20 years without the legendary Mike Royko -The Asian Age

During the week that Mike Royko lay fighting for his life in Northwestern Memorial Hospital in April 1997, of complications following a brain aneurysm, the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin would call me at the Chicago Tribune every day. The short conversations went something like this:
"Hello?"

"Breslin," he would growl. "How's he doin'? What's the latest?" I would give him what little information I had, but when he called in the late afternoon of April 29, I had to tell him that Mike had died at 3:30 p.m. "Goddamn it," he said. "Well, goddamn it." And he hung up.

Many people felt the same way. Royko, a vital part of people's daily lives, was the best newspaper columnist this city had ever known. He started writing a column at the Daily News in 1964, and when that paper folded in 1978, he moved to the Sun-Times and then to the Tribune in 1984 until his death.

"He wrote with a piercing wit and rugged honesty that reflected Chicago in all its two-fisted charm," I noted with my then-colleague Jerry Crimmins in Royko's obituary. "His daily column was a fixture in the city's storied journalistic history, and his blunt observations about crooked politicians, mobsters, exasperating bureaucracy and the odd twists of contemporary life reverberated across the nation.

"It was Royko's inimitable combination of street-smart reporting, punchy phrasing and audacious humor that set his column apart, along with his remarkable durability in facing daily deadlines for more than three decades." (You can read the obituary here: chicagotribune.com/roykoobit).

It has been 20 years since his death, and there are thousands of young people to whom the Mike Royko name means very little or nothing at all. For others, old enough to remember turning to the Royko newspaper column first thing, memories may have gotten dusty. He wrote close to 8,000 columns in his life - most of those banged out at a five-day-a-week clip - and though many of them are collected in books and two biographies have been written about him (Richard Ciccone's "Royko: A Life in Print" and Doug Moe's "The World of Mike Royko"), there is no immortality for newspaper writers. We forget.

As the late Ben Hecht, a famous columnist from a previous Chicago newspaper era, once wrote, in verse of all things, "We know each other's daydreams / And the hopes that come to grief / For we write each other's obits / And they're Godalmighty brief." (When Royko won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, the award's judges described him as "having a flair of an old-time Chicago newspaperman in the Ben Hecht tradition").

There was a time when newspaper columnists became synonymous with the cities about which they wrote. There was Breslin, and Pete Hamill, in New York, and Herb Caen in San Francisco. Royko had his hometown. When Royko died, his great friend, the noted author and radio host (and another Chicago icon) Studs Terkel said simply: "Mike was Chicago." And Breslin, a man of not insubstantial ego, called Royko "the best journalist of his time."

Not everybody liked Royko. He had his detractors, plenty of them. His column, forthright and with an uncanny instinct for the unpopular position, courted controversy and anger. In his final years writing, he ruffled a lot of feathers. Some people took exception to some of his views. A year before his death, more than 1,000 protesters gathered outside Tribune Tower demanding that Royko be fired for what they felt were insulting portrayals of Mexicans in his column. His columns were once described by noted Chicago writer and Catholic priest the Rev. Andrew Greeley as "crudity mixed with resentment."

The wife of one of his principal targets over the years was Eleanor "Sis" Daley, married to Mayor Richard J. Daley (and mother of Mayor Richard M.). She was not happy with Royko's "Boss," the 1971 best-selling biography of her husband. When a Bridgeport grocery store began selling the book, Mrs. Daley demanded it be removed and, of course, it was.

The next day, Royko reported in his column that the National Tea Co. had then ordered the book removed from all its stores, a decision pretty quickly rescinded. A few days later Royko wrote that the books had sold out at all the gift stores at the city's airports, and that "Mrs. Daley did me a tremendous favor. I'm probably going to have a book leather bound, embossed in gold and sent to her for Christmas because she put a couple of dollars in my pocket."

Mrs. Daley did say that she had read the book, but City Hall claimed no knowledge of the book having been banned. When asked about his wife's review of the book as "trash and hogwash," Richard J. replied with that characteristic grin, "She's entitled to her opinion." Royko was 64 when he died. Breslin was 88 when he died this year on March 19. He had retired as a regular columnist in 2004.

The answer to the question of how much longer might Royko have written is, of course, speculative, but the person who misses Royko most, his widow, Judy, had this to say: "I miss Mike every day, no question. His death has left an indelible scar. But I think he would have kept going as long as he could have."

Judy Arndt married Royko in 1986, seven years after the unexpected death of his first wife, Carol (nee Duckman), to whom he had been married since 1956 and with whom he had two sons, David and Robert. Mike and Judy had two now-grown children, Sam and Kate. Of course, when Royko sat down to write what would be his final column, he could not have known that it would be his final column.

It appeared in this newspaper on March 21, 1997. It was about a subject Royko had written about often, the object also of one of his lifelong loves. He wrote about the Cubs, saying in part, "It's about time that we stopped blaming the failings of the Cubs on a poor, dumb creature that is a billy goat. …Yes, blame for many of the Cubs' failings since 1945 can be placed on a dumb creature. Not a poor, dumb creature but a rich one. I'm talking about P.K. Wrigley, head of the chewing gum company and the owner of the Cubs until he died in 1977. … (He ran) the worst franchise in baseball. And a big part of that can be blamed on racism. If not Wrigley's, then that of the stiffs he hired to run his baseball operation." (You can read the entire column here: chicagotribune.com/roykocubs).

"The Cubs winning the World Series? There really are no words to describe what Mike would have thought, would have felt," says Judy. "He would have … I don't have the words." She can remember vividly the night when the Cubs clinched the 1984 division title. She and Mike watched the game at the Billy Goat Tavern. It was jammed, and after the victory, people, strangers mostly, approached Mike to exchange high-fives. Quietly, gently, he grabbed Judy by the hand and led her from the bar, up the stairs and out onto Hubbard Street. She thought they were headed home. Instead he took her in his arms and they started to dance.

"We were there, alone in the middle of the street, just twirling in that strange, otherworldly light," she says. "We were so happy." The following morning he was back at the paper writing his column because that's what he did. The writer is a Chicago newspaperman, a Chicago radio personality and a noted author. The writeup has been published in The Chicago Tribune