Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Mike on "De Mau Mau"
Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Mike on "De Mau Mau"
October 16-22, 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 Bertoluccis 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. Get your Royko fix on Twitter too: @RoselandChi1972.
October 16, 1972
This is a dead serious column about the “De Mau Mau” arrests, a story that hit the papers first on Sunday—yesterday in our timeline.
First, a brief recap. If you read this week’s THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972, skip to the headline “Today’s Column” below.
The brutal August mass murders of the Corbett family in northwest Barrington Hills became the De Mau Mau murders on October 15, as front pages announced the arrests of seven people in what turned out to be a related series of slayings beginning with the Corbetts in early August.
Retired insurance executive Paul Corbett, his wife Marion, her adult daughter from a previous marriage, and Mrs. Corbett’s sister were “riddled” with bullets in the pantry of their 14-room mansion on a secluded, wooded 30-acre estate.
“It was the worst mass murder in the Chicago area since eight student nurses were slain on the city’s South Side in 1967 by Richard F. Speck,” noted the Tribune. For all the coverage, see August 5 and 6 here; August 7, 8, and 9 here; and August 14, 15, 16, 17, and 20 here, all under the Murder in Barrington Hills heading:
Soon came another mass family slaying, the Hawtrees in their modest rural split level in Monee. “Stephen and Judy Hawtree never locked their doors,” was the striking lede in the Daily News on Sept. 5.
With the October 15 newspaper coverage, Chicagoans learned that two more murders were definitely related to the Corbetts and and Hawtrees….
—Michael Gerchenson, the Southern Illinois University student from Highland Park, shot six times and found on May 3 near I-57 about 30 miles from campus;
—Army Specialist William Richter, shot while he slept in his pick-up truck on the shoulder of the Edens Expressway on Sept. 2.
—and a possible third murder, 16-year-old Kathleen Fiene, shot near her Brighton Park home on June 23.
The arrested suspects would grow to ten by the end of the week, all young Black men from the South Side who allegedly belonged to a group called “De Mau Mau.”
It was a disturbing, disorienting, discombobulating week of news in which readers first learned that a gang of Black Vietnam veterans, embittered by racism in the service and at home, with few job skills in an economy experiencing high unemployment, had banded together and taken the name of a secret Black terrorist group from 1950s Kenya aimed at expelling the British from that country.
These “De Mau Maus” were said to number up to 300 here and 3,000 nationally, all bent on random killings of whites—or about to start systematically assassinating white cops.
As the week wore on, readers learned that some “experts” and Vietnam vets said De Mau Mau existed, but was just a loose group of veterans who banded together for mutual support in Vietnam, and didn’t exist in the U.S.—while others said De Mau Mau definitely did exist in the U.S., and still others said De Mau Mau was in the U. S. but wasn’t well organized.
The changing facts were attributed to anonymous “investigators” and “experts,” with no explanation for why the investigators and experts contradicted each other, or why they would say one thing today, and another tomorrow.
Black leaders quickly pushed back on the coverage, questioning the accuracy and attacking the sensational headlines that might provoke racial tensions. Barry Wright, head of Concerned Veterans from Vietnam, a Black veteran’s organization, said there was no De Mau Mau group, period.
Wright attacked the De Mau Mau arrests touted by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan and Sheriff Richard Elrod as “trumped-up bull shit”—
—but Wright also repeated his own earlier predictions that frustrated Black veterans might use their military skills against a racist society, adding, “I have been telling you this for three years.…I think that it will get a lot worse. I don’t think it will subside.”
Four of the first six arrested De Mau Mau suspects had been students at Malcolm X College. According to direct quotes from Malcolm X College President Charles G. Hurst to papers including the Defender, the De Mau Mau suspects had threatened students on campus until they were expelled in spring 1972, and their elaborate ritual handshake barred from campus. “It was pure terror,” the Defender quoted Hurst. “Members of the Mau Mau would intimidate and beat up students and teachers.” Hurst said he didn’t think the Mau Maus were political, and didn’t believe their alleged crimes were racial. “It was just plain hatred.”
