Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Cops, contractors, and thieves
Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Cops, contractors, and thieves
Weekly compilation April 3-9, 1972
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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 the daily Royko briefing Monday-Friday on Twitter, @RoselandChi1972.
April 3, 1972
Why send cop to camp?
Mike ponders a reader’s question.
A small businessman asks why he should buy the $15 “associate membership card” peddled by the Chicago Patrolman’s Association, which he’s told will send a needy cop to the group’s yearly golf outing and dinner.
The card and accompanying windshield decal, Mike notes, may or may not save the small businessman from a parking or speeding ticket.
And, Mike further notes, Chicago cops start at $10,524, with a month’s paid vacation and civil service job protection. That’s $71,037 in 2022 dollars—more than the businessman clears.
“In the not-too-distant past, some of the free-loading was probably justified,” Mike reasons. “Policemen were poorly paid almost as City Hall policy because it was understood they’d steal enough to live on….But that cycle has been broken a long time, and somebody making $300 a week has no excuse for holding out his hand.”
….“Other people have dangerous jobs. Working in high-rise construction is just as likely to get you killed as riding in a squad car….But if everybody who was in risky work was out selling golf tickets, the lines would stretch around every city block.”
Mike’s snappy conclusion:
“Even with inflation, a $15,000-a-year panhandler expects too much.”
GIVE MIKE A STATUE! Read about it here.
April 4, 1972
Lo, the poor contractor!
Mike notices the rehab of the Michigan Av. Bridge (later renamed the DuSable Bridge) is running four months behind. It’s now due to finish in June.
The contractors who put in the lowest bid, Brighton Building Co., convinced the city to raise the fee by $500,000 in exchange for completing the job one year early, on Dec. 1, 1971. Brighton is supposed to pay a $1,500 daily penalty after the deadline--which would be $135,000 by now.
But they’re not. Why?
The city claims the delay isn’t Brighton’s fault. There was “unexpected structural work,” plus bad weather delayed painting and “other surface work.”
“We’re not a bunch of blackmailers,” says the deputy public works commissioner. “We are not out to take advantage of the contractors.”
“Who would anticipate bad weather in Chicago during winter?” Mike writes.
Mike added up about half the public contracts from the last four years. Out of $220 million, Brighton got about $49 million. That’s a lot of work. It took 40 individual companies to cover $100 million of those contracts.
Though Mike doesn’t put it this way, that means Brighton is doing the work of 20 companies. Also, Brighton clearly has a knack for putting in the low bid.
“With so much to do, maybe it is understandable that Brighton might become confused about when it can finish a job,” writes Mike. “So it is decent of the city not to ‘take advantage’ of Brighton.”
April 5, 1972
Scavengers’ record smells
Today’s column won’t shock anybody who’s watched “The Sopranos.” It doesn’t include the mafia, but it still features the smelliest part of the garbage business.
The background: On March 31, the Daily News reported on its own investigation with the Citizens Action Program (CAP) of the garbage hauling contracts for Chicago public schools.
Bottomline, per the Daily News story: “The City of Chicago probably could pick up garbage at city public schools for less than half of the $1.3 million currently paid by the School Board to private scavengers”.
The Daily News analysis shows the Chicago Board of Education pays two to three times more per garbage pickup than “a number” of suburban and private schools and commercial buildings.
“Meanwhile, the city is picking up garbage for most parochial schools in Chicago at least once a week without charge.”
FYR, “parochial school” means “Catholic school.” In 1972, the Chicago archdiocese hadn’t started closing parishes and schools every other week. The process of white ethnic Catholic Chicagoans moving to the suburbs via the still-new expressways is already well underway, but you can still throw a stone in the city and hit a Catholic pretty easily. In other words, Catholics are a massive voting bloc.
It costs Chicago $5 per cubic yard of trash for city pick-up--but the seven companies picking up school trash charge an average $11.03. Plus, CAP estimates the city could collect school garbage for as low as $2.50.
Four of the seven companies picking up school garbage belong to the Chicago and Suburban Refuse Disposal Corp, a trade association that agreed last year (without admitting guilt) to a $50,000 fine and a court order forbidding price fixing, after the Illinois Attorney General filed suit for intimidating customers and harassing independent scavenger companies.
Somehow, the same companies have won the Chicago school trash contracts for the last six years despite “competitive” bidding--and their prices have gone up 89%.
On April 4, Schools Supt. James F. Redmond claimed the Daily News-CAP research “was incomplete and shallow. There was no attempt to investigate the complicated background of the situation.”
But the day after Mike’s column appears, Redmond will order up a review of garbage contracts by accounting firm Arthur Anderson. Arthur Anderson used to be a household word that meant “huge CPA company.”
Now to Mike.
