Mike Royko

My first memories are of walking down to the Wallgreens, in Jacksonville IL, and buying my dad the Chicago Daily News. I would stop, on the way back, and read Royko's column so I wouldn't have to wait for my dad to be done with the paper. From the beginning, Royko's angle always seemed to be that the system (Chicago Daley machine) was corrupt and that its corruption had real life, daily, consequences for ordinary citizens who were, for the most part, immigrants or first generation Americans. The vast majority that he wrote about were the Eastern Europeans that reflected his own background. But, he was clearly immersed in the Greek Town world as well.

Royko seemed to view the Machine as a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia. The pressure, like that placed on store owners to place political signs in their windows was not unlike the pressure placed by a protection racket. Fail to comply and a visitor from code enforcement or the liquor board would show up.

I think the quality of his work and his perspective changed as he went from paper to paper and wife to wife. However, his courage and reason for switching papers was undeniable. There was no preventing the Daily News from folding. The real conundrum was when Ruport Murdoch bought the Sun-Times. Royko had declared he would work for neither the Chicago Tribune or Ruport Murdock. However, he viewed Murdoch as an actual threat to journalism itself, so wound up at the Tribune.

In his book, Boss, Royko directly attacked the Daley machine, prefacing each chapter with a quote from the transcript of the Chicago 7 trial. It was one of the very few books my father and I shared. I was, I think in early high school. I remember him saying that he hated me reading something with that kind of language in it (the Daley quotes, I suspect, particularly the retort back at Sen. Abraham Ribbicoff, at the '68 convention, which Royko interpreted as, “Fuck you , you Jew son of a bitch; you lousy motherfucker, go home!”). But, he thought it was important that I read it. My Greek immigrant father viewed Royko as a knight defending people like him. 

Royko had the clear eyed view of the cynic, regarding the system. But, he never seemed to shake his belief that it was supposed to work. In that, he reminded me of my other favorite writer of the time, Hunter Thompson, who was also cynical and also could not shake his belief in what constitutional government in this country could be, if kept out of the hands of the hucksters. Thompson believed in the Constitution and Royko believed in the voters.

I remember the column he wrote the day after Jayne Byrne (at the time, the anti-machine candidate) defeated Michael Bilandic. “You did it!” He was so proud of the people of Chicago. In that one moment, they had united, stood up and beat back the forces of darkness.  He turned on Byrne, almost immediately, as she turned out to be an opportunist.  But, the column he wrote the day after Harold Washington was elected was another example of good will and hope over cynicism.