Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Mike's most scorching column

Weekly Compilation November 22-28

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Why do we run this separate item, Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today? Because Steve Bertolucci, the hero of the serialized novel central to this Substack, “Roseland, Chicago: 1972,” lived in a Daily News household. The Bertolucci’s subscribed to the Daily News, and back then everybody read the paper, even kids. And if you read the Daily News, you read Mike Royko. Read our Royko briefing Monday-Friday on Twitter, @RoselandChi1972.

November 22, 1971

A landlady cries out

Mike finds yet another Chicagoan who looked the wrong way at the local Machine, and got the Building Department let loose on them.

Just last week on November 17, Mike told us about poor Angie Pierone and her neat tidy brick four-flat. City building inspectors suddenly found it needed up to $4,000 of work after Angie became a Republican precinct captain. See the full post here.

“They can order her to do that because Chicago’s building code is the strictest in the nation,” Mike explained on Nov. 17. “That’s why the building code is such a fierce political weapon, when they enforce it.”

Now it’s poor Miss Edna Profrock, a 65-year-old registered nurse with a quavering voice who hoped to retire soon, but may not be able to after all. She owns a nice tidy 3-flat at 4255 N. Western with a cottage in back, living in the first floor apartment.

“Miss Edna Profrock, an elderly lady, can trace her troubles back to the day she got involved in big city politics,” writes Mike for his usual punchy, one-sentence lede paragraph.

“It wasn’t deep involvement. She didn’t sell racing stock to judges,” he goes on, alluding to the current scandal in which former Illinois Governor, current federal judge Otto Kerner and some others are about to be indicted for a shady deal that got them rock-bottom prices on racetrack stock. See here for the full November 21 post.

Miss Edna Profrock simply let a campaign worker for John Hoellen, the Republican alderman of the 47th ward, put a sign in her car window.

“Hoellen’s presence in the council doesn’t really alter the course of government very much, since the mayor has a majority anyway. All Hoellen can do is make noise, which he does well.” But it makes the 47th Democratic ward organization look bad.

A couple of days after a Democratic precinct worker spotted the Hoellen sign in Miss Profrock’s car, “they arrived—the plumbing inspector, the electrical inspector, the rats and bug inspector. She counted six different inspectors from the Building Department.”

They want her to turn her third floor apartment into an attic, and the backyard cottage into a garage, so she loses 2/3 of her rental income and can’t retire—even though the Building Department has never found anything wrong with Miss Profrock’s building before.

“I had just hoped to live here the rest of my life,” says Miss Profrock. “With things going the way they are, I don’t think that will be very long. I’m going crazy. I can’t take it.”

“I think we need some new signs near the airports and the city limits,” Mike concludes. “They might proclaim:

“Welcome to Chicago

Edna Profrock, Victim”

Miss Profrock's building seems to be gone, BTW. Here is 4255 N. Western today.

November 23, 1971

Mr. Korshak’s memory is bad

Go figure, another unhappy reader who doesn’t like what Mike wrote about him.

Last week on November 17, Mike wrote about a building at 2400 W. McLean owned by suburban divorce lawyer Ted Korshak. Mike says “it’s a miserable dump.” The tenants “can see the sky from one part of the building, because of a fire in 1970. The roof still hasn’t been repaired.”

But the city’s Building Department tells the housing court judge that Korshak is “making progress,” so nothing gets done. Mike surmises this has something to do with Korshak’s cousin Marshall, the 5th Ward Democratic committeeman, part of the real Mayor Daley’s inner circle.

Ted Korshak didn’t agree with Mike’s November 17 column. “Mr. Korshak denied that (the building) is a miserable wreck. He said it is a ‘shambles.’ ‘A miserable wreck is not the same as a shambles,’” he said.

Ted Korshak insists he has not benifitted from sharing a name with his cousin Marshall the political powerhouse. ‘’The only time I see Marshall is at funerals,’ cousin Ted said,” writes Mike.

And Ted Korshak insists his building is expensive to maintain.

“I have never met a slum owner who wasn’t losing money,” writes Mike. “They have to be the most impractical of all businessmen….You would think these people would wise up and get out of that kind of real estate.”

November 24, 1971

Arson sleuths’ big blind spot

Fittingly, this column on the recent four arson fires at the John Hancock is one of the most scorching columns Mike has ever written. But it’s not really about the Hancock.

In our other daily item, This Crazy Day In 1972, we covered the coverage of the Hancock fires, all set in storage rooms. The last one was biggest, with smoke billowing from the 52nd floor and Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn leading the all-out response.

Yesterday, papers reported that as arson investigators waded around in water on the 52nd floor, they noticed a suspicious janitor who didn’t belong there. Later, the 18-year-old recent Yugoslavian immigrant confessed. He’d been forced out of school at 16 after a year in this country by his immigrant parents, and just wanted to go back to class.

