Granger

by Jim Tuohy

We were newspapermen

People today who have the jobs we had—reporting for newspapers–call themselves journalists. Sounds fancier, I guess.

Television reporters call themselves journalists, too, although I’ve never figured out what journal they work for. Even anchor people, who just read stuff other people write, call themselves journalists.

But we were newspapermen, some women too, but not too many in those days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and none on nights. That’s when we worked, a small group of us at the Chicago Sun-Times working the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, with one person designated to work till 4 a.m.

It was a time of great energy in local coverage. In the second half of the 60s alone Martin Luther King moved to Chicago and conducted open housing marches, Richard Speck killed eight nurses, the biggest snowfall in the city’s history, 23 inches, paralyzed the town, riots erupted after King was assassinated, the Democratic National Convention attracted thousands of anti-Viet Nam War protestors and the police shocked the nation by beating up as many as they could, the indictment of eight activists from the convention protests were put on trial in the infamous Conspiracy 8 (later 7) trial.

There were plenty of others things happening, of course, and there were four daily newspapers competing to scoop each other. And we nightsiders at the Sun-Times were in the middle of it, with a guy named Bill Granger one of the ringleaders.

I say ringleader because we were a little like a street gang—aggressive and volatile, profane and hard-drinking, most of us imperfect examples, to say the least, as husbands or boyfriends.

We might not have been very good citizens, but I must say, were good at our jobs—none better than Granger–even though we seemed to give high echelon editors the jitters.

“The nightside staff at the Sun-Times at the Sun-Times was the best newspaper staff I’ve ever seen,” said Granger. “There was Paul McGrath and Tom Fitzpatrick and Tom Dolan and Dick Foster, Paul Galloway, Jamie Campbell, Sam Washington [our first black reporter—how times have progressed], Brian Boyer, Bob Olmstead.

“Everybody knew how to report and everyone knew how to write and everybody had balls about the city. We were producing our own newspaper, separate from the rests of the paper. We’d change the paper around every night with our own stories. We killed the Tribune. We killed everyone.

“There was a great sense of freedom on the night staff. It was the idea of what a paper was supposed to be like that I had since I was a kid. We gave the news a sense of real life, the way it really was. There was no ideology, just a sense of life and truth. It was great to be young and to be on that staff.”

Nobody’s young any more, of course, and Bill died the other day. He was 70, and his mind had been deteriorating since he was 59 and he suffered a series of strokes. The quotes from him in this column come from talks through 40 years of friendship, although, the last decade the insights were silenced.

Recalling some of our conversations it occurs they comprises a tight seminar on good newspapering, as well as the craft of writing, about which Granger knew a great deal, since from the time he left the Sun-Times in the 1970s until he was struck in 1999, nobody in the country did more of it.

In that time he wrote 28 books, a daily newspaper column and numerous articles for publications around the country.

Granger was fast, among the fastest newspaper writers I ever worked with, and there were a lot of fast ones, rewrite men who spilled out stories on deadline, employing two or three copy kids who would run pages of two or three paragraphs down to the composing room where another two or three linotype operators would set them in type. A thousand word story might get done in five or ten minutes.

But speed is not always quality. Granger produced quality. And if he sometimes missed, it didn’t matter. He thought everything he did was good, and it gave him great drive. And a guy like Granger, if he had to, could speed the process if time were tight by dictating a story off his notes from the field.

One night he went to lunch at the Billy Goat. Lunch came after the home delivery deadline at 9:30 p.m., and it was suppose to last a half hour but everybody took longer. So he came back to the office after 10:30. He sat down and began writing about Sam Sianis, who had recently taken over ownership of the Billy Goat after the death of his uncle, Billy (Goat) Sianis.

Granger intended the piece to be run as a Cityscape, a feature that was a much coveted writing assignment. A reporter submitted an idea, almost always a profile of someone interesting, and if it was approved by the city editor, the writer was given an unusual amount of space in the paper—as many as 2,500 words. Some writers labored for days on a Cityscape.

Granger didn’t bother with the submission process. He merely found Sam a guy with an interesting background as he talked to him at lunch. He would submit the Cityscape for approval later.  He finished in less than an hour and a half—done by midnight, and it was quite good.

One time at lunch I told him about an experience I had at a suburban newspaper where I had been the sports editor.  He was struck by the quirkiness of the story. We went back to the office and did what little work was still to be done in the dead hours before two. About 1:30 Bill dropped some copy on my desk. It was a 3,000 word short story; he had converted my tale into a tight work of fiction.

We used to bombard the city desk with ideas for stories, or rummage through the future file for good stories that might be coming up. Granger was one of the most aggressive bombardiers and rummagers. Once he spotted a p.r. release from the local chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars, an organization which honored all things connected with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books. They were having their annual meeting or party or something.

Covering that story would have put me to sleep, especially since I had barely read any Sherlock Holmes. But Granger had—all of them apparently—and he jumped on the assignment.  He came back 30 minutes before deadline and wrote a thorough report of the Irregulars’ gathering—written ear-perfectly in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After that no one but Granger would dare to cover the yearly meetings of the Baker Street Irregulars.

When he started writing books, Granger felt his early advances were too small so he decided to get advances for two books and write them at the same time. In the three years after he left the Sun-Times he had seven book published, including two spy novels, two mysteries, a biography of Mayor Jane Byrne (co-authored with his wife, Lori), and an international thriller, as well as a novel set in Chicago written under the pen name Bill Griffith.

Bill was a South Side guy. Until he was out of high school, he was typical of a certain kind of South Sider who never sees any other part of the city, sometimes barely getting out of his own neighborhood. And since most of the city is on the South Side and most of the jobs as he was growing up were there, it would have been possible for him never to have left.

But he was meant to be a newspaperman. Born in 1941, Bill was the oldest of four children. His father was a laborer in the building trades and for a time had soft drink route which sometimes Bill helped him work. Granger said their family was “working poor.”

Twice the Grangers were the last white family left in an expanding black South Side. They ended up at 52nd and Carpenter while Bill went to De La Salle High School. The changing neighborhoods meant Granger had confrontations on occasion with black youths. He once stabbed a boy in one of those confrontations. He was in sixth grade. The constant tension took a toll.

“Every day you had to go out and face trouble,” he said. “It made me crazy. That’s why I’m crazy today.” Whatever tensions he endured and whatever insecurities he developed, he knew early what he wanted to be.

“In fourth grade I put out my own newspaper, The Chicago Report. I wrote it by hand, then made copies by hand and then distributed the copies around the neighborhood.”

(Incidentally, Granger’s colleague at the Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, who grew up on Washington Street in Urbana, was also born to be a newspaperman. In fifth grade he put out his own newspaper, The Washington Street News. When he was 15, Roger was working 30 hours a week at the Champaign News-Gazette. Granger was editor of his high school paper and both became editors of their college papers.)

A counselor at De La Salle pointed Granger in the direction of Northwestern, well known for its journalism school but completely unknown to the isolated South Side kid. He had won a $600 tuition scholarship to the school of his choice, so he got on the el and went north.

“When the el passed Madison Street it was the firs time I had ever been on the North Side,” he said.

He found even with his scholarship the $1,000 tuition at Northwestern was too steep. He got back on the el and as it pulled into Fullerton he noticed the sign that said DePaul University.

“I had never heard of DePaul. I never knew there was such a place. I walked in and asked the guy how much tuition was. He said, ‘Four hundred and ninety-eight dollars. I said, ‘Good. Where do I sign up?”

His senior year, he became editor of the DePaulia. The paper won the All-American Award of the Collegiate Press Association, the highest award that the organization has. The paper had never won the award before and it has never won it since.

One day sitting in the old St. Louis Brown’s Fan Club, a basement bar around the corner from the Sun-Times, I asked Granger how he went about improving the DePaul paper.

“Cut the shit,” he said.

One story criticized the university for “box factory education,” claiming that everybody was coming out the same. Another criticized the school for freezing the poor out of housing as it expanded. A third took on the school’s chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality.

“CORE claimed all the white students at DePaul were racist. We knocked down that claim. It was 1963 and a lot of people were feeling white guilt. I had grown up with blacks and even though I experienced a lot of reverse discrimination I had developed no prejudice towards them, because growing up in a black neighborhood you have to meet the good people as well as the bad.

“So I didn’t feel any white guilt and we ran a series of articles that said CORE was full of shit.

“My whole idea at DePaul was to write from the common point of view, not the elitist college point of view.”

The university wanted Granger to tone himself down, and there was even talk of taking away his scholarship. Then the paper won the All-American Award and Granger was allowed to escape the institution with his scholarship and integrity intact.

Granger went work for United Press International in Chicago but after six months was drafted and sent to Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. While on a pass to Washington, D.C., he met Lori Meschke, a student at Antioch College who was working for six months as an intern at the Washington Post.

Lori was from the South Side. Her father was an engineer and her mother a professional with the Department of Urban Development. She had attended the University of Chicago Lab School and before that Kozminski grade school, where she had been the only white girl in her class. She and Bill got along immediately.

They saw as much of each other as they could in Washington. They talked about books and writing, the things Bill felt deeply about. But they also talked about art and music and abstract concepts that bill had not considered before.

Lori was the smartest person I ever met,” he once told me. “She still is.”

They fell in love, this tough-talking South side boy with the sensitive core, and the carefully educated, thoughtful girl with the reservoir of street savviness. They were married in1967, a year after Bill got a job as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

After the1982 publication of The Shattered Eye, which involves computer tampering on an international level that threatens World War III, Granger said, “I got locked into the idea, but I had to use Lori. I didn’t know jack shit about how computers work and essentially she knew everything. I needed her expertise so that when programmers read it they didn’t wince.”

Granger left the Tribune in 1969 and joined the Sun-Times. It was the difference in the way the two papers covered the 1968 convention that made him switch.

“I thought the Tribune’s coverage was abysmal,” he said. “That’s not a political evaluation. It’s just that a newspaper should tell the truth and fuck the rest. In its convention coverage the Tribune consciously lied, they consciously distorted and I couldn’t work for a paper that did that. It was a matter of principle. I hate to say that because I hate people who talk about principle.”

Granger sometimes examined his speech to see if he sounded affected. Once we were discussing how he wrote two novels at the same time in completely separate genres.

“That was an interesting life experience,” Granger said, but he said it with a sardonic inflection that meant it really wasn’t an interesting life experience at all, that writing two books at one time was something one did for money and it consisted of concentration, discipline and speed. In fact, he said it so that you knew that “life experience” was not even a form of expression that guys from the South Side used seriously.

Schism was a spy novel in the November Man series, and Time for Frankie Coolin was about a Chicago tradesman who is worried about going to prison because of his indirect involvement with some stolen television sets.  The gruff dialogue accurately reflects the way white working class men talk on the South side of Chicago.

His agent liked it but the first editor he showed it to didn’t. “She almost vomited. She thought it was racist, sexist, everything bad. But they like it a random House.”

When the two books came out in 1981the reviews were exceptional. Reviewers of Frankie Coolin compared Granger with Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell, and they were right. It was written under the pen name Bill Griffith. His agent Aaron Priest said they wanted Granger’s November Man series to be separate from his other fiction.

“We don’t want to confuse your readers with a different style. When John LeCarre wrote a romantic book out of the spy genre his readers got mad at him.”

While he was still at the Sun-Times, Granger began work on his first novel, Public Murders, based on a murder in Grant Park of a Swedish woman. No publisher would buy it.

“One agent said it was nice but that he couldn’t sell mysteries any more because they were out of vogue. I told him I was writing a spy novel.  He said, ‘Now that I can sell.’ I hadn’t really been working on a spy novel, but I went home and wrote five chapters.”

At Lori’s urging Granger took a six month leave of absence from the Sun-Times. They went to England, Scotland and Ireland, where Granger filed some stories about The Troubles. He came back changed.

“Europe? Fuck. What did I know about Europe. But I discovered there was a world east of Chicago. That’s when I developed background and the confidence that would lead to the books.”

When he came back he found the Sun-Times maverick night side staff had been broken up. Tom Stites a former night city editor, talked about the breakup.

“For some reason they started to peck away at that great staff. Granger and some other guys would take hour lunches instead of half hour. The dayside editors started putting heat on me to watch the hours. It didn’t really didn’t matter if they took long lunches. I always knew where they were. You couldn’t stop those guys from running back if a story broke.

“But the establishment was after them, wanted to rein them in. Maybe they were jealous. I don’t know. They were a bunch of crazy men, but they were great. They should have left them alone.

Granger volunteered for duty in the suburbs, and eventually became the paper’s television columnist. In1977 the managing editor of the Sun-Times was Stuart H. Loory, who was a good friend of the station manager at Channel 5. The manager, Lee Hanna, had brought in his brother-in-law, a man of no perceptible news ability, to be news director. Together, they succeeded in producing the worst and lowest rated news program among the Chicago network affiliates.

None of this, of course, escaped Granger’s public attention. Loory told Granger to lay off his buddy Hanna.

“I immediately wrote a column about what a dope Hanna was and Loory fired me from the column.”

In March of 1978, the Chicago Daily News folded. Both papers were owned by Field Enterprises, and although the Sun-Times was in good financial shape, an unjust clause in the union contract allowed Sun-Times employees to be laid off if management chose to replace them with out-of-work Daily News staffers.

The top brass used the opportunity to get rid of people who were hard to handle, regardless of talent. At the Daily News it was people like Rob Warden and Don Zochert, a brilliant writer. At the Sun-Time, of course, it was what left of the old feisty night side staff, led by Granger, along with Paul McGrath, Tom Dolan and Dick Foster.

“It was Ash Wednesday,” Granger said.” I stopped at St. Peter’s and then went to the office and they fired me. McGrath, too. Me and McGrath had come over from the Tribune at almost the same time. I recommended him. So there we were both fired.

“McGrath says, ‘At least I’ll leave with the guy I came in with.’

“We both walked out and got stiff. I still had the ashes on my forehead.”

Granger began working on November Man while Public Murders was making the round of publishers. The hero was secret agent named Devereaux (no first name ever given), code named November. The plot concerned an Irish Republican Army attempt to assassinate a cousin of Queen Elizabeth on a boat in the English Channel

Three weeks after the book came out in August of 1979, Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, was blown up on a boat off the coast of Ireland. The IRA claimed responsibility. Suddenly Granger’s little paperback went into extra printings.

“Back in 1971 I had a boozy conversation with some IRA guys,” he said. “They said the issue in Ireland was no longer civil rights but getting the British out and gaining a united Ireland. To that end and to break the British will, they were carrying out assassinations.

