A week of newspaper humorists -- today Mike Royko

[Jerry Peterson]

Most of us in the Midwest remember Mike Royko from his years with the Chicago Tribune. He was a newspaper columnist who wrote about serious issues – many of them Chicago issues . . . he was always after city hall, the common council, and the mayor – and he often used satire to make his points. He made us laugh.

Royko created the character of Slats Grobnick whom we frequently saw sitting on a bar stool in a Chicago tavern, talking with Royko or another bar patron. Grobnick got all the laugh lines as he tried to make sense of or commented on whatever issue Royko or the other fellow hoisting a beer was talking about.

Over 40-plus years, we chuckled and laughed our way through more than 7,500 daily columns and six collections.

Royko wrote one deadly serious book, an unauthorized biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. “Boss” raked Daley. The mayor was so angered that he forced 200 Chicago bookstores to not stock the book, but public demand over road Daley and the stores put the book on their shelves. And it sold very well.

The wrath of the Daley family continued. Mrs. Daley walked into one of the offending stores and vandalizing copies of Royko’s book. To her embarrassment – and Royko’s joy – she was caught in the act.

Royko got his start with the old Chicago News Bureau, then went with the Chicago Daily News as a political reporter and columnist. When that paper folded in 1978, he hopped over to the Daily News’ sister newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. He left the Sun-Times in 1984 when Rupert Murdock bought the paper. Royko detested Murdock, saying, “No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper.” That was the opening that the Trib’s top management needed. They enticed Royko to come to work at their place, and, wisely, they gave him the same freedom he had had at the Sun-Times. He could write about whatever interested him.

The Trib gave Royko a larger platform than he had at the old Daily News and the Sun-Times. The Trib had a paid daily circulation in excess of a million, and, even better, it had a syndication service that put Royko’s columns into 600 other newspapers around the country.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1972, the National Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990, and the Damon Runyon Award in 1995.

Royko died in 1997 at the age of 64.

You can read the best of Royko in three collections of his columns published after his death: “One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko” (2000, foreword by Studs Terkel), “For the Love of Mike: More of the Best of Mike Royko” (2001, foreword by Roger Ebert), and “Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago” (2010, forward by Rick Kogan). This last is a reprint of Royko’s first collection of columns. It came out the first time in 1967.

Tomorrow: A week of newspaper humorists – Dave Barry