Today Mike notes that Hancock residents can sleep again after “crisply efficient detective work brought about an arrest only five days after the first fire was set.” It’s remarkable, he writes, because with the number of people who live, work and go in and out of the Hancock, the number of suspects was the size of a small town.

But four arson detectives were put on it. It should be a warning, Mike writes, to “all would-be arsonists in this city: You had better not try to get away with setting fire to any of our famous high-rises. [NEW GRAPH] If you want to burn something, go out to a poor neighborhood.”

Now Mike really lights it up: “As some readers may recall, an enormous area of Chicago has been burned out by the biggest concentrated wave of arson in this city’s history. More than 1,600 fires occurred there in Woodlawn in 18 months, most of them caused by arsonists. More than 30,000 people had to move out as hundreds of buildings were gutted by flames.”

“But did anyone say: ‘Question everybody you can and stay with this until we get a break and get it solved.’? You bet they didn’t.”

And now Mike refers to information in a recent massive Daily News series on the blitz of arson fires in Woodlawn.”

“The city’s fire chief, who personally supervised his men at the John Hancock Building, didn’t even know about the arsons in Woodlawn. And one of his investigators summed up official curiosity about the fires when he said:

“ ‘It is like this—you are born, you die, and so what? Other life goes on. [Slur for African-Americans] move into a neighborhood, ruin it, and then there are fires. So what else is new?’”

And so, Mike concludes, of course not a single Woodlawn arsonist has been pinched, though there are clues. One clue was the $1 million “paid out by insurance companies to slum owners who had already milked fat profits out of the buildings.”

“Another clue…could be found in reports from knowledgeable people who said the going rate was $600 for a Woodlawn torch job.”

Finally, Mike’s blistering final sentence, referring to Mayor Daley’s infamous “shoot to kill” order to police during the 1968 riots after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King:

“The thing that puzzles me the most about the city’s failure to catch even one arsonist in Woodlawn is this:  Sure, it’s a black neighborhood, but what happened to that old ‘shoot to kill’ spirit?”

November 25, 1971

A moocher with class

Mike is surprised when a well-dressed, courteous elderly gentleman stops him on the street downtown, shows him identification with an address on N. Dearborn—which means the Gold Coast—and then asks for spare change.

It makes Mike consider the other regular panhandlers he knows, like “the legendary Greasy Chin Smith, who used to be seen in the Loop almost every day. He was known as Greasy Chin because he gnawed on a long, old bone to dramatize how poor he was.”

“Then there is The Weeper, a kid about 12 who operates on the Near North Side and in the Wrigley Building area. His tear ducts work like windshield washers….He thinks big, howling that his mother and five little brothers and sisters are stuck at a railroad station and they need $4.90 to get home.”

The Weeper, says Mike, took Studs Terkel for five bucks recently. Every time Studs handed the kid a buck, he’d say, “Mister, I need more, more.”

“ ‘I knew he was a moocher,’ Terkel said, ‘but what a performance! It was worth twice that much. The kid cried better than June Alyson.”

November 26, 1971

Letters, Calls, Complaints

Mike explains Chicago’s nuclear air raid siren system in another of his regular columns of “Letters, calls, complaints and great thoughts from readers”.

“What’s the purpose of the repeated siren blasts at exactly 10:30 a.m. every Tuesday?” asks Julius Braun of Chicago. He must have just moved here, because frankly, small children knew what that was for--imminent tornado, or imminent atomic death.

Here’s Mike:

“COMMENT: The sirens are kept in working order so that in the event of a nuclear attack they will be blown, causing everyone to believe that the White Sox have won a pennant and we can all dissolve with cheers on our lips.”

FYR (For Younger Readers): In 1959, the White Sox clinched the American League pennant for the first time in 40 years. Chicago Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn set off the city’s nuclear attack air raid sirens at 10:30 PM. Despite Julius Braun’s question, anybody not watching the Sox game knew that meant atomic death, since it wasn’t tornado season.

November 27-28, 1972

As we here all know, weekends could be sad for a Daily News family because Mike Royko wasn’t in the Daily News’ single weekend edition. So we look for Mike elsewhere on weekends.

Today, let’s look at Mike’s first book of columns, “Up Against It,” from 1967. Over coming Weekend Editions, we’ll delve into columns from this first collection. First, let’s consider the dedication, the introduction by Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and also where Royko was in his life at this point, via Richard Ciccone’s wonderful biography of Royko, “A Life in Print.”

“Up Against It” came out in 1967, four years after Royko’s column started in the Daily News—initially three times a week in the op-ed section. Mike was a father by this time, and he was also already “Royko”—ridiculing Mayor Daley and politicians instead of sucking up and cleaning up their quotes, attacking mobsters, even holding his first big event, the “First Annual Mixed Breed Dog Show” in September at Soldier Field. The Royko Cup went to the dog “most indifferent when given commands” and drew 4,000 people. The year 1967 would also see the first run of Royko’s classic Christmas column, in which Joseph and Mary arrive penniless in Chicago looking for a place to stay.