“I thought, from their point of view the logical step for them was to assassinate a member of the Royal family, someone like Price Charles. That’s how I wrote the book, with Prince Charles as the target. But Fawcett didn’t want another book with a real person, so I made the guy in the book a cousin, modeled after a nice Englishman and his wife I met in Ireland.”

The book was printed in several foreign languages, although it wasn’t published in England for three years.  After 19 publishers turned down Public Murders, it was published in paperback. It won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best mystery novel.

Eventually there were 13 books in the November Man series and several more in the Drover series, about an ex-sportswriter named Jimmy Drover turned “knight errant.”  Prominent in the Drover books is Black Kelly, a retired fire captain and owner of Maguire’s, a bar under the el tracks at Webster and Sheffield. Granger had a book signing party for Drover and the Zebras and at Kelly’s pub, located under the el tracks at Webster and Sheffield run by a retired fire captain named John Kelly.

One of the November Man books somehow ended up with a denouement Green Bay, Wisconsin, strictly because Granger’s sister, Ruth, lives there. A love interest in the book is a beautiful woman named Ruth.

Bill wrote three books with Lori, Fighting Jane, Lords of the Last Machine, and The Magic Feather, about their struggles to find the right special education program for their son, Alec, in the public school system. Lori also became a practicing attorney.

Granger, even after 28 books, was always a newspaperman. During the 1980s he was writing four columns a week for the Tribune—the paper had changed for the better since the ‘60s, he said—and in the 1990s a daily column for the suburban Daily Herald.

Lori had a quiet admiration of Bill’s writing, its variety and the speed which he produced it. Bill never got over the quality of Lori’s mind, the sweep of her knowledge.

We were having a few beers one early afternoon in the Billy Goat. It was late in 1982 and he had just returned from six months in Europe finishing a book partly set in Moscow and researching books that would eventually be set in Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.

“Billy, you’ve come a long way from 59th and Carpenter,” I said. “I believe that thing on your head is a tam-o’-shanter.”

“It’s Lori. She’s the one who got me to expand,” Granger said. “She talked me into taking the leave of absence from the Sun-Times, and she’s still the one who pushes me to experiment, to experience what’s going on in the world. A little while ago she got me to eat some quiche. I’m 41 years old and I’m eating quiche for the first time and it’s great.

“Shit,’ I say, ‘this is terrific stuff.’”

He got up to leave. A writer from a small literary magazine wanted to interview him, and Granger had set up a meeting at the Press Club, which was in the Wrigley Building. Granger knew the magazine did not pay well, and it certainly would not pay expenses.

He would tell the writer that his money was no good, that only members could pay at the Press Club. He therefore could sign the check without embarrassing the writer.

Bill Granger, the hard guy from the South Side, would never tell anybody he had cooked up such a plan, though.

end

Maguire University

by Jim Tuohy

The weekend before the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament’s last round of games known as the Final Four, the folks from Maguire University met at Kelly’s Pub, located under the el tracks at Webster and Sheffield, essentially on the DePaul University campus.

Although Kelly’s is usually concerned collegiately with things DePaul, which is a real school, sometimes it is concerned with things Maguire, which is not.

How this came about is a story often told this time of the year in sports features around the country, usually in the city where the NCAA Final Four is held.

Back in 1963 Loyola of Chicago went to Louisville to play in what is now called the Final Four, but back then was simply know as the finals, with two semi-final games on Friday and the Championship game on Saturday night.

Loyola was a highly rated team all season, although the consensus number one team in the nation was Cincinnati, which had been the national champions the previous two years.

The coach of Loyola was George Ireland, and one of his assistants was Bill Shay, a regular at a bar in Forest Park named Maguire’s. Maguire’s was a hangout for sports fans and coaches, mainly from Fenwick High School but also for other Catholic League teams. Scouts frequently dropped in, aware that the place was patronized by some of the most knowledgeable followers of high school basketball in Chicago. Fenwick was on Washington Street in Oak Park, which in those days was dry, and McGuire’s was just over the line on Madison Street in Forest Park, which was wet and close to Fenwick.

Tickets to the final four were precious in those days. Freedom Hall in Louisville held about 19,000. (In contrast, the Superdome in New Orleans, site of this year’s Final Four, holds about 60,000 for basketball). Bill Shay had tickets for the finals, and about eight guys from the Maguire’s crowd went to Louisville. They had such a good time partying at auxiliary events surrounding the games that they encouraged others in the crowd to go the next year, with or without tickets, which can always be obtained one way or the other at big events.

By 1972 more than 100 of the Maguires were going wherever the the Final Four was held and their love of a good time had become well known among other attendees, who included coaches of every level of college basketball, who hold conferences during Final Four week. The Maguires always had a hospitality suite wherever they stayed and coaches like Ray Meyer of  DePaul, Al McGuire of Marquette and Mike Krzyzewski of Duke would drop in to say hello.

That first year in Louisville Len Tyrell, then the football coach at Fenwick, was sitting at a hotel bar on Saturday afternoon with Bill Shay and a couple of other guys and Loyola coach George Ireland. Loyola had beaten Duke the night before by 19 points—it was Duke’s first appearance in a Final Four—and was going to play Cincinnati that night for the national championship. A man approached Ireland.

“Aren’t you the guy who’s coaching tonight?” the man asked.

“I am,” Ireland replied.

“And you’re drinking in a bar now?”

“I’m coaching, not playing,” Ireland said.

Although most people do not realize it, Ireland contributed significantly to the integration of college basketball. In 1963, the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his deliver his “I have a dream speech,” Ireland was the first college coach to start four black players.

When the team met Mississippi State in the East Regionals, the governor of Mississippi and the head of the state police wanted the team to withdraw from the game because Mississippi had a law that forbade white teams playing against integrated teams. The Mississippi players courageously voted to play Loyola anyway. Loyola won, but Mississippi State players had gained their everlasting respect.

In the championship game Loyola fielded its four black starters and Cincinnati three, the combination being the first time an NCAA championship was played by a majority of black players.

Loyola won the game in overtime 60 to 58.

One day in 1972 one of the coaches from Fenwick came into Maguire’s with a rather long application. It was issued by the NCAA. Not all colleges belong to the NCAA, and this application went to colleges that might be interested in joining. As a joke the McGuire regulars decided to fill it out.

The questionnaire asked the name of the school and the coaches and administrators of various programs. For the school’s name they wrote Maguire University, 7215 W. Madison, Forest Park, and they took off from there. Their conference was independent, enrollment 1,600, colors green and white, nickname The Jollymen, field house Lawless (after Tony Lawless, a legendary Fenwick coach). Their football stadium was Friar holding 12,000, their president was Mel Connolly (a truck driver in real life), with Bill Shay the basketball coach and Len Tyrrell  the football coach.

Other Maguire regulars were listed in positions like athletic director, baseball and track coaches, and sports information director. Gert Ireland, wife of George, was listed as the director of women’s physical education. A Chicago police officer who worked at O’Hare was listed as a football assistant. But when they were filling out the application they could not think of his last name, only his first, Sal, so they listed him as Sal DeCopper.

The gag worked. Maguire University was accepted into membership of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and as such was entitled to a block of tickets for the Final Four and a listing in a book put out by the NCAA every year called The National Directory of College Athletics. McGuire U was in the 1972-1973 registry, commonly called the blue book.

The blue book is used by many high school coaches who might be interested in finding a suitable college for one of their players who had been overlooked by other college coaches or scouts. Coaches also use it when trying to fill a schedule of games for various sports. The NCAA takes the book quite seriously, considering it a bible of reliable information (and probably a good money-maker).

Maguire’s saloon had become Maguire University and at the 1973 Final Four in St. Louis, they had a Maguire University hospitality suite at the downtown hotel where they had a block of rooms. They had pennants that said “Maguire University Final Five” and T-shirts. They were more popular than ever, as everyone played along with the joke. It didn’t hurt that the Maguires were good natured spenders and generous tippers.

In 1974 Marquette, coached by Al McGuire, made the Final Four for the first time and the fun-loving McGuire, the son of a Queens tavern owner, became a regular visitor to the Maguire U. hospitality suite.  A confused local sports writer asked Coach McGuire if there was a connection between him and Maguire University.

“No, no, those guys are tougher than my guys. They play hurt,” McGuire said, a reference to the Maguires’ ability to stay out late and bounce back the next day hangover or not.

“We Play Hurt” was added to the McGuire University green and white Final Five pennant.

The phone at Maguire’s, the bar, would get regular calls for Maguire, the university. Said Len Tyrrell:  “John Maguire would answer the phone and someone would ask for the basketball coach, Bill Shay. ‘Shay doesn’t come in until ten-thirty tonight,’ John would say. And the guy would wonder, “What the hell kind of school has a coach that doesn’t come in until ten-thirty at night.”

Once the U.S. Air Force Academy called and wanted to schedule a basketball game, but Maguire’s busy schedule could not accommodate them.

After two years of being an official NCAA college, the Maguires were exposed. Bill Jauss, a sports reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily News who normally had good instincts, decided to write a story about the phony school, apparently under the impression that everyone loves a good joke.

“I thought the story was too much fun just to keep among a bunch of guys who had laughs over it in a bar.” said Jauss years later.

But the NCAA, like almost all big institutions, does not have a really good feel for fun, much less a sense of humor.

“They went ballistic,” Jauss said.

The NCAA ran a retraction in the 1975-1976 blue book and they tried to blacklist the Maguires, for years putting pressure on hotels not to give them rooms.

Although there were times when they were forced into hotels away from the main action, the Maguires continued to thrive, securing their own tickets and still hosting parties under the name of Maguire University.  They were, frankly, more fun than the ponderous NCAA, and they tipped a lot better.

One Easter Sunday, the day before the championship game, a cyclone hit the Omni North on the outskirts of Indianapolis, where the Maguires were staying. It knocked out the electricity in the hotel, which had 1,800 Easter brunches booked.  Management was in a panic, when Chuck LaRue, an electrical engineer who played for a short time for the Chicago Blackhawks, went into the basement to analyze the problem.  He got the electricity restored in time for brunch. The Omni chain rewarded him by giving him and his family a week’s stay and travel expenses to any Omni in the world. And the Maguires moved up the ladder of preferred customers in the Omni chain.

By 2000 the Maguires had outlasted the NCAA and were pretty much unfettered in their choice of hotels. Their We Play Hurt pennants and other paraphernalia, and their hospitality suite were fixtures of Final Four week. Even Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, a native Chicagoan who went to Weber High School, expressed disappointment he was not offered an honorary degree from Maguire University.

After Duke won the national championship in 2010 Coach K was awarded the first honorary degree ever given by Maguire University—in bracketology.

In 2003 the group went down to New Orleans celebrating 40 years of Final Fours. Their pennant read “Final Five ’03—40 years 1963 -2003.” They even had McGuire U tee shirts that had on the back “Final Five Appearances—Maguire 40, Kansas 12, Syracuse 4, Marquette 3, Texas 3.”

Then someone figured out that if you included the first year, 1963, and the last, 2003, it was actually 41 years the group had been attending Final Fours or Fives.

“There was some miscalculation from the Department of Mathematics,” said Skip Dorn, a Maguire regular for more than 20 years.

Now, nine years after their 40th Anniversary the Maguires are going back to New Orleans for their 50th, the Math Department having recalibrated and adjusted the numbers.

The meeting, or final practice, at Kelly’s Pub was in a tent out back of the bar and its purpose was to go over details for this year’s trip and to drink, eat brats, and swap stories. The business, as opposed to the social, part of the final practice was held at half time of the Kansas-North Carolina game and between the roars of the passing els. Maguire’s in Forest Park closed in 1988 and now Kelly’s in Lincoln Park is its home.  The pub is run by John Kelly, a retired Chicago fire captain and his wife, Polly.

The Kellys have been a central force in Maguire University for years—they’re in the Maguire Hall of fame–as have Art Duffy, the equipment manager and his son, Art Jr., who rose to be president of the university in 2000 after founder and president Len Tyrrell died.

John Kelly, who is social director, has a card that reads “Maguire University Athletic Department. We Play Hurt. Kelly Sports Center, Lake Front Campus” with Kelly’s Pub’s telephone number. There is also a number for the West Campus, which is Art Duffy Jr.

The younger Duffy conducted the meeting. This year the Maguire have booked the entire Hotel Marais, 64 rooms, 2 bars and 1 pool, in the French Quarter. They also have 15 rooms at the Mararin, a sister hotel block away. The fee varied from about $1,000 to $2,000 depending on how many night (four or five), which could be paid, if need be, in three installments over six months last year. There would be a 50th Anniversary reception on Friday night at one of the hotel bars where drinks would be free for those with Maguire i.d.s. Guests could also be accommodated that night.

The Maguires sell a lot of their merchandise and every year they select a charity to give the profits to, as they do for an online store. At Christmas clothes and cash donations go the St. Vincent DePaul Shelter.

More than 200 people were making the trip this year. Some were first time attendees, referred to, naturally, as freshmen. Some were second and third generation Maguires. For years Maguire University had a Student Athlete Application for Admission. At the bottom it said, “Filling out application does not automatically admit you to Maguire University…buying Selection Committee drinks greatly increases chances.”

Art Duffy had this to say to the freshmen:

“Three rules for the hotel: finish your beer, no smoking, be at the group picture taking, or you can’t come back for your sophomore year.”

end

Nickel-and-diming

By Jim Tuohy

Every once in a while my old pal Dino calls me when he’s in town and we work out together, usually doing some serious power lifting.

Thus we were lifting a few the other afternoon at the Old Town Ale House when Street Jimmy came in with a bunch of change. Street Jimmy has been written about very humorously elsewhere in this publication by Bruce Elliot, the artist in residence at the Ale House who came about his position by the happy coincidence of  being married to the proprietress.

Street Jimmy is a junkie whose main source of legitimate income arrives from begging in the vicinity of North and Wells. When he accumulates enough nickels and dimes and pennies he brings them into the Ale House where the bartender agrees to convert them into dollar bills, since Jimmy’s heroin connection apparently does not consider things like pennies proper monetary units to be used in a respectable dope deal.

In fact, the Ale House bartenders won’t take the pennies, either, only the higher denominations of change. That doesn’t stop Street Jimmy from trying; he always clatters a mass of pennies onto the bar along with nickels and dimes even though he is always refused. Bruce has pointed out that Jimmy’s powers of retention may have suffered a bit by the way he has chosen to conduct his path through life.