Then Hurst held a press conference with Barry Wright and denied the De Mau Maus had any presence on campus at all, saying “all students are required to pledge that they will not use or distribute narcotics or engage in violence. If they do, they will be suspended.” The alleged De Mau Mau students, Hurst said, per the Defender, “were dismissed from the school last year because of ‘poor academic performance’ and failure to attend class.”
For more details, see each day in last week’s TCD1972 under the De Mau Mau heading:
Mike would have written this October 16 column with only the first day’s coverage of De Mau Mau, before the pushback from Hurst and other local Black leaders, and before the confusing deluge of changing “expert” and “investigator” opinions. Here, Mike assumes the basic facts of “De Mau Mau” are correct—that a group of frustrated young Black men, many Vietnam veterans, have killed people just for being white.
This is one of Mike’s most serious columns, with the same tone he used, for example, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. The morbid humor, what little there is, must have hit readers with a painful slap of national self-recognition.
Today’s Column
Now to Mike:
“We’ve proved ourselves over and over again to be tough-minded as a nation.
“The majority of us accept the need to drop bombs on Vietnamese because we are told it is, in some vague way, in our best national interest. The news photos can be shocking, but that passes.
“We accept more people being out of work because—as the economists explain—it is therapeutic unemployment. That means it will be good for us in the long run, at least those of us who keep our jobs.”
…." “So we’ll probably have to learn to face, with just as tough-minded an attitude, such terrible outbursts of urban racial warfare as the acts of ‘De Mau Mau.’”
Ranting about De Mau Mau, or cracking down on crime—these things may make people feel better, Mike writes, but will solve nothing.
“That’s because so many of our most important tough-minded national decisions have set us up for such people as ‘De Mau Mau’…..
“It wasn’t possible to fight an expensive war while handling our urban (meaning racial) problems at the same time. You can’t ask a taxpayer to dig down for the price of bombs, while also asking him to come up with the cost of books. He might get mad and refuse to pay for the bombs.”
How will cracking down on crime, Mike asks, “discourage the kind of killing that comes from bone-deep racial hatred?”
“The opportune moment to have done something has passed. That was when the Urban League—not Stokely or H. Rap or the Panthers—was speaking for ‘colored people’ and ‘Negroes.’ That was when blacks didn’t appear to hate whites as much as we hated them.
“That would have been the time to have started doing something about better education, training, better jobs, housing, and the hope of a better future.”
That was as recent as 10 years ago, Mike notes, adding that “the chance for change was lost in the windy debates of politicians and the old business of priorities.”
Mike’s brutal conclusion:
“I hope those who talk loudest can offer some kind of solutions before the next car full of ‘De Mau Mau’ takes to the expressways. As for me, I don’t have any answers. I thought I did during the time of the sing-song marches, but that time has passed.”
If you dig Mike Royko, check out the news he’s writing about here!
October 17, 1972
Mike connects the De Mau Mau case with blaxploitation movies, which have been a hotly contested topic in 1972, especially since this summer’s release of “Super Fly,” but also “Shaft’s Big Score” and most recently “Is the Father Black Enough?” and Jim Brown’s “Slaughter.” These films are considered a second wave in the genre, started in 1971 with “Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasssss Song” and “Shaft.”
Note the subhead in the upper right hand corner of “Is the Father Black Enough”: “A Racist winds blows the dust from a Black man’s grave to choke the honkies to death!!!”
TCD1972 readers have seen the ongoing blaxploitation debate, and may want to skip ahead to “Today’s Column.” However, I did not have space in TCD1972 for coverage of reviews of “Slaughter” and “Is the Father Black Enough,” the two movies Mike will reference specifically, so you might want to read that section before the column itself.
