Mike Royko: A Life in Print
By F. Richard Ciccone
Public Affairs, 451 pages, $27.50
In the early 1950s, when Mike Royko was a junior-college student a few years shy of finding his calling in journalism, he visited the Riverview amusement park on Chicago’s North Side. There he happened upon a midway attraction called the Dips, in which a contestant hurled a ball at a target. When it was hit, three caged black men were dumped from a wooden bench into a vat of water.
More than a decade later, as the civil rights movement was turning its attention to a deeply segregated Chicago, Royko returned to Riverview in his guise as a columnist for the Daily News. Learning that the Dips had shut down for fear of being boycotted, Royko asked the operator why he could not have put some whites in the cage.
” ‘I only have one dressing room,’ ” Royko quoted the man as saying.
” ‘You can’t have whites and Negroes using the same dressing room.’ ” Royko closed the column by adding, with deadpan control, “And this, as others have discovered, is 1964.”
That episode attests to much of what made Royko great and renowned: his willingness, even as a product of the white ethnics who ruled Chicago, to challenge their social order of racial bias and political corruption. And the incident attests, too, to the vigor of F. Richard Ciccone’s exhaustive and important biography, “Royko: A Life in Print.”
A former managing editor of the Tribune, Ciccone has undertaken on a grand scale the kind of legwork his subject would have appreciated. He has read through the 8,000 columns Royko wrote in his 33-year career, immersed himself in Royko’s private correspondence and interviewed scores, perhaps hundreds, of former colleagues, friends and family members. For its trove of information, then, Ciccone’s book deserves to be read by those who cherished Royko’s column; it merits a place on the shelf next to the two Royko anthologies released by the University of Chicago Press since his 1997 death.
While Ciccone rightly admires Royko, calling him “better than anyone” in the introduction and “a true genius” on Page 2, he delivers something more shaded and complex than an acolyte’s tribute. From early in his tenure as a columnist, Ciccone writes, Royko was “conflicted by the joy of fame and the fear of failure.” He championed underdogs and bullied underlings. He courted his future wife with guileless ardor, mourned her death in several heart-wrenching columns, and in between ignored and antagonized her by drinking away his nights with sundry hangers-on. Even as Ciccone provides dozens of examples of Royko’s finest work, he makes a credible attack on “Boss,” Royko’s famous investigative biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley, as hyperbolic and in places poorly documented.
Despite all its achievements, however, “Royko” falls short of being the definitive biography it might have been. Part of a biographer’s work consists of the hunt for raw material, for facts and opinions and anecdotes, and this Ciccone has done admirably. But a biographer also must think his or her way through that material, through the life being examined, and dare to impose form and meaning on it. On this score, Ciccone does not quite succeed. For all the intricate detail in this book — detail that is hilarious, instructive and touching at turns — Ciccone fails to trace the trajectory of Royko’s character, of how he became who he was.
That arc, it seems to me, consists equally of fidelity to his heritage and transcendence of it. The son of a bartender and a shopkeeper, Royko grew up on the Near Northwest Side in the kind of blue-collar, ethnic family and neighborhood that defined 20th Century Chicago. Royko preserved all that was best in a way of life that venerated labor and abjured pretense; yet he rose above what was mean-spirited and parochial in that world, its casual racism and blind obeisance to the Democratic machine.
The unique Royko voice, as Ciccone demonstrates with numerous excerpts from columns, was compassionate yet astringent, idealistic yet sardonic. But where did that voice come from? How did it get that way? Ciccone unearths all the tantalizing clues. He tells us that Royko’s father hung a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt in the family tavern. He informs us that Royko, having dropped out of several high schools, read James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Arthur Schopenhauer, and committed Beethoven symphonies to memory. He quotes this gem of a self-definition, which Royko wrote in applying for a job at the City News Bureau:
“I think I can write. I’ve got a pair of strong legs, lots of energy and I don’t plan on being rich. And I can type. What I lack in formal education, I’ve made up, to a certain point, in personal experience and a heck of a lot of reading.”
I only wish Ciccone had arranged such vivid information into a kind of unified field, a way of understanding Royko. Reading this book, I could not help thinking of another newspaperman’s biography of another working-class hero: “When Pride Still Mattered,” David Maraniss’ extraordinary portrait of football coach Vince Lombardi. Maraniss showed how the forces of class, ethnicity and most of all Jesuit Catholicism forged Lombardi; he exposed the private roots of the public man. Ciccone seems to resist taking that kind of analytical leap with Royko.