“I hated pennies, too,” said Dino, watching the transaction between Jimmy and the bartender.

Dino and I were in the Marine Corps together back in the 1950s around the time of the Korean War. Actually, to phrase our military service as I just did is a bit misleading. Where we were stationed was in downtown San Francisco, and the fighting had ended several months before we enlisted. But we are technically Korean War veterans, and we have a ribbon and the G.I. Bill to prove it.

In those days the Marines had a headquarters and supply building at 100 Harrison Street, almost at the Embarcadero, under the Bay Bridge. Dino had gone in the Corps from McCook, Nebraska, about a month before I had gone in from Chicago, but we ended up at the same duty station, where we carried out office duties when we weren’t detached to Special Services. I played basketball and Dino played baseball. To extend our ball-playing detachments from our regular duties, I used my influence to get Dino on the basketball team in the winter, and he used his influence to get me on the baseball team in the spring.

I looked good in my baseball uniform that said MARINES across the jersey, and I had nice form when I played catch, but I had grown up playing 16-inch softball and I never in my life had played a game of hardball, a game in Chicago we called “league.” However, I had a private conceit that I might be one of those athletes who could master a new sport almost immediately. I found out at the first practice that not only was I not a potential master, I was a menace to the orderly conduct of the game, that I couldn’t hit and I couldn’t field, and that I never would.  In the outfield I ran in to catch flies that landed behind me. At the plate, no matter how light the bat, I couldn’t swing it around fast enough to hit even the slowest pitch.

Out of friendship they let me stay on the team, and once in a hastily scheduled non-league game against a pickup team from a destroyer that was undergoing repairs at Hunter’s Point, I got into a game. The game had become so one-sided in our favor that the coach asked me if I wanted to pinch hit. It was a desperate attempt to keep the score down by reversing the logic of baseball strategy—putting in a bad hitter to replace a good one.

Everyone expected me to make an out and help bring the game to a merciful close, but I had been studying the pitcher. I discerned that his deliveries were seldom strikes. Guys like Dino swung and connected on pitches outside the strike zone because they were so easy to hit. My plan, therefore–knowing even the lamest of pitches were beyond my ability to catch up with–was to not swing at anything. I calculated, from my close observations, that the pitcher’s chances of throwing three strikes out of seven pitches were close to zero; he had not done so the entire game. I would take a walk, and I would someday be able to tell my children and grandchildren that in my entire baseball career with the United States Marines I was able to reach base every time I batted.

I stepped confidently in the box, waving heavy lumber; I had no intention of swinging it, so it didn’t matter that I could barely lift the bat off my shoulder . I squinted intimidatingly at the pitcher. The first pitch came, fat and right over the heart of the plate. Called strike one. The second pitch arrived slow and down the middle. Strike two. I knew this couldn’t last; I was too good at calculating odds. Third pitch. Strike three.

We played it safer with Dino on the basketball team. While I could look okay throwing the ball around before a baseball game, Dino was so awful in all aspects of basketball that we didn’t dare expose him to pregame warm up drills. He would drop passes, kick balls into the seats, and launch layups into space. But he too looked good in his uniform so we dressed him for every game and put an Ace bandage over most of one leg. He became our designated best player who was out with an injury, a role he excelled at, putting on a show for the other team, limping and exhorting us to carry on as best we could without him. And of course, if we chose to, we could point out that we were losing games without the services of our star.

Dino had many of the requirements of a good con man. He was handsome in a crooked-nose Marlboro Man kind of way, had a good speaking voice and a direct trustful gaze, and he was a glib liar. It made him a very good panhandler. As Marine PFC’s we were paid about $80 a month, so money was always tight to those of us who were not careful with it. Dino supplemented the cost of our liberty adventures, if need be, with some panhandling. He had developed a successful spiel about being a serviceman stranded without enough money to get the ferry over to the Naval Hospital in Oakland, or to the Marine security detail at Treasure Island or to his duties as a chaplain’s assistant at the Presidio.

One of Dino’s most successful nights came when we were at the old Hungry I between sets of the Vince Guaraldi Trio and Mort Sahl. We were on the last beers we could afford (at about 35 cents each) when Dino said, “Let me go out and see if I can raise enough for another drink.”

He left and I prepared to make my beer last. But I didn’t have to. Dino was back in no more than ten minutes with something like nine dollars and twenty-five cents. It was enough for us to drink until closing, and then to get a six-pack for the walk back to the barracks.

We were sitting with our six-pack at an empty newspaper kiosk on Market Street when a guy walked unsteadily towards us. He was husky and rugged looking, rather swarthy. He could have been anything, I thought, a drifter, a merchant marine. But he was friendly and talkative and we gave him a beer. His name was Art. Art DiBenidetto. We talked of nothing important, as good natured drunks tend to, and Dino said on payday he was going to buy a watch for his girlfriend’s birthday back in Nebraska.

“A watch?” Art asked. “You want a watch? Come with me.”

Dino and I looked at each other knowing what the other was thinking: This might not be good, but it might be interesting. Warily, we followed Art. We turned a corner and we were in Union Square in front of a granite building where a maintenance man was hosing down the sidewalk.

“Good morning, Mr.DiBenidetto,” the man said as he turned off the hose and unlocked the building’s elegant front door. We went to the second floor where a sign in the door of a store said “DiBenidetto Brothers Jewelers.” Art owned one of the fanciest jewelry stores in San Francisco. He told Dino to pick out a watch for his girl friend. He told me to pick out a watch for myself. We said something like, “No, no, we couldn’t,” but without much conviction.

‘Listen, you guys gave me your last beer,” said Art, who it turned out had been a lieutenant in the Marine Corps in World War II. “That was worth a lot more to me than a couple of watches.”

Actually, I think it was three watches. Dino ended up getting one for himself.

As Street Jimmy scooped up his rejected pennies from the bar at the Ale House, Dino said, “Pennies were a pain–at least a disappointment. I’d get somebody to listen to my story, which was the hard part, but then end up with more pennies than quarters.”

I never panhandled; I never had Dino’s knack, but I once had a banner bottle deposit day.

It was June of 1982 and I was writing a story at the apartment of my beloved Miss Jones, who was off at work. Her apartment was two blocks from Wrigley Field, close enough to hear the crowd roar. I took a break about one o’clock and turned on the TV to Channel 9. A pregame interview was in progress and I discovered the Cubs were about to play the Phillies, which was of only casual interest to me until I found out the starting pitchers were Fergie Jenkins for the Cubs and Steve Carlton for the Phillies–two sure hall of famers. Pete Rose was playing first for the Phillies and Mike Schmidt third, two more hall of famers. Ryne Sandberg was also on the Cubs but it was too early to know he would one day make it to the hall, although I enjoyed watching him, a smooth natural talent. Maybe I could slip out for a while…

The problem was, I had no money, which was no surprise, but after a thorough search of Miss Jones’s stashing spots I found she had left no money around either. But there were some empty pop bottles in the pantry. In an effort to be environmentally sound we had taken to buying Coca-Cola in 8-packs of 16-ounce returnable bottles, each bottle worth a 10-cent refund. There were two 8-packs, worth $1.60. I think at the time it cost $2.50 to get into the bleachers and perhaps $4.50 to get a general admission ticket. There were a few assorted pop bottles in the pantry, most of them quart-sized. When I was a kid these bottles had a nickel return, so it would take a lot of them to get me up to bleacher money, even if they had gone up to a dime. All I could do was try. All those great players were beckoning to me.

I loaded the bottles in an unwieldy box and set out at a fast pace for the Jewel at Southport and Addison. The game was about to start. I waited anxiously as the service desk person did some button-pushing calculations before a piece of paper clickety-clicked from a slot. She went into a desk drawer and pulled out—bills! A five! A couple of ones! A Kennedy half dollar! Refunds on quart bottles were now 25 cents each, much more than the old days. I had more than seven dollars!

I hustled down Addison. I had enough money to get into the bleachers with enough left over for a beer and even a hot dog if I chose. Or I could pay my way into the grandstand and wiggle my way into the box seats, where my distinguished gray hair would make me look as if I belonged. It was a beautiful sunny day. I was almost skipping along with happiness when a thought exploded in my head:

I AM 48 YEARS OLD AND I HAVE JUST RETURNED POP BOTTLES TO GET ENOUGH NICKELS AND DIMES TO GET INTO A CUB GAME. I DID THAT WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD. THIS IS THE EXTENT TO WHICH MY LIFE HAS PROGRESSED? WHY AM I HAPPY?

Still, under achiever as I was, I couldn’t contain my joy. I was seated in the boxes in time to watch the Cubs score five runs off Carlton in the second as they went on to win 12 to 11.

“I thought for a moment there in the Jewel I might have do a you if I came up a little short,” I said to Dino in the Ale House. “I might have to beg outside the park. Maybe I could have said I was a disabled vet.”

“You were, as far as earning power went,” said Dino. “How much does it cost to get into Wrigley now?”

“The last time I went it was seventy-six dollars for seats in the area I paid four-fifty for that day.”

“Where’d you get seventy-six bucks?” Dino asked.

“I didn’t. My friend Andy Rayburn from Canada took me. We have a deal. Whenever he’s in Chicago he takes me to a Cub game. Whenever I’m in Ottawa I take him to a Senators hockey game. So far I’ve never been to Ottawa.”

“Well if that deal falls through you might consider saving bottles,” Dino said. “At an average, say, of fifteen cents each you would only need about five hundred to get enough dough for a good ticket. Getting them to the Jewel would be a problem, though.”

“Or I could wait for you to come to town and you could do your Frisco thing. How long you think it would take for you to raise seventy-six bucks on game day at Clark and Addison?”

“I’m fifty years out of practice, but I would guess about twenty minutes,” Dino said with his direct trustful gaze.

end

Details, Details

By Jim Tuohy

The current movie “Hitchcock” points out that during the making of “Psycho,” director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, caught a mistake that had gone undetected in the editing process.

Janet Leigh, whose character lay eyes-open dead on the bathroom floor of a room at the Bates Motel, swallowed.  Just a frame, but enough that a cut was required, according to the story.

I don’t know how anyone watching a movie at regulation speed can catch a mistake of one frame’s length–there are 24 of them, I believe, per second–but that is not what interests me as much as what the result would have been if “Psycho” had been released to the general public with an easier-to-spot swallow (say, one that lasted half a second).  If I had seen it, I might have assumed the swallow was intentionally left in for those of us with exceptional powers of observation to catch. I would have assumed that Marion, Janet Leigh’s character, was too big a star to kill off so early and that she would somehow reappear as the plot advanced. Therefore, when she didn’t reappear I would have been confused and disgusted about the sloppy editing. Of course, I am often confused and disgusted, so I would have survived that particular disappointment without major damage to my psyche.

Tiny mistakes can often change the entire meaning of a piece of art, songs providing frequent examples. We are all familiar with the way we, as children and even as adults, have heard lyrics wrong and tried to make our own sense of them. I always thought the words to one of those Christmas songs, “Winter Wonderland,” included the passage: “In the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is parched and brown/He’ll say ‘Are you married?’  We’ll say ‘No, man, but you can do the job when you’re in town.’”

Now, as everyone knows who is acquainted with the lyrics of stupid Christmas songs, the protagonists in “Winter Wonderland” said “Parson Brown,” not “parched and brown.”  Parched and brown makes no sense whatsoever, and  I guess I just dismissed its nonsensicalness to the generally low standards of the holiday song genre. But substituting “ Parson Brown “ isn’t too much of an improvement: what one ends up with are a couple of grown people, old enough to consider marriage, entertaining questions from an inanimate blob in a snow-strewn field. One of the questions concerns their matrimonial status, Are you married?  And they answer this representation of an Anglican cleric–who under ecclesiastical law is the authorized leader of an entire parish–by calling him not Parson, not Reverend, but “man.”

Actually, I kind of like that part–the absence of obsequiousness before authority. Even better would have been if they decided the figure in white was the pope and called him “Pops.”

Apparently you don’t have to be a thick-headed amateur like me to hear things wrong . Sometimes the pros do too.

Arthur Prysock, the basso jazz and blues singer who had a sensitive touch with ballads, recorded the standard “My Funny Valentine” back in the 1960s. It was an excellent piece of work except for one word. He said “your” instead of “a.” Part of  the Lorenz Hart lyric is “don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me,” an expression of love for every intangible aspect of  his odd lover in spite of  her not possessing, to say the least, conventional attributes (“Your looks are laughable, unphotographable”). But Prysock sings “Don’t change your hair for me,” switching a touching expression of ethereal devotion to a mundane, “I like your hairdo.”

The singer Buddy Greco recorded Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” a few years after Frank Sinatra recorded it with a Nelson Riddle arrangement. After listing experiences many find exciting but the narrator finds boring, Porter’s final line is “Yet I get a kick out of you.” Sinatra and Riddle added  a hip little riff on the final line by throwing in “…I get a kick—you give me a boot—I get a kick out of you.”

Greco, strongly influenced by Sinatra, ended his version with the line “…I get a kick—you give me a boost—I get a kick out of you.” Greco stole, but he stole ineptly. The word  boot, of course, has a direct and clever relationship to the word kick; boost does not. If Greco used boost as an intentional change, it was a fruitless exercise in improvisation; the imprecise word just pointed out the passage’s imitativeness and made you yearn for the Sinatra-Riddle version.

I’m always curious how easy-to-spot mistakes make it through various editing processes. In movies if a phone is off the hook in a room, say, where a body has been discovered, the phone is always emitting that irritating bee-bee-bee-bee sound that indicates the phone is off the hook. In real life that sounds goes only for 45 seconds before the receiver falls silent. Could it be that no one in Hollywood has ever let a phone off the hook more than 45 seconds?

In television, too, a wrong word or fact can be distracting. There is a popular, well written and well acted television series called “The Good Wife” currently running on CBS. It’s about the romantic and professional adventures of a fictional Cook County State’s Attorney and his wife and her law firm associates. Besides having sets that look nothing like courtrooms anywhere in Cook County, there is a sub-plot about the living arrangements for the state’s attorney’s family. When the state’s attorney was new to the job they lived in a big house in the upscale North Shore suburb of Highland Park, but after he cheated on her they separated and the house was sold. Now, however, there are discussions about the wife buying it again because the children like it there.