“The column had become the single driving force in his life by now,” writes Ciccone. “It was what he thought about the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night. It had become an obsession.”

The book, you’ll notice, is dedicated to Larry Fanning—not Royko’s beloved wife Carol, or his parents, or his kids. Fanning, managing editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, arrived as the Daily News as executive editor in October 1962, and he set out to change the way the paper covered its city.

The Daily News had always been known for its foreign news bureaus, more than any except the New York Times, and “more than the other three Chicago papers combined,” according to Ciccone. “Fanning wanted the paper’s national and local coverage to match its dominance in foreign news. One of the first things he did was to cover civil rights.”

Fanning sent correspondents including Ray Coffey, Nicholas Von Hoffman and Ed Rooney to cover the Civil Rights movement in the South. At home, reporters like Lois Wille were assigned stories like finding out how Chicago’s black population lived. And, writes Ciccone, Fanning “would create the most influential newspaper columnist of the next thirty years.”

Royko had been working the Cook County beat, writing a Saturday beat column which was supposed to be like other weekly beat columns—a boring news round-up. Royko preferred character sketches about County politicians and workers and anecdotes. These Saturday efforts drew an offer from the rival afternoon paper, Hearst’s Chicago’s American. The American had recently poached the News’ star columnist, Jack Mabley. Royko took his American offer to Fanning, asked for a column at the News—and got it.

A year later in 1964, when Chicago hosted a then-traditional Democratic parade “to close the presidential campaign,” this time led by President Lyndon Johnson, Fanning put Royko’s Monday column on the front page.

“While the other papers indulged in their standard boosterism,” Ciccone writes, “Royko took a different tack. Rather than recounting how many people cheered the president…Royko counted the number of skid row bums who were hauled off the streets and taken to police stations so the mayor wouldn’t be embarrassed by the Madison Street winos.” Lois Wille called it a “watershed moment” showing the change in Daily News coverage.

Fanning also endured sometimes biweekly rampages in his office from the head of circulation over Royko’s many pro-Civil Rights columns, which lost the paper some subscribers, according to Lois Wille. Then, in1965, Daily News and Sun-Times owner Marshall Field IV died suddenly. In the shake-up that followed as son Marshall Field V took over, Larry Fanning was out.

Lois Wille says Royko tried to lead a staff revolt over Fanning’s firing. He started a staff petition. It fizzled. But we can see from Royko’s book dedication two years later that Mike never forgot Larry Fanning—or, according to Lois Wille, the staffers who refused to sign that petition.

Bill Mauldin’s introduction is a snapshot of Royko as success began to take its toll. Mauldin, a friend of Royko’s, came to fame himself at a tender age during World War II when as a soldier, he created cartoon GIs Willie and Joe for Stars and Stripes. Willie and Joe were soon syndicated across the country, and Mauldin went on to editorial newspaper cartooning, arriving at the Sun-Times in 1962.

Ciccone says Mauldin “was among the first to notice that celebrity was changing Royko, that he was already becoming conflicted by the joy of fame and the fear of failure that would drive him deeper into daily homage to the column above all else. He and [Royko friend and Daily News/later Tribune critic Richard Christiansen] both noted Royko’s ‘grumps,’ which became as much a part of his aura as his wonderful laugh lines and his legendary nights.”

As Mauldin writes in his introduction, “Royko is indeed fast becoming successful, and the poor guy is fighting against it every inch of the way….It is a source of sympathetic amusement to some of Mike’s associates on the Chicago Daily News, where he works, and on the Sun-Times, which is in the same building, to watch him try to squirm out of his fate. He grumps at admirers in the office corridors.”

We’ll give Mauldin the last word:

“Royko is like his city. He has sharp elbows , he thinks sulphur and soot are natural ingredients of the atmosphere, and he has an astonishing capacity for idealism and love devoid of goo.”

By the way, this feature is no substitute for reading Mike’s full columns. He’s best appreciated in the clear, concise, unbroken original version. Mike already trimmed the verbal fat, so he doesn’t need to be summarized Reader’s Digest-style, either. Our purpose here is to give you some good quotes from the original columns, but especially to give the historic and pop culture context that Mike’s original readers brought to his work. You can’t get the inside jokes if you don’t know the references. Plus, many columns didn’t make it into the collections, so unless you dive into microfilm, there are some columns covered here you will never read elsewhere. If you don’t own any of Mike’s books, maybe start with “One More Time,” a selection covering Mike’s entire career and including a foreword by Studs Terkel and commentaries by Lois Wille.

Do you dig spending some time in 1972? If you came to MIKE ROYKO 50 YEARS AGO TODAY from social media, you may not know it’s part of the book being serialized here, one chapter per month: “Roseland, Chicago: 1972.” It’s the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here.

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