Mike talks to “a small independent scavenger operator, who has barely managed to survive”. This scavenger explains how the local garbage business works:
In the ‘30s, the Dutch dominated the garbage industry here and kept everybody else out. Then “North Side Swedes” muscled in.
Now there’s a small number of big garbage companies, not so ethnically divided anymore. They use the Chicago Suburban Scavengers Association to control prices by price-fixing amongst themselves, undercut small new companies until they drive them out of business, and use threats when everything else doesn’t work.
“I’ll take an oath that I’ve been threatened,” the small scavenger tells Mike. “Or your equipment gets damaged. And maybe you have trouble buying equipment from suppliers. Or your drivers will be told that if they work for an independent, they won’t ever be hired by an association member.”
“School Supt. James Redmond righteously denies that he might be paying too much to the scavengers who pick up the schools’ rubbish,” Mike sums up.
“That, I suspect, is just a little more rubbish.”
If you dig Mike Royko, you’ll want to see the news he’s writing about. Check it out here!
April 6, 1972
Situation wanted: Thief
I love how Mike’s friends aren’t a bunch of lawyers and other muckety-mucks. Today he talks to an old pal who’s a thief.
After a couple of stints in prison, Mike’s friend has turned to shoplifting—“boosting” in the parlance of the time.
This is a real person, to be clear, not a companion to Slats Grobnik.
“Nobody shoots boosters,” Mike points out. “Next to holding public office, it is one of the safest forms of larceny.”
And in 1972, with soaring inflation and daily newspaper stories advising readers how to make their paychecks stretch at the supermarket, Mike’s friend has found the easiest gig of his life--driving all over Chicagoland and boosting a few steaks everywhere he goes.
“If I work at it, I can clear $70,000 a year,” he tells Mike.
Problem is, Mike’s pal is sweet on a woman who insists he go straight. Mike’s pal would like to become a security consultant, but the security people tend to be cops, and they don’t want to work with a thief.
Mike’s pal wishes he could get in touch with an executive, who “might have better sense.”
“What do the security guys know?” says the thief. “I do my best work in stores where there’s a uniformed guard. The clerks relax with a guard there. I could walk out with a side of beef.”
The Supermarket Institute tells Mike that Chicago-area grocery stores lose $10-$20 million yearly from shoplifting/boosting.
Mike will put anybody in touch with his thieving friend who would like to upgrade their store security. Otherwise, his pal says, “If I can’t go to work in security, I guess I’ll air condition my car trunk this summer.”
April 7, 1972
Let’s hear it for traffic jams
Mike channels Mayor Daley to address a traffic study that must have recently come out finding Chicago traffic is the nation’s worst. And Mayor Daley must have vigorously objected to it.
I say “must have” because I could find no trace of this traffic study in any of the papers, or digital archives, including the New York Times.
Let’s just go with it. Somebody comes out with a traffic study showing Chicago has the worst every year. No surprise that trend was already firmly in place in 1972, or that Mayor Daley would vigorously object.
UPDATE: But no—intrepid reader Bernie Cicirello sent me the front page of the April 6, 1972 Daily News and there, ABOVE THE MASTHEAD, is the traffic story.
All I can think of is that psychological experiment where everybody watches the basketball game and doesn’t notice the guy in the gorilla suit walking around nearby. Obviously, I already had my own microfilm copy of this page and simply did not see it when I scrolled around looking specifically for the word “traffic” in a headline. Crazy. Though I still don’t understand why the study didn’t show up in the Trib or New York Times archives.
Of course, none of us are surprised by the results of this traffic study. But there were also some fun comments from Frank Koepke, assistant director of traffic engineering at the Northwestern University Traffic Institute. Koepke called the typical Chicago driver a “daily pro” for dealing with our streets, though his actual quotes sound more like a parent with a teen driver in the house.
The Chicago area driver “has aggressive driving habits,” said Koepke, due to “a surcharge placed on him by his driving associates.” More: “Koepke said the Chicago area driver—confronted daily by the restrictions and limitations of the city and its expressway system—will follow autos more closely and ‘accept shorter gaps for turning in the face of opposing traffic.’” In other words, we tailgate and make really risky left turns.
Finally, to Mike’s column on the traffic study!
Mike never uses Mayor Daley’s name here, because he doesn’t have to. Readers know the terms “Chicaguh” and “wunnerful” automatically mean it’s Mayor Daley talking.
Here we go:
“I have called this press conference to answer the report, made by a bunch of outsiders, which says traffic in Chicaguh moves slower than in any other city in the country. That’s an insult to the many wunnerful people who drive cars in Chicaguh…and it’s an insult to their wunnerful families.”
It’s an insult also to all our expressways named for “wunnerful” Democratic politicians—including the Eisenhower, even though Ike was a Republican.
“These experts come in here, and they go outa here, and they say that the traffic moves faster in New York than in Chicaguh? Sure it does. But they don’t tell you why, so let’s look at the record.”