There are plenty of smart suburbs the producers could have selected as the place a Cook County state’s attorney might live if he chose not to live in Chicago—Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth and Glencoe on the North Shore alone, and dozens of others  northwest, west and southwest (Barrington Hills, Forest Park , Palos Hills, for example, if you wanted to use a town with a two-word name). The writers chose instead Highland Park, which is in Lake County, a place where by law the Cook County State’s attorney cannot live. You would think someone involved in the development of an expensive TV production like “The Good Wife” would have done enough research to suggest an easy one-word edit: replace “Highland”  with “Forest.”

One Saturday in 1992 I was in the real Criminal Courts building at 26th and California, a much grittier place than the Toronto-modern sets in “The Good Wife.” I was in the chambers of Judge Mike Toomin. It was the day they were shooting the opening scene of the movie “The Fugitive.” Spread around were Harrison Ford ,wearing a beard, and his wife sitting on a couch; the film’s producer sitting in a chair in front of Toomin’s desk; Toomin behind the desk; the actor Andy Romano, who played the judge in the opening scene, sitting next to Toomin; and a couple of lawyers standing with  a couple of actors who would play lawyers in the scene. The director Andy Davis was in and out.

What Davis was doing was trying to avoid little mistakes. He had the actors who were playing defense and prosecuting attorneys going over their scripts with a real prosecutor and a real defense lawyer. Romano was doing the same thing with Toomin. Davis was keeping the dialog loose. If the words as written rang false, the real officers of the court could suggest changes. At one point Davis noticed the nameplate on Toomin’s desk. It usually sat on his bench in the courtroom, but had been replaced there by a generic black laminated sign that said  “Judge Bennett” in white lettering. It was the kind of desk sign seen on office desks everywhere. Toomin’s nameplate, on the other hand, was a handsome solid oak block fronted by a square brass plate with “Judge Toomin” engraved on it, the standard style for Cook County judges. Davis admired the piece and picked it up.

“Boy, it’s heavy,” he said.

“I know,” said Toomin.

“So does Urso,” said Mike Boland, another Criminal Court judge, who had stopped by to catch the action. Boland was referring to Judge Joseph Urso and an incident that occurred after he had sentenced a defendant to 20 years.

“The guy grabbed the plaque off Urso’s bench and threw it at his lawyer. Nearly knocked his head off. Urso tacked on five more years,” said Boland.

Davis decided Toomin’s nameplate would look better than the one the prop department had provided. An assistant pointed out that the name of the judge in the movie script was Bennett.

“Change it to Toomin,” said Davis.

Meanwhile, the producer was most worried about whether or not Ford’s character in the movie, Dr. Richard Kimble, would have received the death penalty for the murder he was convicted of. Toomin felt the facts fell short of warranting death. Ford wanted the death penalty kept in the story because it added dramatic tension.

“Scott Turow told me death could be given for a crime like that,” he said.

“Not in this jurisdiction,” Toomin said.

“Have you ever given a death sentence?” the producer asked.

“Yes, I have,” answered Toomin.

“What do you think the penalty for this would be?”

“Fifty years, probably. You might be able to go to 75,” Toomin said.

Harrison Ford had the most theatrical clout, however, and Andy Romano gave him the death penalty a few hours later. And in spite Davis’s efforts to get details right, I noticed when I saw the movie that a detached telephone headset  was going bee-bee-bee-bee at the scene of a crime.

Coincidently, when “The Fugitive” came out in 1993, a former photographic assistant of my pal Jack Lane was nearly involved in a fatal traffic accident on the way home from watching the movie at a suburban theater. This assistant had a masterful way of misplacing words. In recounting her close call with death she said:

“It was one of those moments when your whole life passes between your eyes.”

Royko

By Jim Tuohy

Mike Royko was standing near the grill at the Billy Goat one afternoon talking to a rewriteman from the Sun-Times. The man had recently written a story that had appeared in the paper without his name on it. Instead the byline was that of the reporter who had gathered the facts.

The rewriteman, who was new at the paper, told Royko that a pompous editor had pointed out how well written the story was, not knowing who really wrote it. The editor was, in effect, giving the new employee a lecture in Journalism with his own story.

“So I told him I wrote it, thereby deflating him. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, been a bigger man,” said the rewriteman.

“Fuck that,” Royko said. “Stick it to the asshole. Always call those mopes on shit like that.”

Then he told a story.

Writing “Boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago” was as hard on him as any work he had ever done.

“Not writing the book,” he said. “I loved writing the book, but as the deadline approached I was spending more time on it. In the meantime I was putting out the column every day and I didn’t want the quality to suffer just because I was involved in a personal project. It wouldn’t be fair to the readers. I didn’t want to take a leave of absence to finish the book because that wouldn’t be fair to the readers either. So I had to work hard on the columns and hard on the book and when it was finished I didn’t even know what I had. I didn’t know if it would sell.

“Then the pressure was off and I’m just doing normal work and then the book comes out and it’s a hit and for the first time we’ve got some money and Carol and I take like a belated honeymoon to Europe.

“We go first class on a ship and one night I’m at the bar and there’s some guy in there talking about Chicago politics. He’s a blowhard, loud. I don’t say much, but finally he says something that is completely wrong. It’s just wrong, so I say ‘That’s wrong. I’m from Chicago and you’re wrong.’

“He says, ‘Your trouble is you don’t understand Chicago politics, how it really works. There’s a new book out by a guy named Mike Royko and if you read that, then you’ll know something and then come and talk to me.’

“I put my hand out, grab his and say. ‘My name is Mike Royko asshole.’

“Always stick it to them.”

***

One of the funniest promotions Royko ever worked out was The First Annual Mixed Breed (Mongrel) Dog show of 1967. It was conceived of shortly after the Westminster Dog Show had concluded at Madison Square Garden. In a column Royko described the purpose of the show and the judging categories, including Best of Show, which would resemble nothing ever seen in formal dog shows. Among other ribbons to be won were one to the dog that answered the least amount of commands and another: The Dog That Barks the Longest for No Known Reason.

Promotional events at which a columnist participates are a good way for newspapers to test his popularity. Royko always drew, especially in the early days, more than anticipated. There were hundreds of entries at Soldier Field on a sunny weekend afternoon, and with them some of the ugliest, ill-mannered dogs in the midwest (The dog that was eventually named Best of Show, an astoundingly unattractive animal, was described in the Daily News by Van Gordon Sauter as resembling a foot scraper). A writer doing a freelance piece encountered Royko on the infield, somewhere between dogs barking for unknown reasons and those disregarding instructions. Eager dog owners were holding their dogs for inspection and asking dozens of questions. He looked uncharacteristically discombobulated.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “All these people are serious about these dogs. They really want them to win these categories. They don’t see anything funny about it. I’m never doing this again.”

There never was a Second Annual Mixed Breed Dog Show.

***

Mike Royko and Marshall Field, the owner of the Daily News and Sun-Times, were friendly and often fished together. Deep sea fishing was a passion for both of them, but while Royko had other abilities, such as being the best newspaper columnist in America, Field had only a desultory interest in the business Royko loved.

In the early 1980s William Wrigley, whose family had owned the Chicago Cubs for years, was undergoing a messy divorce. Royko, as he did all stories everywhere and in many different publications, followed the Wrigley matter closely. He became convinced Wrigley needed cash and might be willing to sell the Cubs. He had an idea.

“See, I saw the Cubs as an opportunity to fuck the Tribune. I would arrange to buy them, and then take the radio and television rights away from WGN. I went to Charlie 0. Finley (the former owner of the Oakland A’s and a drinking buddy of Royko’s at the Billy Goat). I asked him how much he thought the Cubs would sell for if they were put on the market. He said around $21 or $22 million. I said if I could put a deal together would he be general manager. He’s the smartest baseball guy around. He said yes but he wants 15 per cent. I went to Marshall and said, ‘Why don’t you buy them. Then you take them off Tribune radio and television and put them on WFLD-TV (Then the Field-owned tv station in town, Channel 32). Without the Cubs, Channel 9 isn’t worth a shit. And it would have made something out of 32. He says he doesn’t want to spend $22 million but he will put up most of it, if I can get the rest. I went back to Finley and asked if he could get other investors and he said, yeah, easy. So I’m working like a son-of-bitch making all these calls, trying to do it in a hurry. I’m going to take one percent, just so I can say I own the Chicago Cubs. I’ve stressed the urgency to Marshall, telling him we don’t want anyone to find out. Well, I get it all arranged on a Friday and I call Marshall, and he’s gone. Deep sea fishing in the Caribbean and is unreachable.”

In the meantime, Don Rueben, the influential and shrewd lawyer who represents the Tribune, learned the Sun-Times might buy the Cubs.

“Rueben hears the rumor and immediately grasps what it all means. That was Saturday. On Monday the Tribune bought the Cubs from Wrigley for $21.5 million. I never could get hold of Marshall.

“Later that week, on a Thursday I think, I’m having lunch at the Tavern Club and Marshall is there, back from fishing. The Trib’s got the gaddamn Cubs. He saunters over to my table and says, ‘Well, Mike, maybe the Bears will be up for sale.’

“I said, ‘Marshall, get the fuck away from me.'”

* * *

Around the time the Chicago Daily News was folding, in March of 1978, a writer was sitting with Royko in the corner at the Billy Goat and Bobby Shriver walked in. The son of R. Sargeant Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Bobby had been at the City News Bureau when Royko had hired him as his legman.

Royko suddenly cut off the conversation with the writer and joined Shriver at the end of the bar.

“Hey, Royko,” said the writer, “you see someone more famous come into the room and you drop you’re old friends?” It was obvious the writer meant the comment as a joke, but Royko exploded.

“Don’t ever accuse me of being a starfucker,” he yelled. “This is my legman and I want to talk to him. He’s a good newspaperman.”

It turned out that what Royko wanted to talk about was Shriver’s job. Royko was going over to the Sun-Times and, in the complicated union-management arrangements at the time, had the ability to protect one job, his legman. His first legman, Terry Shaffer, was then a reporter at the Daily News and was going to lose his job. So Royko was telling Bobby Shriver that in order to keep Shaffer, who had a family, working he was making Shaffer his legman again, putting Shriver out of a job. Shriver took it well. Terry Shaffer became Royko’s first and last Daily News legman.

Royko made a lot of phone calls on behalf of Daily News people who would not be absorbed by the Sun-Times.

* * *

In the mid -1970s, Royko, out late drinking on Lincoln, got into an argument with a group of people, mostly actors, in a booth. It climaxed with his throwing catsup from a bottle onto the fur coat of a pretty girl. The tavern owner insisted the bartender call the cops. Royko was taken to jail and charged with battery, a felony. He stayed in jail until Sam Sianis arrived in the morning and bailed him out.

The matter dragged out in court longer than it should have, the owner and actors seemingly enjoying the publicity. It should have been an easy matter to settle.

“The woman’s not the problem,” said Royko on the phone one day. “She’s satisfied. I’ve written her a letter of apology. Christ, it’s a collector’s item. I said I was the worst piece of shit that ever lived. I groveled. We offered to buy her a new fur coat. She said she didn’t need a new one, just pay for the cleaning on the old one. We did. It’s the guys. They say, ‘He behaved very badly. He was drunk. Of course I was drunk. That’s what I thought saloons were for.”

In the end, that was exactly the defense used by Julius Echeles, Royko’s colorful lawyer. Dram shop laws require a bar to refuse service to an obviously drunken person who enters it. Royko had three witnesses who said they had drunk with him at various places through the night, and he was drunker at each place and blasted when he went into the Lincoln Avenue bar. The case was settled.

At about the same time there was another incident on Lincoln Avenue in which Royko cracked a window somehow.

Michaela Tuohy, who wrote a gossip column for the Reader called “Hot Tripe”, described the incident as follows: “Mike Royko, window shopping along Lincoln Avenue, found the one he wanted to break.”

Royko did not talk to her for a year, even though they were fairly good friends. Royko called Tuohy “Chicago’s broken nose beauty,” which was a Nelson Algren phrase for a particular look the city has.

* * *

Nelson Algren and Royko were close. A group, including Royko, had worked on getting a section of Evergreen Street in Algren’s old neighborhood renamed for him. Not those funny little brown vanity signs they have now, but the regular street sign. They were successful in getting a block renamed but the residents complained it was too confusing having one block named Algren and all the rest of the street named Evergreen. It was changed back.

Royko was also close to Studs Terkel. Royko got the new Mayor Daley, Richard M., to name a bridge for Terkel. The Division Street bridge just west of Halsted, crossing onto Goose Island, is now the Studs Terkel Bridge. Royko attended the dedication ceremony.

“Richie likes me, but don’t tell anyone,” he said conspiratorially. “When he was first running for state’s attorney he was visiting the Tribune editorial board, where they question candidates on their views. They asked me to sit in. I could see he was really nervous. So I asked the first question, a real soft one that he would have no trouble with, and he was relieved and handled himself well after that. He knew what I had done and we have gotten along o.k. since.”

How about getting a Nelson Algren Street again?

‘That’s next,” said Royko.

* * *

Royko was standing at the bar at O’Rourke’s on a Saturday afternoon making a list of the 10 Biggest Assholes in the United States and another list of the 10 Biggest Assholes in Chicago.

He was asking people for nominations but he was rejecting almost all of them, either because he already had them on the list or because of arcane reasons only he could decipher.

A man and a woman, out on a date, came in and talked to Paul Sequeira, a photographer who had worked at the Daily News with Royko. Royko’s wife Carol had died and he had not yet remarried. Royko asked the newcomers for Asshole nominations. They were polite and good natured but looked at Royko as if he were some kind of indelicate creature not to be approached. Then Sequeira introduced them and their attitude changed, especially the man’s. “You’re Mike Royko? Wow!” That sort of thing.

Royko, engaging the woman, for some reason did a 30-second denunciation of attorneys. He asked her occupation.

“I’m an attorney,” she said.

That exchange did not seem to get them off on bad footing, however, because as time went on the conversation became much more intimate. The man seemed unaware, so glad was he to be near Mike Royko and be able to say a word to him every once in a while. Finally, a newspaperman standing nearby began singing the lyrics to “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”

“A lady doesn’t leave her escort. It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice. A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice…So let’s keep the party polite…Stick with me, baby, I’m the fella you came in with…”

And suddenly they were gone, as the man talked to Sequeira. He looked around, and cognizance slid down his face.

“I think my girl just left with Mike Royko,” he said.

“Now you’ve learned something about the girl,” said the singing newspaperman.

