’s too self-conscious, its grime and gruffness almost self-parodic. But — alas — the fakery is what makes it, in 1997, the “real Chicago.”
One night I brought in a friend visiting from California, a very pretty woman. At the corner of the bar sat Royko, alone, hunched over the paper. I had never seen him in person before. One hand held a Pall Mall, the other a plastic cup of (I think) Old Style. This was too good to be true — my friend was going to get a taste of the real city!
I ordered a glass of white wine for her and, though I shudder to think of it now, a shot and a beer for myself. I screwed up my courage. “Hi, Mr. Royko, ” I finally said. “Great column today!” My voice was very high.
Even now, 15 years later, I can’t think of the look he gave me without feeling slightly sick. It wasn’t a sneer. It wasn’t condescension. But there was profound revulsion in it, I can tell you that. He hunched over his paper again.
After a half-hour or so, I got up to go to the bathroom. When I came out a few minutes later, Royko was sitting on my barstool.
Now he was hunched over my friend, whispering. When he saw me he gave me that look again. Slowly, very slowly, he stood up, winked at her, and climbed the stairs out of the bar.
I didn’t say anything, nor did my friend, but at last, after several interminable minutes, she giggled. “He said you were a dork,” she said.
He was probably an S.O.B. But he was the greatest journalist of his time, and being an S.O.B had something to do with it. In his last years he refused to bend to the pressures that closed in on him — the pressures of political correctness, in current shorthand — the same pressures that have crippled journalism elsewhere. Liberals always loved him for championing the “little guy.” But nowadays the little guy is just as likely to be a white middle-aged small-businessman harassed by OSHA or the EEOC, or otherwise bedeviled by do- gooders and busybodies. He championed the little guy to the end. He was right to say that he hadn’t changed, the world had. So had the city.
When Rheta Johnson’s column about Royko came out, he read it and wrote her a note. “You should have spoken,” he said. “I would have tipped my hat, bowed from the waist, and pinched you in the ass.”
America cannot afford to lose many more such men as this.