The debate in 1972 Chicago
In 2022, you could spend months reading all the philosophical takes on blaxploitation films, and you could certainly get a Ph.D in it. Back in 1972, it’s a public discussion carried on not by film scholars, but by local leaders, columnists, and ordinary people including newspaper readers via the letters columns.
Here, in an August letter to the Defender, “Concerned Mother” cogently wrapped up the negative side of the debate regarding “Super Fly,” the most controversial 1972 blaxploitation film. In case you haven’t seen the movie, Concerned Mother’s opinions are her own, but no matter how you slice it, the hero of “Super Fly” is a drug dealer named “Priest” whose goal is to make a gigantic profit by buying and selling a massive amount of coke to poor Black customers.
On August 27, a group of Black teenagers protested “Super Fly” in front of the Oriental Theatre, 20 W. Randolph.
Chicago Today film critic Mary Knoblauch (white) gave “Super Fly” a glowing review, calling it “an extraordinary movie, the most entertaining film to come out of the new wave of black movies since ‘Shaft.’”
Knoblauch acknowledged it’s “the story of the rise and fall and rise again of a young black drug pusher,” but insisted it’s wrong to say “Super Fly” glorifies pushers, just as she doesn’t think “The French Connection” glorifies policemen. “Neither film glorifies,” she wrote. “They simply report.”
The Tribune’s Gene Siskel (white) gave “Super Fly” three stars, calling it “the frequently exiting story” of a cocaine pusher’s “attempt to make one last big score”. Siskel was impressed that “in a number of scenes,” “Super Fly” goes “beyond the standard end point in providing dramatic entertainment”—by, for instance, having a restauranteur hold out an extra three minutes before lending the drug pusher money to buy the big stash he hopes to sell a million dollar profit.
Sharon Scott (Black) in the Defender called the acting in “Super Fly” “better than in the most recent black films because now and then the characters branch out of their stereotypic roles.” But then she noted the film doesn’t emphasize “the vices of dope peddling or the plight of its victims. The emphasis is on a brother with the best of material goods, which 3/4 of the black American community will never have in the course of their own lifetimes…If anything, the film inadvertently encourages those who have little to get into ‘the life.’”
Mary Knoblauch later devoted a lengthy two-part Sunday series to examining the debate, here and here, with her own approval of the films made clear. Knoblauch quoted Julius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP, who headed a new protest group called the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, supported by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH:
“We must tell white and black movie producers that we will not tolerate the continued warping of our black children’s minds with the filth, violence and cultural lies that are all-pervasive in the current productions of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males with vast physical prowess but no cognitive skills.”
“The pusher may be outside the law,” Knoblauch concluded, “but is he any worse than the corrupt cops? Is it really unbelievable that this extraordinary young man could blackmail himself to safety? Are the representatives of the law deserving of respect no matter what they do?”
The Daily News’ Lu Palmer wasn’t having it.
“The time has come when blacks must lower the boom on so-called black movies,” Palmer opened his column on Sept. 9-10, the same weekend Part 2 of Knoblauch’s series ran in Chicago Today. Palmer saw the genre as starting with “Shaft,” and he didn’t like that movie’s 1972 summer sequel, “Shaft’s Big Score,” any better.
“In fact, decisive action against these movies is overdue,” Palmer wrote. “With rare exceptions, so-called black movies have become subtle, almost subliminal mind polluters.
“And black youths are the major victims because they are the ones who are largely flocking to see this new kind of vicious anti-black propaganda.”
By the way, I’m surprised Lou Palmer didn’t mention that “Shaft’s Big Score” reportedly influenced the three young Black gunmen who robbed Kiyo’s Japanese Restaurant on August 29. See August 30 and 31 for details. The men forced the staff and customers together at gunpoint. The lone surviving gunman said they only intended to rob the place. But one staffer escaped, alerted police, and a hostage situation developed after police surrounded the front of the restaurant—which was right across from the Century Theater on Clark.