* * *

Royko, who never did as much television as he could have, was a special commentator on Channel 7 the night of the mayoral primary in February of 1979. Mayor Michael Bilandic, who in a power grab had succeeded Richard J. Daley, was a heavy favorite to beat Jane Byrne.

The early returns as reported by television and radio gave Bilandic the expected lead. One by one the stations were declaring him the projected winner. Television political reporters were doing the same thing, explaining why it looked like Bilandic.

Except Royko. He sat on the outer edge of the set, beyond the big-voiced anchorman and political reporters, saying little, looking at scraps of paper, working figures on his wrist calculator.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think Bilandic has enough to do it. The strong Byrne areas are still to come in.”

He was the first person on television to go against the tide and call a Byrne victory. Later that week, sitting at the far end of the bar at the Billy Goat, near the VIP room, Royko talked to a writer from the Chicago Lawyer. What had he picked up that the television computers had not? asked the writer.

“I was just doing the usual thing,” he said. “Looking at the precinct-by-precinct results coming in from the City News Bureau, making some phone calls. Keeping an eye on the key precincts.”

A photographer from the Washington Journalism Review, which was doing a profile on Royko, was snapping pictures as he talked. Sam Sianis was called over to get into the photograph. The Chicago Lawyer guy, out of frame, asked why Royko did television that night.

“They called and asked. I don’t do anything election night, anyway, besides follow the results. I figured I could do the same thing on the set.”

They pay?

“Yeah.”

How much?

“Seven hundred and fifty. I know. They got a good deal.”

***

“You’re right,” said Royko in the Billy Goat early one evening as he stood near the angle of the bar under the always-on television. The Cubs were preparing to lose a night game. “Daley’s decision to run for state’s attorney and then against Byrne was a defensive one. The Daleys had nothing against Byrne at first. Sis Daley went to her inauguration and was all smiles with her. The Daleys were happy with Richie where he was, in the state senate. He was becoming more acceptable to the liberals since his dad died, making deals with Dawn Clark Netch and that shit. He was in no hurry. He was young and could run for almost any job in the state, including governor.

“Then Byrne listened to Vrdolyak who convinced her that Daley was the ultimate enemy and she began carving up his ward, firing his people, taking away patronage. To protect himself he had to take a counter measure, which was run for state’s attorney, a job I don’t think he ever thought about before. Mayors have to be careful with state’s attorneys or they’ll be facing a shitpot full of indictments.”

* * *

On a cold, snowy February night, Royko talked about writing books. “I wrote Boss because of my agent, who was really a great guy. He encouraged me. But he died, and I’ve never wanted to work with anyone else. I don’t think I’ll ever write another book.”

He never did, although his columns were published in several books, including “Sez Who? Sez Me,” which was sold at the Billy Goat. They were on a ledge near the television with a sign that said Mike Royko’s book was on sale here, autographed.

“They printed about 70,000 books,” Royko said. “Then the publisher calls me up and says they’re going to put it on remainder and do I want some at a low price. I say yeah, ship ’em all to me. I figured they’d send me a few boxes, but when they arrived the boxes of books filled my driveway. There were hundreds, thousands. I never saw so goddamn many books.

“So I brought them to Sam. I figure this is the natural place to sell the book because the first 10 columns are about Sam and the Billy Goat. I always did think the way publishers sell books is backwards. I think they ought to sell them in saloons. The author’s there, people are drinking and have money. They come up to you and say, ‘Where can I get your book? Right here. Twenty bucks. You don’t have to tell them to go to some bookstore. The next morning they’re not going to remember about some bookstore.”

Royko was good at inscriptions. Larry Green, a former Daily news reporter and editor, asked Royko to sign one of his books for his Jewish mother in Michigan. “Mrs. Green,” Royko wrote, “Larry’s a nice boy. But he’s kind of skinny.”

Royko often wrote introductions for other writers’s books, and sometimes blurbs for jacket covers. Publishers say one of the hardest things to get writers to do is write blurbs. For some reason they put it off, perhaps thinking it will take no time at all, and then the deadline for printing the jacket cover passes.

Once Royko had promised an author a blurb, and the deadline was fast approaching. The writer called Royko at his office.

“Mike, they’re pushing us; you want me to write the blurb for you, so you don’t have to fuck with it?”

“Yeah, you write it and call me back and read it to me,” Royko said.

The writer struggled for a while to say something terse and Roykoesque but not trying to top him. Fifteen words or so. He called Royko.

“Not bad. I’ll call you back.”

Twenty minutes later he called. He had written two blurbs, neither of which resembled the one the author had written. They were better and longer, both about 60 words. Pride of authorship.

A week later Royko saw the writer in a saloon.

“Which one did they take?”

The writer told him.

“I thought they would. You can keep the other one and use it some other time.”

“Don’t worry I will,” said the author.

When the book came out some months later, there was an autograph party and then a lot of people gathered at the Billy Goat. Royko was there and got into a long discussion on Christianity with the author’s very Catholic cousin. The discussion soon escalated into an argument and then into a potential fistfight as both men took off their coats. The author’s attractive daughter stepped between them, and Royko, with an eye for the ladies, began to chat with her, forgetting all about the fight, leaving the cousin poised to defend his faith but having an opponent whose restless mind had wandered onto other topics.

* * *

Mike Royko, who had left the Chicago Sun-Times when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, stood near the stairs of the Billy Goat arguing with Bernie Judge, who had left the Tribune and become city editor of the Sun-Times.

The main points of contention in this alcohol-enhanced confrontation were: Royko said Judge was a sell-out for going to work for Murdoch, and Judge said Royko was a sell-out for going to work for the Tribune, the company Royko had so long and publicly despised. Voices rose, volume increased. Bad words. Sam Sianis went over and said to cut it out, they were acting like children. The contestants mumbled and parted. Judge considered the situation. He went to Royko.

“Mike, Sam’s right. We’re acting like children. I’m sorry,” He extended his hand.

“Fuck you,” said Royko.

Judge swung at him and Sam dashed over, got Judge away from Royko and out into a cab, taking his car keys away from him. The next day Judge asked Larry Finley, who was going to lunch at the Billy Goat, to get his car keys back.

“You tell Bernie I want to talk to him personally,” said Sam. Judge stopped in after work, creating the odd situation of the city editor of a major metropolitan daily getting a lecture from a saloon owner before he could get the keys to his car back.

Royko received no lecture.

* * *

The entire Tribune Tower was made a no smoking zone. There was only one exception. Mike Royko’s office. So if you were a good friend of his he would let you come in a take a smoke break.

Not long after the no smoking edict, Royko had a party at his house in Winnetka. All the big executives were there, and so were the working stiffs, reporters and former Royko legmen. Royko had his own edict: all non-smokers could gather out on the patio; all smokers could smoke anywhere inside.

“I loved it,” said reporter Susie Kuczka, a former Royko legman. “Every time I’d pass John Madigan, the guy who made the building no smoking, I’d blow smoke in his face.”

* * *

The day Mike Royko died a reporter sat in the Billy Goat by himself thinking how a good part of Chicago journalism had also died.

But maybe not. Guys like Mike Royko pass on to everyone who knew them a bit of journalistic integrity, sort of like Mr. Roberts and Ensign Pulver. And that can be passed on again.

Back in 1966, when Royko was moving into a position of prominence among the city columnists, a young reporter from the City News Bureau asked him if fame made it harder for him to get information; were people more guarded?

“No, it’s easier,” Royko said. “They know who you are, and you have some power. But you have to quote them accurately. If you’re accurate, even if you catch ’em with their pants down, they’ll accept it. As long as you don’t attack their family–you know, say somebody’s wife is ugly or something.

“See, politicians know how the game is played. If they fuck up, the press might catch them.  So if you’re accurate, they live with it. Just don’t make up shit, or get it wrong. They might even buy you a drink when they run into you.”

A few years later the reporter did a story on a politician that was not entirely favorable. The politician telephoned. He said he wished some quotes that put him in a bad light had not been used. Then he said:

“But what the hell, I said it. And you caught it. Let’s meet. I’ll buy you a drink.”

                                                                              

Editor’s Note: James Tuohy, an award-winning journalist, is a veteran of UPI, The Chicago Sun-Times and CBS News. He is the former associate editor of the Chicago Lawyer, an investigative monthly that broke many of the stories that led to the federal Greylord investigation. He is the Co-author of Greylord, Justice Chicago Style. He was a friend of Mike Royko for 30 years.

(This article was first published in the May 15, 1997 issue of New City).

The Nominee

By Jim Tuohy

As Election Day approaches it might be useful if we citizens were presented with more information about the family of Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, which I will now provide as a non-partisan, and quite brief, public service.

Mitt Romney was born Willard Mitt Romney in March of 1947. He is the son of George Romney and is named after Milton “Mitt” Romney, his father’s first cousin, and J. Willard Marriott, the hotel guy, who was a fellow Mormon and great friend of George.

Until he started Kindergarten Willard was known as Billy. Then he said he wanted to be known as Mitt, maybe because names with the same double consonants at their ends seem to run in the Romney history (although he could have called himself Bill). Not only were there a Marriott and a Mitt in Mitt the Nominee’s background, there was also Parley P. Pratt, one of Mitt’s great great grandfathers, who had been an early leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.

George Romney’s cousin Mitt, whose namesake is Mitt the Nominee, was a Utah Mormon who was a football star at the University of Chicago in the1920s. In 1925 he joined the Chicago Bears. Another more distant cousin of George was G. Ott Romney, who was the coach of Brigham Young University’s football team from 1928 through 1936.

Cousin Mitt was the quarterback of the Bears for three years. He was the first in a distinguished line of Bears quarterbacks which included, to name just a few, Rex Grossman, Cabe McNown, Kent Nix, Larry Rakestraw and Kordell Stewart. And, of course, the strong-armed Bobby Douglass, who, like Mitt, had the appropriate consonants at the end of his name, but unfortunately did not have a sense of direction or the gift of precision, sad deficiencies in a professional quarterback.

Douglass played for the Bears when their home was Wrigley Field, reconfigured for football with the north end zone at the base of the left field bleachers. Fans of the Cubs are used to seeing home run balls hit onto Waveland Avenue—most commonly by the opposition–where they are chased by souvenir hunters. Douglass was the only quarterback in Bears history who had football hawkers waiting at Waveland and Kenmore for one of his passes to sail over the left field wall.

  However, the Bears traditional futility at quarterback is for another discussion, and we must return to the topic at hand, which is the Romnee—excuse me–the Romney family.

Although no abundance of athletic skill seems to have flowed into the genes of Mitt the Nominee, there was enough that made him an agile cheerleader in high school, a pep squad captain, sis boom bah-ing with the best the Michigan private schools had to offer.

After Mitt graduated from prep school in 1965 he went to Stanford, where he participated in Vietnam War demonstrations. He was on the pro-war side, a side he would remain on through 1969 and five draft deferments.

Although little is known about Mitt’s personal life at that time, some digging by a North Avenue Magazine investigative unit headed by editor Chris Chandler has discovered that Mitt became good friends with a woman named Chastity White who shared Mitt’s ideals and beliefs, including that it was important for Americans to fight in Vietnam but not for people of their station to do the fighting.

No romance blossomed from this friendship, however, because Chastity was not a name with enough of the same letters at the end of it.  Eventually Mitt went to BYU and in 1969 he married Ann (nee Davies) his high school sweetheart.

Mitt and Ann have five sons. The first they namedTagg. The others, I think, they named Bagg, Whiff, Tripp (forTriple A), and in a break from the baseball pattern, Matt, a name more associated with the sport of wrestling than baseball—except in the case of the Doormatt Chicago Cubs.

But wrestling, too, presents some interesting possibilities for names of children of men named Matt—for instance, Flipp and Flopp,.

The Romney family has had long ties with the state of Utah and its institutions. One of these is the state’s only major league professional sports franchise, the National Basketball Association team that moved to Salt Lake City from New Orleans in 1979.  Is it possible that some future member of the Romney clan might be named after it?

Jazz Romney. It has a certain ring to it. A hip name for a hipp family.

Debateable

By Jim Tuohy

I have worked out a winning strategy for the Democrats in the upcoming presidential debates, where, in essence, President Barack Obama doesn’t have to say a thing.

This will skirt a potential weakness that political commentators have found in Obama: that he is arrogant and thin skinned and if pushed in a debate might say something that will expose those traits, thereby negating his likeability ratings with the American public.

It is not clear why all the commentators think this, except commentators, especially in Washington, talk mainly to each other and often start believing their own theories, no matter how shaky. Charles Krauthammer even suggested the only way for Mitt Romney to win is to bait Obama into grumpiness with edgy comments. That might work if Krauthammer, a really scary looking guy who dresses like a mob hit man, were debating, but he is not.

There have been books about Obama that claim in private he casts a smart alecky air of impatience towards the less gifted, but there is no evidence that I have observed that Obama loses his cool in public. On the other hand, commentators have offered as proof of Obama’s tendency for public superciliousness the 2008 primary debate where he told Hillary Clinton, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” That was after polls showed people liked Obama’s personality better than hers and she said, “I don’t think I’m that bad.”

There is still not full agreement that the senator from Illinois was talking down to the senator from New York, but so what if he was. Clinton had said Obama was “no Martin Luther King,” and her husband Bill had said, “Do you want to roll the dice?” on Obama, suggesting America might not be ready for a black president. Under the circumstances, Obama might have been due a little uppityness, and it didn’t seem to hurt him.

Anyway, my strategy for the Team Obama in the debates will make any off-hand displays of arrogance by Obama irrelevant.  All his team has to do—it might be too late for the first debate, but they certainly can arrange it by the third– is to insist on a set that includes a long runway like the ones models negotiated during last month’s Madrid Fashion Week. The candidates will then enter the hall and walk the long runway to their places on the stage.

This entrance will doom Romney, who does not stride when he walks but takes tiny baby steps that makes it appear his body is too tall for his little feet and he must move them fast to keep from toppling forward. He walks like the actor David Suchet playing the role of detective Hercule Poirot in the Agatha Christie series on PBS.

          Polls have shown anyone who walks like Hercule Poirot has a huge psychological obstacle to overcome to be elected President of the United States.

In a recent study, the non-partisan Sarsfield Institute of Voting Behavioral Sciences at Stanford State College determined that seven out of ten voters could not put aside their prejudices against a silly walk when considering their choice of candidates.

When shown a rare film of Romney walking some distance (he is never seen at campaign rallies taking more than a few steps) and then one of Obama strolling a similar distance, 97 percent of the Stanford subjects  preferred the president’s long stride and shoulder sway to Romney’s Poirot-like mince. Even registered Republicans said they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Romney.

