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