For several hours, the gunmen forced hostages to scream things like “They’re going to kill us!” as they shot up the restaurant, all to scare police into giving them a getaway car. When police provided the car, the gunmen took five hostages. They drove like maniacs across the city, a flight that ended in a spectacular and frankly insane intervention by two cops on the Dan Ryan. One cop shot the driving gunman as the getaway car and the squad car hurtled down the expressway at 100 m.p.h., while the other cop, who was driving, forced the now driverless getaway car up the Dan Ryan’s embankment.
The getaway car came to rest in the front yard of 8425 S. State. Of the two surviving gunmen, one jumped out and shot at police, then died in the ensuing shoot-out. The other gunman had to give up after one of the hostages fought him for control of his sawed-off shotgun. The hostages all survived, by the way, incredibly enough.
Louis Tarver, the surviving gunman, told police that he met his fellow robbers at a showing of “Shaft’s Big Score” at the Roosevelt Theater three weeks earlier.
“Police said the violence-laden movie could have inspired the irrational conduct of the gunman….In the restaurant and during the chase the gunmen threatened, kicked and punched hostages and hurled racial insults at everyone who was not black,” wrote the Trib’s Steven Pratt and Thomas Powers.
“While the three held 14 hostages…and while they sped recklessly thru city streets and expressways, the young gunmen acted as tho they were acting in a movie, witnesses told police.”
On Sept. 15, Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett backed up the News’ Lu Palmer and blasted Today’s Mary Knoblauch by name:
“Taking the lead from a Chicago-based organization named Kuumba, blacks thruout this nation are voicing opposition to the spate of sick, slanderous, pro-filth, fake revolutionary movies being peddled in the name of black cinema.
“And just as we expected, several white writers are coming to their defense. One Chicago newswoman’s descriptions of black opposition is just like the old days. Last Sunday, film critic Mary Knoblauch consumed a full page of Chicago Today in defense of ‘Super Fly,’ the movie that makes a hero of a dope pusher.”
“Slaughter” and “Is the Father Black Enough?”
Finally, before getting to Mike’s column, let’s look quickly at the two films he will reference—Jim Brown’s “Slaughter” and “Is The Father Black Enough?”
The latter film’s poster communicates the movie’s message pretty clearly. Note also the odd co-starring presence of one of the Monkees.
I could only find reviews for this movie by David Elliott of the Daily News, and Bruce Vilanch at Chicago Today. The Defender and Tribune didn’t cover it, and if the Sun-Times did, I missed it. Bruce Vilanch used to be Today’s main TV critic, but since he returned from the summer Democratic National Convention, he’s bounced around doing interesting features and a lot of concert reviews. Why did he review this movie? Maybe Mary Knoblauch didn’t want to touch the blaxploitation genre again so soon.
The News’ David Elliott declared that “Black Enough” is “outclassed by the cartoon showing with it, and if you know how dismal most cartoons are today…you can imagine the sheer awfulness of the movie.”
“The story concerns a black Vietnam veteran whose brother, a Catholic priest, is murdered because he (the priest) dated a Southern white girl,” Elliott summed up the plot. “The girl’s brother, a really verminous racist who paid for the killing, becomes the object of a callous manhunt by the veteran, who dresses in his brother’s cassock and proceeds to dispense Godlike vengeance all over the landscape.”
But most of the killings are “senseless,” per Elliott. The Vietnam vet brother drowns his dead brother’s girlfriend in a bathtub, for instance. At the end, the vet finally kills the real villain, the girlfriend’s awful brother who hired someone to murder the priest. “The black veteran grinds the knife in further until the racist is dead, and then walks away laughing.”