Six of ten in the Stanford study said they would prefer someone who walked like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character to one who walked like detective Poirot.

There have been several examinations of how physical characteristics influence presidential politics. The best known are considerations of height. Statistics show the taller of the two candidates has won 59 percent of the time. But that statistic only applies in the general election. In the Electoral College, the taller of the two has won only 53 percent of the time.

The difference is explained by three elections. In 1876 Samuel J. Tilden, who was 5-feet-10, beat Rutherford B. Hayes, who was 5-feet-8, in the general election; in 1888 Grover Cleveland, who was 5-feet-11, beat Benjamin Harrison, who was 5-feet-6, in the general; and in 2000 Al Gore, who is 6-feet-1, beat George Bush, who is 5-feet-11, by more than half a million votes. All lost the electoral vote. (A good trivial question for a while was: “In 1984 Ronald Reagan received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Who received the next most? Answer: Al Gore.”)

Bush knocked off another taller candidate in 2004: John Kerry, who is 6-feet-4. In spite of a height disadvantage, his smirk, and his walk, which resembled a Mussolini-like strut, Bush was able to knock off both Kerry and Gore because they were among the biggest stiffs the country had to offer in those years. Kerry especially seemed incapable of producing a simple declarative sentence or answering any question directly. He made his shorter, syntactically tortured opponent, Bush, seem a smooth talker in comparison.

Another tall candidate who failed against a shorter opponent was Winfield Scott, who was the youngest general ever in the U.S. army, becoming one at the age of 27 and remaining one for 47 years. But too long a general apparently makes a stone out of the personality. In 1852 Scott, at 6-feet-5, towered over Franklin Pierce at 5-feet-10, but Scott, a hero of the Mexican-American War, was arrogant and distant on the campaign trail.  Pierce was a much lesser Mexican-American War figure than Scott, and he drank to excess, but he was a charming professional politician who had served New Hampshire in the U.S. House and Senate.

It also didn’t hurt that Pierce’s buddy from Bowdoin College, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote his campaign literature and biography, even though Horace Mann said about Hawthorne, “If he makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man it will be the greatest piece of fiction he ever wrote.”

In the end, Scott was done in more by the issue of slavery than by his lousy personality. He was a Whig, which had a pro-slavery plank in its platform. This hurt him in the North. He was personally anti-slavery, accepting the nomination but rejecting the platform, which hurt him in the South. This put him in a vice worse than Kerry’s “I voted against the war before I voted for it.”

Pierce won big, and made Nathaniel Hawthorne the U.S. envoy in Liverpool, at that time an appointment second in state department prestige only to the post of ambassador to England.

In 1960 Esquire Magazine ran a story about a psychologist who thought he had worked out a formula to determine how long various prominent world figures could talk without talking about themselves. The theory was, apparently, that the longer one talked about things other than one’s self, the broader their general knowledge and the more interesting they were. This could possibly make their personalities more appealing to voters.

As I remember, Senator John F. Kennedy was judged by this formulation to be able to go about an hour without bringing himself into things, while Vice President Richard M. Nixon, his opponent in the 1960 presidential election, could go about 30 seconds. A surprise of the research was Charles DeGaulle, considered haughty and egotistical, who could go about three hours without mentioning himself. But the research also showed DeGaulle mentioned France about every three seconds, and DeGaulle thought he and France were the same thing.

The egocentric-electability theory died almost upon birth, but I feel confident my Poirot baby-step theory will not, if only the Obama team has the political will to put it into action.

It is an idea, as they say, that has legs.

end

Singing The Ballous

by Jim Tuohy

On the last night of the Republican National Convention thirteen American Olympic athletes who had won gold and silver medals through the years took to the stage to show support for Mitt Romney. In a classic example of Republican exclusionism, not one of those Olympic stars was black.

I would have thought that in America today it would be almost impossible to fill a stage full of hot shot jocks without any of them being black. But the Republicans managed, mostly by concentrating on men and women who excelled at winter sports and swimming, areas were blacks have yet to dominate.

The night before, the RNC did present Condoleezza Rice, who shoots golf in the 90s and was recently admitted to the previously men-only, heavily Republican August National Golf Club, site of the Masters Tournament. While it took 80 years to admit a woman, the Georgia-based club did not drag its feet on admitting blacks. That took only 67 years.

One person the Republicans never considered presenting at the convention was the black athlete who in my opinion stood out above all other competitors in the 2012 Olympics: Manteo Mitchell.

It’s understandable you might not know who Manteo Mitchell is because his performance in the 1600 meter relay—four runners running 400 meters each, once around the track—was the most under-reported story of the Olympics, at least as far as NBC’s television coverage was concerned, and television was where most people got their Olympic news.  Mitchell ran on the United States team and what he did was keep running after he broke his left leg halfway through his 400 meter segment.

The United States was a heavy favorite to win the gold medal in the 1600 meter relay, an event they had dominated for years, having last lost in 1972.

Mitchell was assigned to run the first leg of the relay in the preliminary race that would determine whether the USA qualified for the final, something they were expected to do easily. But Mitchell, leading the seven other runners at 200 yards, began to labor, his stride slightly off.  Four runners went by him before he managed to pass the baton to the next runner. Mitchell was enough in the race to allow his teammates to make up ground and finish second, which was good enough to put the Americans team in the final the next day.

No one from NBC seemed curious to find Mitchell even after a doctor determined that his leg had been broken at the 200-yard mark. The 400 meters is a punishing race requiring the speed of a dash and the endurance of a distance run, and Manteo Mitchell had run half of one on a broken left tibia. Television learned of it through reporting by USATrack and Field Magazine who talked to the doctor Mitchell went to and, of course to Mitchell himself.

“I felt it break,” Mitchell was quoted. “I heard it. I even put out a little war cry but the crowd was so loud you couldn’t hear it. I wanted to just lie down. It felt like somebody literally just snapped my leg in half.”

If Mitchell had lain down, as he had every right to do, the U.S. team would have been eliminated, so he kept going, and under the circumstances, going fast.

“I knew if I finished strong we could still [qualify for the finals]. I didn’t want to let those three guys down so I just ran on it. It hurt so bad.”

That’s dramatic stuff. If I were a TV producer I’d want to find that guy and get him to tell his story to the nation. People in combat often get valor medals for unselfish acts like that. But TV did not find Mitchell and talk to him. They reported the story from print sources—admittedly with admiration– then moved on to the stories they already had prepared.

The bad leg star of the Olympics was supposed to be Oscar Pistorius from South Africa who was born without tibias and had his legs cut off below the knee when he was 11 months old. In spite of that he participated in all kinds of athletics and became a world class runner, using J-shaped carbon fiber prosthetics. His nickname was the blade runner. He was running the anchor leg on South Africa’s 1600 meter relay team in the final.

Pistorius was a good, if extensively reported, story and NBC was prepared for it. They had a couple of features and interviews with Pistorius leading up to the final, and one after his team finished last. In the meantime, NBC anchors were talking to pretty women volleyballers, cute girl gymnasts, and handsome gold medal swimmers. No talking to Mitchell, especially after the men’s 1600 relay team, without Mitchell, finished second to the Bahaman team.

NBC treated the loss of a gold metal to the Bahamas as a disappointment for team USA when it should have been celebrated as a great silver medal accomplishment made possible because of the astounding grit of Manteo Mitchell. He should have been showcased across the network –several networks, in fact.

The inability of television to recognize what had become the best story of the games while they plugged away at lesser ones, reminded me of Wally Ballou, a fictitious reporter invented by the old radio and television comedy team of Bob and Ray. Wally Ballou consistently missed the larger story for the smaller one. His only journalistic accomplishment was winning 16 Diction Awards.

Wally Ballou in a typical skit is interviewing a grower of cranberries or some such in boring detail as in the radio background are heard gunshots and sirens and people panicking. Wally shows no interest in the rising commotion around him, completing his dull agricultural feature while listeners were left wondering what in the world they were missing.

I ran into some Wally Ballou types in print reporting, too. One of the duties of reporters in the Chicago office of United Press International was to take minor league baseball scores from stringers in nine central states. I think the stringers might have been paid a couple of bucks for scores, and there were no game stories to report, just the scores, which would then be put on the regional wire. But for stringers, it was a start in the news business.

One day a stringer called in and said he had doubleheader scores for, maybe, Fox Cities and Waterloo. He apologized for calling in late, but he said the second game had been delayed. I had no idea when he would usually call in, because of all the chores one had to do on a shift at UPI taking minor league baseball scores was probably the least important or taxing. One would write: “Midwest League: Fox Cities 3 Waterloo 2, (2nd game) Waterloo 8 Fox Cities 4.”

You just thanked the guy and hung up. But for some reason on this night I asked why the second game was delayed. I still don’t know why I asked, maybe because it’s what reporters do—ask questions.

“Oh,” the stringer answered. “The stands collapsed.”

“The stands collapsed?  Were there people in the stands?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. They were full.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Oh, yeah. Fifty people were taken to the hospital. They had ambulances from five towns.”

So a routine item turned into a good Midwest story, even though the stringer, Wally Ballou style, didn’t bother to work beyond his assigned task. At the time, I felt the stringer lacked the natural talent that would propel him into the top ranks of journalism. But maybe I was wrong.

He might have become a big success in television news, or as an NBC sportscaster.

   

The Rest of the Way is by the Stars

By Nelson Algren

(First published October 5, 1970 in the Chicago Free Press)

“The Vietnamese ruling establishment is still dominated by the more educated elite and the bourgeoisie left behind by the French and by the new urban rich. There is still an inadequate concern for the welfare of the rural peasant and worker. The Viet Cong have a more revolutionary image, whatever their ultimate intention may be. The Chieu Hoi program can only sell the GVN image which exists.”-Department of Defense statement on the Chieu Hoi or Open Arms amnesty program.

“l’d   like to work with the Vietnamese the rest of my life,” Sgt. Y, wheeling the jeep that was taking us to the Saigon Chieu Hoi center assured me. “I’ve got a volleyball team out here that beats the Americans every time.”

A GI jacket bearing the legend, “When I die I’ll go straight to heaven- l’ve done my time in hell,” is such a common sight around Saigon that I was pleasantly surprised to find an American soldier to whom Vietnam was nearer heaven. Nor did Sgt. Y. share the usual American complaint that the Vietnamese soldier “bugs out.”

“Most reliable men I’ve ever worked with,” he informed me. As he’d just returned from a jungle mission with an Armed Propaganda Team I had to correct my earlier impression.

Sgt. Y. Was a large-size Californian wearing blue levis, muddy combat boots and a shirt that looked like he might have found it on a bush. He’d set up four interviews for me at the Chieu Hoi center.  

The building which houses the library, interrogation rooms, classrooms and offices of the center was built, by the French, of white enduring stone. It is spacious, air-conditioned and well appointed. When the French were having their day it must have been well-shaded too. The French built solidly because they had all the time in the world:  it was their country and they were never going home.

The low dark barracks in the rear look like some boomtown company quarters after the boom is done. The Americans build in a hurry because they’re going home any day now: it was never their country and they were always going home any day now.

The men billeted in them are probably living no worse than the North Vietnamese Army or the Viet Cong. Lying or sitting on their bunks, idling in or out, they seem bored by something more than idleness and the heat: an air of psychological fatigue. You don’t become one with people you fought just by crossing over into their lines; all you do is turn those with whom you fought into deadlier enemies.

Some gave up out of weariness and some out of fear. Some because their officers lied. (As though the common soldier is ever told the truth.) Perhaps their passivity derives from no longer knowing just who they are.

The barrenness of their billets isn’t due to American stinginess. The Americans, if permitted, would install air-conditioning, a snackbar, juke-boxes, a steam-bath-massage parlor with adjoining swimming pool and a landing field for choppers bringing in colored Kleenex and chocolate macaroons vacuum-packed in Brooklyn. The Americans would pour it on.

But there can’t be any pouring. “Standards will be kept deliberately modest” is the ruling. “It is expected that returnees will be accommodated in modest comfort but not at a level that would incite the envy of neighboring Vietnamese troops.” Vietnamese envy is easily incited.

The present standards of the Saigon Chieu Hoi center must seem sufficiently high to most Vietnamese because, now and again, a Saigonese cowboy will present himself as a defector, pass the screening, and enjoy a month’s vacation with pay; and take off in a new suit of clothes.

Chieu Hoi is financed by the U.S. and guided by American advisors. It is modeled after the amnesty mission which had success in the Philippines against the Hukbalahops. Its purpose is to turn the insurgent into a friend by rewarding him with a respected place in the Establishment. Something like offering a member of the Black Panthers a job as an executive in Head Start. Forget the NVA and become a Kit Carson Scout.

RETURNEE AWARDED VN. $26,000

Saigon (VP) The ministry of Open-Arms recently decided to grant VN $26,000 to a returnee in An Xuyen who guided the RVNAF combatants to launch an operation during which a number of communist weapons were seized. The Weapons seized included one K-50, six Russian rifles and one Mauser. During the operation the RVN killed 10 communists and captured four others. The returnee was a guerilla at Phong Lac village in Song Ong Doc districts, An Xuyen. –Saigon Daily News

Once a defector has passed a screening which ascertains that he is not an infiltrator, he pledges loyalty to the government of South Vietnam and receives an ID card entitling him to the same privileges, immunities and responsibilities of every other citizen of that curious republic. He receives a mattress, a blanket, two suits of clothing and $61 in piastres; as well as the opportunity to develop a skill in woodworking, brick-laying or animal husbandry. He is also required to attend classes in political orientation. He is a Hoi Chanh.

A Hoi Chanh may remain in a Chieu Hoi center, with his family, for as long as 60 days. He is then offered the alternatives of serving as a regular soldier in the Vietnamese military, of joining the Americans as a Kit Carson Scout, of going into a government Chieu Hoi village or of returning to his own village. He is usually sufficiently shrewd not to return to his own.

If he prefers farming to fighting he is given a six months’ supply of rice and $90 for purchase of building materials. Roofing and cement is provided by the American government. He sometimes winds up with roofing, rice and cement, but without land to build on.

Sgt. Y. took me to a jerry-built construction, called “The Club,” to ‘ meet our interviewees. The Club looks like one of those general stores on the outskirts of town where a rusty dipper hangs on a pump. The furniture consisted of three mess tables and half a dozen benches. The walls were covered with coca-cola ads and dated Vietnamese calendars. A Vietnamese woman sold coffee, tea, rice and cigarettes here. It was a Hoi Chanh  Playboy club.