The one exception comes when he describes the series of controversies swirling around Royko’s columns and his private life in the 1990s, when he was periodically accused of being anti-gay, anti-black and anti-Hispanic. Ciccone attributes much of the outcry to the reign of political correctness, and in this case I find the analysis facile and unconvincing.
Certainly, Ciccone is right when he contends that readers at times mistook Royko’s satires of intolerance for the real thing. Reporters in their 20s and 30s, encountering Royko in his crotchety, self-destructive dotage, could hardly conceive of the moral courage he had shown earlier in his career or the brutal responsibility of being brilliant five days a week for longer than many of them had been alive.
But the term “political correctness” serves as a useful cudgel for discrediting any allegation of bigotry. If times and sensitivities changed — so that wisecracks about Mexican incompetence and rants about “fags” no longer seemed like harmless banter — then why should Royko be excused from changing with them? His grandeur as a columnist, after all, was that he refused to be shackled to the prejudices of the times into which he was born.
It gives me no pleasure to express these qualms. Though I grew up and now work in the Northeast, I began reading Royko as a teenager, when my best friend’s older brother, a Jesuit seminarian then based at Loyola University, steered me to “Boss.” During college in Wisconsin, I proudly wore a “Royko Power” T-shirt from a Daily News promotion. While reporting for the Tribune’s suburban edition roughly 20 years ago, I started every morning by reading Royko in the rival Sun-Times. Among my keepsakes, even now, is a yellowing copy of the column Royko wrote the morning after Jane Byrne defeated the machine’s Michael Bilandic for mayor, his tribute to “you wild and crazy Chicagoans.”
For its abundance of Royko fact and lore, for its example of relentless research, I appreciate Ciccone’s book and will recommend it to the aspiring journalists I now teach. But I will not stop waiting for another biography to give the full measure of the man.
The Royko touch
A few years ago there was an event at the Harold Washington Library Center to celebrate the publication of “One More Time,” a posthumous collection of Mike Royko columns put out by the University of Chicago Press. The event was also meant to celebrate Royko, who had died in 1997, and so a number of his pals, colleagues and a couple of admirers were asked to speak to a packed auditorium.
Stories were told, columns were read, anecdotes — both tender and tough — were related. It was an evening of some tears, much laughter and many books sold, as the event launched one of the most successful books in U. of C. Press history. Chicago, it appeared, just couldn’t get enough of Royko.
One short biography, “The World of Mike Royko,” by Doug Moe, was published in 1999. And now we have more: a lengthy biography, “Mike Royko: A Life in Print,” by Royko’s former colleague and friend, F. Richard Ciccone, and a new collection, “For the Love of Mike,” from the U. of C. Press, portions of which are excerpted below. So much Royko in print, almost makes it feel as if he never left. Almost.
Here’s Royko on . . .
The title “alderman” (Dec. 15, 1992)
For the sake of political correctness, maybe the Chicago City Council should give thought to officially changing their title from the gender-offensive “alderman” to the gender-neutral “aldercreature.” On the other hand, some of them might not want to be known as aldercreatures. One must think of the wife and children. “What does your husband do?” “He is an aldercreature.” “Oh, my goodness, is there any treatment for it?”
Journalists (July 21, 1995)
It has been said that journalists have a special public trust. I don’t know about that. If we have a public trust, how come the public doesn’t trust us?
Chicago sports teams (Feb. 8, 1996)
As a Cub fan — and this could also apply to Sox, Bears, and Hawks fans — you should have known better. But you became a true believer. You forgot the one hard rule of being a Chicago sports fan: If anything bad can happen, it figures that it will happen to us.
Wearing jeans (June 21 1995)
I’m aware that some men wear jeans into their middle years. But I assume that they are making a personal statement. The only statement I make with clothing is that I am not naked.
The New Hampshire primary (Feb. 2, 1996)
There are well over 200 million of us. So why must we listen to the TV babblers, the Washington pundits, and every other self-important yapper tell us that it is of monumental importance how the vote turns out in a state that represents less than one-half of 1 percent of the American population. You could drop all of the registered voters in the entire state of New Hampshire into New York City and lose them. Oh, I wish we could.
Wisconsinites (Nov. 8, 1995)
Those of us in Chicago sometimes poke affectionate fun at our rustic neighbors to the north. We tease them for wearing red long underwear to weddings and other formal events — as an outer garment. We call them cheeseheads and chuckle at the way they chomp their bratwurst, drink their brandy-beer boilermakers, and happily thump their distended tummies. The men too.
Happiness (March 17, 1987)
Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn’t the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.