Elliott spends the last third of the review defending the blaxploitation genre against criticism, perhaps because this review appeared on October 18, three days after the start of De Mau Mau coverage—though he never mentions that. Elliott writes that “any young black veteran who’s learned to hate honkies in Vietnam won’t need to stoke up his wrath at ‘Is the Father Black Enough?’ and the young black kids who laugh at the comic book killings in ‘Slaughter’ have clearly had the seed of race hatred planted long before, by forces in society that deserve more attention than films.”
“The question on the floor, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Is the Father Black Enough,” and that’s where it should remain,” wrote Bruce Vilanch in a brief review. “On the floor. Trampled under, punched lifeless, sprawled beneath the city traffic, buried forever.” Bruce pronounced the movie “heavy on plot” but not on “character, or intelligence, or any but the basic photographic techniques. I mean, it’s at the bottom rung of the movie ladder.” The audience at the Loop Theater, wrote Bruce, “laughed at every other line”.
As for “Slaughter,” the Defender didn’t run a review for that, either. The Defender lavished attention on Jim Brown himself this summer, and also Jim Brown’s appearance at this summer’s Bud Billiken parade. But the paper only ran two pictures of “Slaughter” with bland plot descriptions. Here’s one, from August 30:
But there was more to the plot of “Slaughter” than “the Syndicate’s nerve center”.
“Slaughter is his last and only name, and slaughter is his first and principal game,” wrote Gene Siskel on August 28. “In order to legitimize Brown’s violence, the character of Slaughter is made out to be an underdog. He is black, an ex-Green Beret captain, and last but not least, his parents, presumably named Mr. and Mrs. Slaughter, recently have been murdered by The Mob. They were killed because the old man knew about The Mob’s computer center hidden in an unnamed South American country.”
“In addition to shooting, punching, stabbing, and kicking his way to retributive justice, Slaughter pauses twice to make love to Stella Stevens, the mob chieftain’s best girl,” Siskel wrapped it up. “A sequel, good grief, is planned.” (The sequel is actually announced this week in 1972.)
Even Mary Knoblauch had no love for “Slaughter.” She called it a waste of time, money, “and worse.”
“It is the most sadistic movie to hit our theaters in months,” wrote Knoblauch. “Except for the good fun of watching Jim Brown’s muscles ripple as he plays Superman, it is faintly sickening.”
At the end, mob chieftain villain Rip Torn is pinned under his wrecked car as gas from the punctured gas tank washes over him. “Brown calmly shoots the tank with his pistol, setting it and Torn afire and, listens calmly and approvingly to Torn’s screams.
“Now Torn is a terrible villain to be sure, but Brown’s character is no better at this point. The point of superhero movies is to keep the superhero super, not reduced him to the level of his enemies.
“One can’t imagine James Bond…using Blofeld’s own tactics on his sworn enemy. Sadism, no matter who practices it, is not admirable….and turns a potboiler like ‘Slaughter’ into a reprehensible piece of sensationalism.”
That’s true, though doesn’t everybody really enjoy it when Kevin Costner’s Elliott Ness throws Frank Nitty off the roof near the end of David Mamet’s “The Untouchables”? You know he shouldn’t, but still. By the way, remember Elliott Ness is a son of Roseland.
I’ll have to also note that Siskel has a completely different take than Mary Knoblauch on Rip Torn’s performance as the mob chief. Siskel says Rip Torn is “an unintentional parody of Marlon Brando”. Knoblauch writes, “Rip Torn plays the villain with his little finger and outacts everyone else.”
And now. Finally. We bring you Mike’s column today.
Today’s Column
“A black man is killed by a white racist. The black man’s brother, a veteran of Vietnam, wants revenge, so he slaughters four innocent people.”
Note: So far this could be either “Is the Father Black Enough” or “Slaughter.” But we’ll find soon it is not “Slaughter,” so it has to be “Is the Father Black Enough?”
“Sound familiar? No, it’s not something out of the current front pages.
“It’s the plot of a movie showing at the Loop Theater on State St.
….
“Like most of the films being made for black audiences, this one is heavy in black racism and white stereotypes.
