I was in Buffalo and it was raining.
It was on a Sunday night long ago that I walked into a hotel bar and spied the Chicago Blackhawks and Mike Perricone, then a colleague of mine at the Chicago Sun-Times who covered the team.
I looked at him, surrounded by beer-guzzling young Canadian athletes and weary after filing a story from the arena, and was reminded of Maish Rennick. He was the kind-hearted, if conniving, boxing manager played by Jackie Gleason in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” who looks forlornly out a coffee shop window and intones, “I’m in Pittsburgh and it’s raining.”
While Rennick dealt with a blundering fighter, Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn), Perricone covered a miserable franchise and endured one-night stands in places like Buffalo, Winnipeg, Detroit and, yes, Pittsburgh. I concluded that he had one of America’s worst jobs.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., native reported on 1,200 Hawks games in a dozen, mostly losing seasons, ate the wrong things, drank too much and had resulting intestinal problems. He was good, fast and accustomed to a grind of afternoon and evening deadlines. Sports writing was his life-at least until he came upon a personal ad in the April 1986 issue of Chicago magazine.
It was placed by Don Borzak, an executive at a Chicago printing firm, Service Web Offset Corp., 2500 S. Dearborn St. He put it there on behalf of Joan Vanderbeck, a rising star at the firm, who had gone through a divorce a year before. He didn’t tell her.
Perricone, then closing in on 40, responded. He and Vanderbeck started dating and, 14 months later, were married. Then came the question of children. Vanderbeck was just over 40.
They decided to try, and soon she was pregnant. She was also by now president and chief executive of the company, doing quite better financially than Perricone. Because the couple didn’t want to depend on day care, they made made a big decision: Mike would become Mr. Mom.
He quit the paper on Sept. 1, 1989, three months before a difficult pregnancy ended with birth of a healthy daughter, Jenny. It was a joyous event, but also start of a traumatic change in Perricone’s narrow existence. For example, until marriage and fatherhood, he hadn’t known whether it was Jewel or Osco that sold food or drugs-he only knew takeout, restaurant and room-service cuisine.
Although Vanderbeck was adamant about breast-feeding Jenny and, for much of the first year, came back to their near West Side townhouse each day at lunch, most daytime duties were Perricone’s.
Many of his resulting tales of fatherhood, such as once throwing her bottle across the room in frustration, were recounted in charming weekly columns published during 1990 in the Sun-Times.
Those columns make up about 70 percent of a new book, “From Deadlines to Diapers” ($11.95, Nobel Press paperback). It’s partly the saga of a man confronting deeply held cultural norms.
“I had a very long period of adjustment after leaving the paper,” he said Thursday. “It was numbing, frightening and frustrating. A lot of time was spent with Joan teaching me things around the house, about buying food, preparing food and doing other things.”
But the adjustment also involved being asked, either directly or indirectly, “What else do you do?”
That could leave a creeping sense of failure. When things didn’t go right at home, “I got frustrated and felt as if I wasn’t accomplishing anything important.” After all, he didn’t have a “real” job.
Estimates vary, but there may be a mere 1 million American men doing what Perricone is doing. Further, studies suggest that many working mothers are chagrined by the scant help they receive from husbands in child-rearing, seeing themselves as forced to put in a “second shift” when they get home.
Perricone, 43, gets help on some afternoons from a sitter. Jenny will attend a preschool in the fall, with her dad transporting her each way.
All in all, it has been “the toughest job of my life,” he says. The highs and lows don’t match anything he has encountered. And his concept of toughness itself has changed.
He once associated it with ripping somebody in print, then facing him. Now he sees it as more internal, perhaps not succumbing to an impulse to be alone when your child needs you.
He has been to just one Hawks game since quitting. He’s working on another book on fatherhood and, when Jenny gets older, wouldn’t mind “cranking up” his career a bit.
As for returning full time to a newspaper job, perhaps even returning to the Chicago Stadium press box, well, as Mr. Mom put it Thursday, “If I said yes to that, I think Joan would hit me with a 2-by-4.”
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Along with counsel from hair stylists, Chicago TV reporters might be equipped with maps.
Two weeks back, viewers could wince as the redoubtable Larry Mendte of WBBM-Ch. 2 revealed ignorance by calling Racine Avenue an east-west street.
Last week, WMAQ-Ch. 5’s at-times maladroit sportscaster Jon Kelley envisioned the Bulls winning a third straight title and becoming the “the toast of Madison Avenue.” Fine, assuming he meant a Bulls ad agency. If he’s referring to the Bulls, and where they play, it’s Madison Street.
Then WLS-Ch. 7’s Cheryl Burton, reporting on the kidnapping of a La Porte, Ind., teenage girl, said that phone calls with information had come from as far as “New Buffalo, Ind.” New Buffalo is in Michigan and it’s all of 12 miles from La Porte.
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A stirring week for American academe:
Mickey Edwardson, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Florida and former longtime film critic for Florida’s Gainesville Sun, last week explained to us her supposedly surefire “Oscar’s Law,” developed after studying Academy Awards results since 1929.
Well, she predicted all the big Oscars right on the nose, including Marisa Tomei for supporting actress. If she doesn’t have it, give the woman tenure.
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The fever of congressional reform may be subsiding.
C-Span junkies could sit enthralled, or dyspeptic, into the early hours Friday as the House, led by Dan Rostenkowski, agreed to raise the government’s borrowing limit to a whopping $4.37 trillion.
A supposedly feisty Democratic new guard, including Chicago Rep. Mel Reynolds, fell in line like dominoes, with some rhetorically kissing Rostenkowski’s ring. And Reynolds, who moaned about being around so late, was perturbed by criticisms that traditional perks were being protected by the majority.
Declared Reynolds: “If you feel bad about your free parking, pay for it.”
Many members applauded Reynolds’ rapid assimilation to their value structure.
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David Letterman, whose impact on late-night entertainment is substantial, can now claim influence on management-labor relations during daytime hours.
This was evident last week around the newsroom of the Milwaukee Journal. While a new top management, led by president Jim Currow, is apparently getting good early marks for more benevolent dealings with employees, women and minorities contend that their numbers are abysmally low and that their pay doesn’t track that of white males.
It explained one bright yellow sign that proclaimed, “What does the Milwaukee County Transit System have in common with the Milwaukee Journal? Both just got new tokens. Congratulations, Milwaukee Journal, for hiring your first full-time woman photographer in a decade!”
Then, there was the Letterman-influenced sign with “Top 10 Things About Being a Woman at the Milwaukee Journal!”:
10. Hardly any jet lag from long, boring foreign trips.
9. Less of that messy “disposable” income.
8. No lines at Women’s Executive Washroom.
7. No night work covering the Bucks, the Rep. (Repertory Theater), the symphony, movies, dinner at Grenadier’s, etc., etc.
6. Little risk of overexposure from Page 1 bylines.
5. Fewer tedious management seminars.
4. Extremely low risk of exhaustion from carrying those heavy cameras.
3. Fewer crank calls from readers who hate your column.
2. Opportunity to teach your kids thrift when your pay gets slashed after a maternity leave.
And the No. 1 thing about being a woman at the Milwaukee Journal . . .
1. We’ve heard it’s lonely at the top, but we don’t know personally.