Our interpreter was a schoolboy from Hanoi, wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a St. Chris. He introduced me to Van, a boy hardly older but much tougher, who’d fought six years with the NFL. I asked the boy from Hanoi to ask the VC boy why he’d defected.

“I was second in charge of eight men of the Dong Nai regiment. We were stationed in Binh Duong Province. Our people had taken Saigon, we were told.

“There were a hundred of us. We moved only at night. We were not to fight on the way. By day we rested. I had four clips of 30 rounds apiece for my AK-47. We did not know how we were to be reinforced or supplied. On the outskirts of Saigon we were beaten. It turned out to be a lie that our people held Saigon.

“I realized that we were a suicide mission. I found a leaflet promising safety and-amnesty to soldiers of the Dong Nai regiment.

“I had no wish to die. When I was sent to get rice, that night, I walked to where the ARVN troops had dug in. I made a lot of noise and held my rifle and the leaflet over my head. I became a Hoi Chanh.

“What will you do when you have finished here?”

“I take the one-year draft exemption.”

This kid was simply war-weary, that was all.

The next interviewee was a man, in his middle-thirties, who’d served eight years’ as a medical officer with The People’s Army of North Vietnam. His family was still in Hanoi.

“Will measures be taken against your family because of your defection?”

“They may find things harder economically.”  

Though nobody would be busted, I took this to mean somebody might get fired. I asked him why he’d defected.

“Because I am a doctor first, a soldier second. In the North I had to be a soldier first. There the best doctor is the best soldier. I am a good doctor but a poor soldier. I am a poor soldier because I am not political.”

“Do you consider the Chieu Hoi program to be non-political?”

“Yes,” Sgt. Y. cut in.

“If so,” I wondered, “why the acceleration? Isn’t the aim of accelerated pacification to capture as much territory as possible before a cease-fire, in order to strengthen our bargaining position?” `

“Capturing the minds and hearts of men is our purpose,” Sgt. Y. assured me. `

“Isn’t that what the Japanese meant when they spoke of ‘co-existence’?”

“The Japanese didn’t practice co-existence. They practiced ‘Break and Subdue’.”

“Don’t we do the same thing under ‘Clear and Destroy?”

‘If it were we wouldn’t be winning the war that the Japanese lost.”

“I didn’t know we were winning it.”

“America has never lost a war.”

The Hanoi boy’s spectacles slid down his nose.

“The Americans had to run like hell at Inchon,” I remembered.

“They didn’t run,” the sergeant was certain, “they walked.”

The next interviewee had been a professional soldier 28 years, and if he lived another 28 he’d still be soldiering. He appeared to be in his early thirties but was actually 43. His name and rank were sewn on his sleeve: Major Luan.

Major Luan had a broad, strong-boned face of such strong intelligence that, though he wasn’t a big man, he gave the impression of being a six-footer. This impression also derived from his self-con-fidence. He spoke so directly that his cordiality seemed challenging. He was the son of a farmer of the north; and had turned soldier when he’d been only 15.

“The French came to our village,” he explained, in the tone of a defense lawyer confident of his client’s innocence. “They made our girls stand in the middle of our village. Some of the girls were married. Some were mothers. It made no difference to the French. Their officers chose among them, pointing to this or that one, like men in a whorehouse. Wherever the French officers went, they took what they chose for their pleasure. If it gave them pleasure to kill, they killed. I have since killed many French. But not one have I killed for pleasure.”

“The Americans gave much support, in money and planes and guns to the French. There was even a plan to use a nuclear bomb at Dien Bien Phu. So aren’t you now fighting for what you used to fight against?  Even though the Americans do not kill for pleasure?”

“No,” Major Luan answered decisively, “I fight now for the same object I fought as a boy: the freedom of the Vietnamese people.”

“Do you believe that, had the election promised by the Geneva conference been held in 1954,Diem would have won over Ho?”

“Ho would have won,” the major admitted, “and we would now have a communist country.”

“Wouldn’t that be preferable to having two countries engaged in an endless war?”

“No. Better no country than a communist country. I fight with the Americans now because that is to fight for what I have always fought; the freedom of the individual man to vote, to speak freely, to assemble freely, and to have a fair trial.”

“When the Saigon Chief of Police executed a suspect in front of the American TV cameras, many Americans began to doubt that we were fighting for the right of a suspect to a fair trial.”

“That was just an accident in time and space,” Sgt. Y. explained. I didn’t know what he meant.

The Major stood up looking exasperated. He walked up and down, frowning, wanting to be understood before he began speaking. Finally he stopped and looked at me seriously.

“You cannot understand hatred,” he assured me. “I do not approve of what Chief of Police Loan did- but I understand it. You think there is always time to be reasonable. But there is not always time. When you live with memories of what the enemy has done to your friends, it is hard, when your own chance comes, not to do the same to him. Yet, even when my own desire was vengeance, I have kept my men from killing. It was not easy.”

He sat down looking troubled. There was sweat on his forehead; he wiped it off. Then, with an effort, he smiled.

“You too might have done what the Chief of Police did—if you did not know a TV camera was watching.”

“TV only shows the VC side of things anyhow,” Sgt. Y. complained. “When the air force bombs the wrong village by mistake, they play it up. Why don’t they show what the VC does?”

“I was only speaking about the reaction in the States,” I told both the major and the sergeant, “seeing an unarmed man, with his hands bound behind him, executed on the spot, made a lot of people sick. And what made them sick was knowing that they were on the same side as the Chief of Police of Saigon.”

“I have killed many men in battle,” Major Luan persisted in taking the argument as a personal accusation, “but I have never killed an unarmed man. Many times I have taken prisoner men it would have given me satisfaction to kill on the spot. But I did not because I have self-control. There is only one man in the world I would not take prisoner. And into him I would put my knife as far as it would go.”

Major Luan looked out at the low, dark line of barracks.

“General Giap,” he told himself softly, “General Giap.”

Although the Chieu Hoi program is pointed for battlefield defections, few men come in by that route. The soldier may be ready to desert; but he lacks confidence that the Green Beret will hold his fire. So most give themselves up at civilian centers or to the National Police. Some have their families arrange their defections. More give themselves up to Vietnamese forces than to American. More come in from the N.F.L. than from the P.A.V.N.

Chieu Hoi pays the Hoi Chanh for every weapon he brings in with him; or to which he leads an American or GVN force. The ministry of Chieu Hoi paid out 23 million piastres in 1968 for weapons brought in or discovered. One Nguyen Van Bang earned 2,028,500 piastres-about 12,000 American dollars–for revealing one cache.

Psychological warfare experts in South Vietnam are using astrology to bring Viet Cong over to the government side during the lunar New Year starting Tuesday. A professional astrologer, Thai Son, who writes a popular horoscope for Saigon newspapers, has prepared a forecast sheet to be included in Tet gift packages. The Joint United States-Public Affairs Office says the sheet makes predictions favorable to the government and unfavorable to its enemies. The United States agency is advising the government on preparing and distributing 100,000 of the astrological charts as well as 28 other items, designed to boost the Cheiu Hoi, or ‘open arms’ defection program.-AP dispatch from Saigon in the Baltimore Sun.

The next defector to whom I spoke was a wan youth who’d picked up $26,000 for serving as a guide in an operation which led to the capture of one K-50, six Russian rifles and one Mauser. He hadn’t kept the whole reward for himself, he apologized, but had given VN $5,000 toward a fund for the rebuilding of Hue. With the balance he planned to buy a Yamaha. And added, in English, that he hoped to become a Kit Carson Scout.

The Kit Carson Scouts have distinguished themselves. Dinh van Minh, on patrol northwest of Da-nang,. recommended an ambush site to his American commander and fired the first claymore, killing five NVA men. He then threw grenades into the enemy position and continued to fight, although wounded. Minh was recommended for the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the NFL put a VN $100,000 price on his capture. Eight men kidnapped him from his home, and cut the soles of his feet to make his escape difficult. Minh succeeded in escaping, nonetheless, and returned to the First Marine Division.

Truong Kinh, a Kit Carson Scout with the Fifth Marines, is credited with the killing of 55 NFL men in a single day’s fighting. “Even more important than the number killed,” his CO commented, “is that Kinh has won the respect of every Marine in the outfit.”

The names of heroic Vietnamese, who have come over to the American side, would make a long, long list. What is troubling about it is that the achievement is simply one of successful counter-terrorism. One fails to see what it has to do with “winning the minds and hearts of men.” And those Hoi Chanh who do not become incorporated into an army outfit, remain unincorporated in Vietnamese society. These VC and NVA men, lying apathetically around the Saigon Chieu Hoi center have become second-class citizens in South Vietnam. As, indeed, have those multitudes who’ve been bombed out; then given free cement.

Rep. Chamberlane of Michigan offers us a direct route to victory in our pacification program: “There is no doubt that soap boosts morale,” he assures us, “and of the nutritive value of candy there can be no doubt”- and so devises a Victory in Vietnam motto: Candy is dandy and soap brings hope.

How such minds get elected to public office is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Though I make an effort whenever Roman Pucinski makes a public statement.

While the GVN estimates that the NFL has lost the equivalent of 10 divisions, by defections through the Chieu Hoi program, it has itself lost 100,000 men whom nobody solicited to quit fighting. That some of them are now embattled as policemen, among Saigon’s 50,000 “White Mice National Police,” seems plausible.

The risks being taken, and the hardships now endured, by Americans trying to provide schools, medical help and modern agricultural techniques to the South Vietnamese, is a struggle, essentially, against the present government in Saigon. That government’s opposition to ‘land reform, a position supported by the U.S. Embassy upon the ground that such tenure would create “political instability,” has reduced the hope of “winning the hearts and minds of men” to what, with less hypocrisy, Imperial Japan called “Break and Subdue.” And what we term “Clear and Destroy;”

Imperial Japan’s policy on land reform in Vietnam was sustained by Diem’s concentration camp order of Jan. 11, 1956. And has since, by the support of American weaponry, been ‘sustained by the present government in Saigon. lndeed, the major cadres of the American pacification programs are derived today from the party organized by the Japanese business-military complex: the Dai Viet.

“In our time,” George Orwell wrote, “political speech and writing, are largely the defense of the indefensible … political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Mil1ions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. ”

Not even Orwell could foretell a day when Earth’s mightiest power would seek help, in rectifying frontiers of a country 10,000 miles away, by consulting a wandering astrologist.

The rest of the way is by the stars.

 

 

Jim Tuohy on Roger Ebert

ROGER EBERT OUTDRAWS THE BASKETBALL TEAM

By James Tuohy

ROGER EBERT HAD arrived at the movies, but the movies had not. “There’s no 1 o’clock screening of Trenchcoat,” Ebert said into a telephone at the reception desk of the Film Media Center, a film-editing firm that has a screening room. “It’s been cancelled.”

Ebert was calling his office—the one at Tribune Productions, not the one at the Chicago Sun-Times or the one at WLS or the one at the University of Chicago. He used to have one at the Mer­chandise Mart too, but he recently quit doing mo­vie reviews there for Channel 5. He keeps busy, though, doing daily reviews and weekly articles for the Sun-Times, radio commentaries for ABC radio, and At the Movies, the weekly program in which Ebert and Tribune critic Gene Siskel review movies, which appears on 130 television stations.

The crowded schedule occasionally creates logistical breakdowns, such as on this Wednesday after­noon, as Ebert was informed by the At the Movies office that Walt Disney productions had failed to furnish a print of Trenchcoat. At The Movies had been informed of the cancellation, but this informa­tion was not transmitted to Ebert.

“You have to remember to take it out of the book when it’s cancelled,” said Ebert calmly into the telephone. He stood with his rain coat hanging loose and open, its collar up, and he held a white bag in his hand. He replaced the receiver, took off his coat, and sat down on a flat, cloth-upholstered couch. He reached in the bag and spread on the floor a hamburger with ketchup, mustard, onion, and hot pep­per, French fries and, somewhat futilely, a medium-sized diet drink. It was lunch time.

* * *

Breakfast for Ebert had been in Columbia, Missouri. He and Siskel appeared at the University of Missouri the night before, and Ebert returned to Chica­go about 10:15 a.m., armed with a line for the day: “Fifteen-hundred people came to see us. We out­drew the basketball team.” The comment was typi­cal of Ebert, pithy and cheerful and delivered with a hint in his voice that it might even be true.

There were almost 9,000 people at the basketball game in Columbia, but there was a game.

Ebert took a cab to the fringe of Old Town, to an old three-story, red-brick townhouse he bought last year, moving from a smaller townhouse around the corner. “One day I was looking for a parking place, and I saw a For Sale sign. The owners showed me around, and I said ‘I’ll take it.”

It cost about a quarter of a million dollars.

Ebert does not give details on his earnings, but media personalities at his level talk about salaries in chunks of hundreds of thousands, and he’s making several chunks. He owns several pieces of property, including the townhouse he moved out of.

“It’s hard for me to know how much I have because a lot of it is tied up in mortgages,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that I’m rich, but I make more money than I ever thought I would.”

Such statements have to be coaxed out of Ebert, for whom money has never been the primary reason for doing what he does. He gave up his lucrative three-day-a-week contract with Channel 5 simply because he wanted more free time. A bachelor and for 17 years a well-paid movie critic for the Sun- Times, Ebert lived comfortably long before his other contracts came along. He does radio and television mainly because he likes to.

“It’s fun,” said Ebert, who always had a streak of ham in him, whether on the stage in high school, telling jokes in a bar, recounting travel adventures to friends, or making guest appearances on talk shows. “I thought, at this point in my career, I would be writing a general interest column, but now that At the Movies is a hit I don’t have time. It’s OK, though. I love the movies.”

Ebert walked through the living room of his townhouse, which has been kept out of the grasp of interior decorators. He walked into the kitchen, fed his two cats, dropped his bag in a second-floor bedroom, and called the Sun-Times from a third-floor study. He picked up five radio scripts from a desk. Each one-minute long, they would be played on 400 ABC-affiliated radio stations the following week.

Ebert walked to his 1980 grey four-door Volkswagen and drove to the Stone Container Building at Wacker and Michigan. There, in a small studio, he sat at an empty table and laid his scripts down in front of a microphone. On the other side of the glass sat Bob Benninghoff, the engineer.