New Yorkers want to get away from each other, Mike/Mayor Daley explains. But Chicagoans are friendly, and like to drive slowly and look at their neighborhoods. Speeding up traffic would ruin that.
“Well, they can’t come in here and take over the streets and break up families that way.”
Plus, the report is all lies.
“And even if it is true, it won’t be true after we build the Crosstown Expressway, and name it after a fine man, a wunnerful family man, a great leader of the Chicaguh, a man who”
That’s not a typo. Not my typo, anyway. The column’s typesetting got messed up, and this is how it appeared, with its last sentence or two cut off.
The column was probably fixed for later editions, but the chances of any individual reader who got this edition finding a different edition and seeing the real end of this column? Vanishingly small. And that includes us here, because I’m not going back to the microfilm room at the library to find a different edition.
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.
Looking for Mike in other newspapers, Installment #1
Praise and a few attacks, plus TV and radio appearances: That’s Mike Royko in the other papers, outside the Daily News.
It occurred to me it would be fun to look at all the instances where Mike turns up in the other Chicago papers. In practice, that means the available digital archives, which includes only the Tribune and the Defender. Today is the first installment, as we intermittently work our way through both.
I was surprised at the large number of Mike appearances in both papers, because the farther you go back, the more the major dailies tended to ignore each other. Each paper seemed to feel it was beneath them to refer to its competitors, or if they were referenced, best to do it without uttering the competitor’s name.
So if a writer in one paper wanted to criticize a writer in another paper, they were likely to take Jack Mabley’s route in his April 4 column, featured in this week’s THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972, which will post Sunday 4/10/22. In a piece headlined “Stealing—a national sickness,” Jack complains of a greedy, nihilistic American mind-set that he says started with Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book.” Jack sees Mike’s hilarious March 16 column as part of this pernicious trend.
On March 16, Mike addressed a reader’s question to the Daily News’ financial columnist, asking how to hide income in order to fraudulently qualify for public housing. The financial columnist had refused to answer, but Mike ran with that ball:
“All up and down La Salle St., you can find experts and specialists who will provide sound, reliable advice on how to cheat at almost anything,” Mike wrote “However, their services come high. The average person can’t afford them….Thus he is deprived of good, sound advice on how to cheat.”
Mike imagined the string of events that would follow if the average person could make money by cheating, which ended by eliminating crime and making everyone better off. At the end, he offered to answer similar questions for common people in the future.
Jack Mabley missed even a glint of humor in that column. Mabley thought it was another example of America going to hell in a hand basket: “A columnist on a major metropolitan newspaper recently announced he is going to provide a service for little guys on how to cheat.”
(Note: I have no idea—though I hope to find out—what kind of relationship Mabley and Mike might have had. This reference implies their relationship was not a good one. Recall that Mabley left the Daily News for the Herald-American, which became Chicago’s American, which turned into Chicago Today. Mabley’s move opened up space at the Daily News for a new columnist, which turned out to be Mike Royko. Royko quickly became the city’s supernova columnist, blotting out all the smaller stars in the Chicago newspaper galaxy. If Mabley found that annoying, and I don’t know that he did, you probably couldn’t blame him.)
Even with the common practice of not naming competitors, Mike’s name gets gets 175 hits in the Defender’s database, which covers 1909-2010. Mike’s column in the Daily News began in 1963, and he died in 1997. His first Defender mention comes in 1965, and the last is 2006.
In the Tribune, Mike’s name gets 276 hits for articles alone before 1984, when he left the Murdoch-befouled Sun-Times and moved to the Trib. His first mention comes in 1965, in the Walter Winchell-style “Tower Ticker” column by Herb Lyon.
We’ll look at Mike’s mentions chronologically. Today, let’s begin with his earliest Tribune appearances, which are mainly from radio and TV listings and advertisements. Most Royko fans will recall that you didn’t see Mike pontificating a lot on TV news shows a lot, or on radio. He didn’t have to. But we aren’t remembering the earliest years, when Mike was still building a brand.
Here’s Mike in the Tribune 1965-66. Take a deep breath, Royko fans. It will kill you that you can’t tune in to these shows.
Tribune, January 3, 1965:
Tribune, August 13, 1965—Mike’s first Trib appearance in an actual article:
Tribune display ad, June 30, 1966:
Yes, Mike did this apparently single, one-off, half-hour TV show for Channel 7, “Mike Royko’s Sidestreets.” As you can see from the TV listings below, he was up against Johnny Carson—and Bill Veeck. Was it always meant to be a one-off? Was it a try-out for a potential regular show that didn’t go well? Or Mike realized there was no way he had time for a TV show? Whenever I have the opportunity, I’ll ask Royko friends and colleagues and update if possible.
Tribune weekly TV guide from June 25, 1966—a historical artifact all by itself:
Tribune, August 4, 1966:
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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