“As the movie ends, the black hero is chuckling about how easy it is to kill ‘honkies,’ and he makes a clean escape.”
Nearby, another theater is showing Jim Brown’s movie about a black Vietnam veteran who also “spreads destruction among the evil whites.” Mike gives a synopsis, noting that there are only two “non-evil whites” in the movie, “Brown’s sidekick, a pale Stepin Fetchit, and the naked woman Brown goes to bed with.”
Mike tells us why he’s reviewing movies today:
“Because out here, in real life, some young veterans who are said to be members of something called De Mau Mau are accused of murdering whites…..The only difference is that Hollywood has decided that what its gun-crazy heroes do is good.”
Mike is surprised that film critics and Black leaders find only one flaw in this genre of film—that they’re unfair to Blacks, because most Black characters are drug dealers and criminals.
“But nobody talks about the obvious: that these films are the most racist products ever put on the American screen. You have to go back to World War II, and the way the Japanese and Germans were portrayed in movies to find any group as loathsome as whites in current black movies. At least then we had a war as an excuse.”
Mike calls up American International Pictures, distributor of “Slaughter.”
“The element of black-white doesn’t enter into this film,” says Milt Morris, the company’s publicity head. “Groups of people like seeing pictures about their groups.”
“The movie industry is so busy selling tickets that it gives little thought to the possible impact of these movies,” writes Mike. “Maybe there is none. But I suspect that if kids see film after film in which it is good to kill honkies they’ll walk out of the theaters remembering something more than the taste of popcorn.
“The advertising industry knows what a well made commercial can do, if it is drummed into people over and over. The product sells.
“Maybe Hollywood should buy a few copies of Chicago papers and start asking itself if its product isn’t starting to sell.”
October 18, 1972
“Is somebody in the White House the real leader of the Zippies?” asks Mike today in his lede.
What is a Zippie? Forget the current definition when you read this. The original Zippies were a faction of the 1960s Youth International Party—the Yippies. Per Wikipedia, “Zippie (ZIP) was an acronym for "Zeitgeist International Party"—a term first coined by Tom Forcade. This was the name given to the radical breakaway Yippie faction that demonstrated at the 1972 Republican and Democratic Conventions in Miami Beach.”
But it was just the ‘72 Republican Convention that was nuts.
“More than 1,000 protesters bent on disrupting the Republican National Convention swarmed through the city Wednesday night, blocking streets, damaging autos and buses, setting fires, and smashing windows,” reported the AP.
“They were met by massed forces and flying squads of police who cut them off at almost every turn and arrested hundreds who refused to disperse or failed to be fleet enough afoot.”
“For hours…demonstrators blocked traffic, deflated and slashed tires, sprayed paint on delegates’ cars—and on some delegates themselves, ripped wires off bus motors and distributor caps out of cars, smashed windows, and hurled garbage cans and rocks at delegates’ cars.” For more, see here.
Back to Mike:
“That’s what experienced members of the national peace movement now believe. They have become convinced—especially since the Watergate Scandal—that Republican money financed the insane Zippie behavior during the GOP convention in Miami Beach.”
The reasoning: TV viewers were turned off of the peace movement after seeing the violence, which could only have hurt McGovern.
Mike say the theory that Republicans were behind the crazy Zippie violence is circumstantial, but interesting. He writes that an umbrella peace group, the Miami Convention Coalition, had planned nonviolent sit-ins and marches, and “was dismayed when the 200 or so Zippies…very systematically began smashing windows, pushing around old people and storming the buses of delegates.”
It’s unclear to me whether only 200 people were involved in those doings. About 800 arrests were made. It could be, of course, that 200 Zippies whipped up a significant portion of other protestors to join them. Again, I have no idea. For sure, the original converage emphasized that the organizers had specifically asked for peaceful demonstrations, though that did include directions to (peacefully) block key intersections and entrances to the convention hall.