After some preliminaries, he said into the mike, “This is Movie News for Tuesday, March 15th…John Huston received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award . . . Who else do you know who’s been master of the hunt… beachcomber in Mexico… lover of great women… Boxer…director…African Queen…Key Largo… Treasure of Sierra Madre…Why, if it weren’t for John Huston, the late show wouldn’t be worth staying up for…”

Ebert looked over to Benninghoff again. “Was that a take? It was too short, wasn’t it? Do another one. I’ll add a sentence…Take two…the Late Show wouldn’t be worth staying up for. Of course, he also made Annie, but nobody’s perfect.”

Because of stumbles in delivery, Ebert did four takes. “He’s working hard on this,” said Benninghoff.

Ebert ran through the other four scripts with retakes on only two of them. He had entered the studio at 12:30 p.m. At 12:49 he completed the tap­ings, his week of radio toils finished. “I’ve got a mo­vie at one o’clock,” said Ebert, who never wears a watch.

“Don’t they wait for you, Rog?” asked Benning­hoff.

“They have a way of inviting other people, Bob.”

In his car Ebert listened to tapes of the current week of ABC broadcasts, which Benninghoff had given him. Movie News runs at 7:45 a.m. in Chicago, and Ebert seldom listens to it then. Ebert parked in a lot next to Lenny’s, a prefabricated hot dog stand on Ontario, where he ordered lunch, the one he would take in a white bag to the Film Media Center.

***

One of Ebert’s great culinary disappointments has been that the Steak-and-Shake chain has never successfully entered the Chicago market. He grew to love Steak-and-Shake steak burgers as a child in Urbana. The white-and-black-tiled short-order shops have inspired Ebert to rhapsodies through the years, both written and oral.

Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the only child of Walter and Annabelle Ebert. Walter, who was 40 when Roger was born, was an electrician. Annabelle worked as a bookkeeper. Roger’s stable, two-car Midwestern childhood could have been used in scripting an Andy Hardy movie.

He lived all his growing years in the same two-bedroom white stucco house with green shutters at 410 W. Washington Street. The Eberts lived across the street from the city editor of the Champaign News-Gazette, and he sometimes took Roger with him down to the paper, even when Roger was still in the grades at St. Mary’s Catholic School. For almost as long as he remembers going to Steak-­and-Shake, Roger wanted to be a newspaperman. When he was in fifth grade he put out his own newspaper, The Washington Street News. When he was 15 he began working 30 hours a week at the News-Gazette, covering sports and features, and he wrote for and became editor of the Urbana High School paper, The Echo. Along the way, Ebert, took first place in a state radio contest, preparing a five-minute newscast on deadline and then reading it.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois in 1960, Ebert started his own weekly paper, The Spectator, which was devoted to the arts and poli­tics. Like his writing skills, Ebert’s interest in the arts developed early, the cultural opportunities be­ing extensive in a university town. As early as grade school he began attending concerts, plays, and, of course, the movies. He became a regular col­umnist for the Daily Illini when he was a freshman and the editor of the paper when he was a senior. While still in college he sold pieces to Panorama Magazine, the Saturday feature section of the Chi­cago Daily News. In 1966, after going to graduate school and being accepted into the doctoral program in English at the University of Chicago, Ebert was hired as a reporter at the Sun-Times.

He covered routine stories and wrangled feature assignments. He wrote about underground films. He wrote a review of the movie Blowup, did the Sun-Times’ obituary of Walt Disney, and was sent to the West Coast to do feature stories on the film­ing of Camelot. Seven months after he started at the Sun-Times, the paper’s movie critic retired. On April 1, 1967, Ebert became the youngest movie critic on a daily newspaper in the United States.

“It was very exciting. I was very lucky.”

Ebert was also very good. Before Ebert, Chicago daily movie critics generally behaved as nightlife columnists still do, cheerleading for advertisers. Ebert knew that a whole new generation of movie­goers was buying newspapers, and they considered films serious artistic endeavors, not just Saturday night diversions.

His first review was of Galia, a French art film. “What we’re hearing is the sound of the French New Wave rolling aside,” he wrote. Chicago news­papers weren’t used to reviews about prissy foreign waves. The old-time hack reviewers could only scratch their heads.

Ebert, possessor of a smooth writing style, brought magazine-quality slickness to his daily re­views. His background as an English major gave him a solid understanding of plotting and pace, if not always the nuances of film mechanics, and his age kept him attuned to the concerns of the anxious young people of the 1960s.

On the other hand, although his prose was as so­phisticated as, say, that of the reviewers for Time magazine, Ebert liked more movies than did non- newspaper critics, many of whom seemed bored by movies without subtitles. He did not reserve high ratings for films that were made with aspirations to high art. A movie, he believed, was successful if it became in the end what it set out to be in the begin­ning. A good John Wayne western should be re­cognized as such, Ebert believed, and should not be belittled because it didn’t try to be as important as The Rules of the Game.

In 1975 Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for criti­cism. The award was given for 10 articles he had written during 1974, including reviews and com­mentaries. One of the reviews was an effective de­molition of Mame, which Ebert had finished writ­ing within 45 minutes of the screening.

***

At 1:45 p.m., his Lenny’s lunch completed, Roger Ebert was talking on the phone in his office at the Sun-Times to his office at Tribune Productions. “It’s not your fault. It’s all right. This way I don’t have to see Trenchcoat, and I’m in my office two hours early.”

Ebert’s office is in a corner of the fourth floor fea­tures section of the newspaper, with windows that look east toward the Wrigley Building and the Chi­cago River. He had to write a review of Death Watch for Friday’s paper, as well as a script for At The Movies.

Ebert’s office has more pictures, signs, posters, books, papers, plants, and knickknacks than the eye can quickly comprehend, even on a careful sweep of the room. There are posters for Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Headline Hunters, The Third Man, and The Seven Samurai. Near his old Smith-Corona typewriter is a gumball machine with glass gumballs in it, close by a dozen little Disney figurines and big Donald Duck. On top of filing cabinets are old newspapers, pocket books, film refer­ence volumes, and video tape containers. On the walls are pictures of Ebert with Lillian Gish, Harri­son Ford, and Pia Isadore. On a pile of post cards is one showing a buxom blonde in a revealing outfit, signed “Sex Symbol Sybil.”

The phone rang.

“…We outdrew the basketball team,” said Ebert. “Fifteen-hundred people packed the auditorium. The show is real popular there . . .”

Ebert answered some mail. “Dear Cary, next time I’ll go-fer the dictionary. . . Dear Sonny, I share your enthusiasm, especially for E.S. White and cats.”

Bobby Zaren called. Zaren is a legendary press agent known for sending out only personal letters, never press releases or mimeographed letters.

” . . . Right, Bobby…That’s why you’re the number one press agent in New York–or is it publicist now? I like press agent better. Press agent sounds like someone smoking cigars and running blondes down Broadway.”

Ebert was delaying the moment when he would write. He had seen Death Watch in New York more than a week before and could have written the review any time, but he never writes until he has to.

At 3:15 he wrote the script for reviews of two mo­vies he would give on the At The Movies show to be taped the next day. At 3:45 he was done.

Ebert was due at 6:30 at the University of Chica­go on Michigan Avenue, where he teaches a film class every Wednesday night. Tonight the subject would be Frederic Fellini. Ebert paged through a file of Fellini material.

At 5:30, using no notes, Ebert began writing his review of Death Watch. He worked at a computer terminal behind his desk. He was finished, after re­visions, at 6.

There were about 100 people at his film class. Ebert passed out free tickets to a screening, gave away a couple of paperbacks he had received in the mail, and showed 8 1/2, leading a discussion after­wards. The class broke up at 10, and he and a pret­ty psychiatrist went to Miller’s Pub for a late sup­per. She talked about her high school days in a small Missouri town, and mention of Missouri re­minded Ebert that he had just been there. “We out­drew the basketball team,” he said.

* * *

The following day, Ebert left his Volkswagen in the parking lot of the WGN-TV studios on the Northwest Side. “When I get inside, the first thing I that will happen is that Gene will say something about my being late, like “The World’s Latest Movie Critic.”

But, when Ebert opened the door of room 136, Siskel was typing his script in a corner cubi­cle and he said nothing. It turned out he had a bad cold and was saving his voice for the taping.

Although Ebert writes his two reviews the after­noon before the taping, Siskel waits until Thursday morning because Wednesday is a crowded day for him. He regularly comes in an hour early on Thurs­day, allowing him to needle Ebert about being late.

Ebert was the youngest daily movie critic in the country until Siskel, three years younger, got the Tribune job in 1970. They have spent so much time being adversaries that friendship has come slowly, if it can be said to have arrived at all. They do not meet socially, indeed, do not travel in the same so­cial circles. Ebert lives simply, dates a variety of women, and frequently goes to dinner with a few old friends, a couple of whom are carpenters. Siskel lives in a Gold Coast co-op and is married to an ad­vertising woman who is a former Channel 2 producer, and his social activities involve the high-power­ed media people of the city. The Siskels might be dining at Le Perroquet while Ebert and his pals are eating at the Parthenon.

It might be said that Siskel and Ebert have a strong lack of dislike for each other. The strongest bond between them is their respect for each other’s professionalism. They retain good humor while working together, though remaining dogged com­petitors in large and small ways. When Sun-Times TV columnist Ron Powers won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, two years before Ebert did, Ebert said he was happy for Powers but admitted he never could have been happy if it had gone to Siskel. For the two and a half years that he did re­views for Channel 5 Ebert’s total earnings exceeded Siskel’s and, he admitted, that fact gave him great satisfaction.

As Siskel typed, Ebert talked with Joe Antelo, the executive producer of At The Movies. There had been an article about Ebert and Siskel in USA Today that morning. It said they “are on the verge of turning themselves into the hottest properties in non-network television.”

“Nice article,” said Antelo.

“Couldn’t be better,” said Ebert. ‘Said we were the hottest thing in syndication.”

Ebert and Siskel first got together at WTTW in1975, a once-a-month show titled Opening Soon At a Theater Near You. In 1979, the show evolved in­to the weekly Sneak Previews, which ran for three seasons and became the highest rated program in the history of the Public Broadcasting System. But PBS is a strange operation. The budgets are big, but salaries are small. In August of 1981, after three years of Sneak Previews, the WTTIV ma­nagement offered Ebert and Siskel a four-year con­tract at a raise of $100 each year. WTTW would sell the program to commercial syndication, but Ebert and Siskel would share in none of the profits. In the meantime, Antelo approached Don Ephraim, lawyer for Ebert and Siskel, about putting together a package for Tribune Productions. Ebert and Siskel now share in profits that have raised their salaries by hundreds of thousands each year.

Ebert developed a line to cover the whole WTTW situation: “I already pledged to PBS and got my tote bag. I’ll be damned if I’ll pledge four years of my life, too.” The USA Today writer used it as the last line of his story.

When Siskel finished his script–reviews of The King of Comedy and Tender Mercies–his pages were joined with Ebert’s reviews of My Tutor and High Road to China. All the copy was put in a long roll and sent down to the teleprompter.

After separate lunches in the WGN cafeteria—a gyros sandwich from the steam line for Ebert, skin­less breast of chicken from home for Siskel—and separate trips to makeup, the two critics were seated on the set at 1:15 p.m.

Siskel, wearing a brown sport coat, red crew neck sweater, and red-checked sport shirt, read Variety. Ebert, wearing black slacks, a blue V-neck sweater, and blue button-down shirt, talked.

Ebert had kept up a running commentary all morning—which Siskel, too hoarse to banter, had endured silently. Ebert had been particularly de­lighted by a wire-service story in the Sun-Times that said women found men with hair sexier than men without. He had taped it to the wall. “Phil, you probably saw today that article about women’s at­titude toward baldheaded men,” said Ebert to the floor manager, Phil Reid. “It said a man without hair is like a ring without a diamond.”

The start of taping had been delayed by a technical problem. Ebert continued his patter, comment­ing repeatedly on Siskel’s cold-induced passiveness.

“My partner here is fighting his usual losing bat­tle with catatonia…If my car behaved like Gene, I’d need a new set of jumper cables.”

”That’s a Rodney Dangerfield line,” he said. It is not a Rodney Dangerfield line. Ebert just wanted an excuse to do a series of Rodney Dangerfield jokes, which he did.

The taping went slowly due to technical troubles, but Ebert’s and Siskel’s readings went smoothly, requiring few retakes. Their ad libs between reviews, some almost two minutes long, were recorded without retakes.

The Stinker of the Week portion of the program requires the presence of a skunk named Aroma, and at 3:20 it was placed in a seat next to Ebert. He began petting it. “Hi, kiddo,” he said to the skunk.

Siskel did not address the skunk.

“Gene’s a little afraid of the skunk,” said Nancy Stanley, the makeup woman.

Ebert said he had received a post card during the week from a viewer who wanted to know if the skunk was real. “People are so used to special effects these days they can’t even tell a real animal,” said Ebert. “I wrote her hack and said the skunk is real but Gene is a special effect.”

The tape rolled with a close up of Aroma. “No, we couldn’t keep him away,” said Siskel, ad libbing the introduction. “That’s Aroma, and it’s time for The Stinker of the Week.”

“Do you know we actually got a post card want­ing to know if Aroma is real?” asked Ebert.

“Yes,” replied Siskel. “I told them the skunk is real but you are a special effect.”

Ebert let out a great laugh.

The sound was bad, and the exchange was reshot three times. On the last one Ebert could not resist the temptation to add a rejoinder: “Jumper cable for Mr. Siskel, please.”

It was not as funny as it had been the original way. It was, in fact, a non sequitur, but producer Nancy De Los Santos let it stand.

“OK, Roger, that’s a wrap for you,” said De Los Santos at 4:10.

Ebert had time to go home, shower, and change clothes before leaving for the 6 o’clock screening of Trenchcoat, a movie so bad he contemplated awarding it no stars.

On the way home that night Ebert stopped at O’Rourke’s, an Old Town bar he did a lot to popula­rize. Through the years Ebert wrote about O’Rourke’s, interviewed actors there, and hosted parties there. The place gained a reputation as a hangout for celebrities and media stars. Ebert quit drinking three years ago, but he still drops in for brief visits.

Ebert started to tell a political story to Chris Chandler, a press aide to Mayor Harold Washington. But he was interrupted by a woman who said she was a reporter from Newsweek. “We’ve been thinking about doing a story on you,” she said.

“Any time,” said Ebert. “USA Today says we’re the hottest thing in syndication. We went down to the University of Missouri and outdrew the basket­ball team.”

The woman looked impressed. Ebert looked like a man who knows how to have fun.