And then there’s the issue of money.
“The Zippies had it,” writes Mike. “Or at least their leader did. His is a rather mysterious person—even by ‘underground’ standards—named Tom Forcade.”
Mike writes that Forcade kept his Zippies together during convention week by renting “comfortable houses,” supplying them with cash and drugs, and even giving them Zippie t-shirts.
Other peace movement leaders were suspicious of Forcade as the convention approached, when it seemed like he was trying to sabotage their efforts to get campsites for their followers, writes Mike. “No matter what the coalition planned, he wanted to do the opposite,” Mike quotes one.
Another source points out that Forcade could have been arrested at any time during the convention, if only for drug possession. But he wasn’t arrested until the last day, for allegedly stealing a picture of Lyndon B. Johnson. Forcade reportedly had plenty of money for his own bail, and the charges were later dropped. This source says that a law enforcement official told him he’d tried to get Forcade arrested, but couldn’t get permission—from levels above the Miami Beach police.
“Since the convention, Forcade has dropped out of sight,” Mike writes. “And his Zippie movement has faded as abruptly as it began.”
“We’re convinced he was somebody’s cop, I don’t know why,” one peace movement person tells Mike. “Maybe he’s always been doing it or maybe they got him on a drug bust and he had to make a deal, but nobody has any doubts why he went down there.”
Before Watergate, Mike notes, that theory could have been laughed off.
“But now we’ve had burglaries, buggings, Maurice Stans’ mysterious financing, White House aides in cloak-and-dagger roles, ex-FBI men swearing that they were in on political espionage, poison-pen letters, and other mischief.
“Who knows, maybe after the election the mysterious Mr. Forcade will be named an ambassador.”
October 19, 1972
Today Mike reports that a little known, inexperienced Democratic candidate for the state Senate, Tom Flynn, is accusing his Republican opponent of some nefarious activities.
Flynn is a young former teacher, now working in the Cook County Department of Planning and Development. All Mike knows about Flynn is that Flynn’s friends say he’s so honest, he held a $7.50/plate fundraising dinner and lost money because he had the restaurant serve a meal that cost more than $7.50/plate, feeling his donors should eat well.
Flynn’s opponent is John Nimrod, a Republican Niles Township committeeman.
“Flynn said he never intended to use a personal attack in his campaign, but that Nimrod drove him to it,” writes Mike.
“‘He’s going around saying I’m a pinko and a queer,’ Flynn said, denying both allegations.”
For Younger Readers: “Pinko” meant Communist, and “queer” meant “homosexual.” Both would have been political career-killing characteristics in 1972.
Flynn’s story about Nimrod goes back to around 1966, when Republican Illinois Gov. Richard Ogilvie was Cook County Sheriff, and Nimrod had a patronage county job through Ogilvie. Nimrod was in charge of the cleaning workers in the County Building. He could get any key to the building.
“Being a Republican, Nimrod wanted to get something directly” on George Dunne, writes Mike. Dunne is Cook County Board President in 1972. In 1966, Dunne was already on the County Board and serving as finance chairman, “one of the most powerful Democrats in Chicago.”
Nimrod’s desire to get something on Dunne “is only natural,” writes Mike. “It is the backbone of our two-party system.”
The story goes that Nimrod had one of his payrollers hide in George Dunne’s office closet every night to see if Dunne did anything controversial when he worked in his office after dinner. The worker never got anything on Dunne, though. As Older Readers know, he just didn’t stick around long enough.
This payroller was irritated at having to hide in a closet, complained to the sheriff who replaced Ogilvie, and got fired. The payroller “was forced into the unfamiliar world of honest work,” as Mike puts it, and vowed revenge on Nimrod by telling the story of hiding in George Dunne’s closet.
Mike asks George Dunne if he ever heard anybody listening to him in his closet.
“I don’t know what an ear against a door would sound like,’ Dunne said, ‘since I never put mine to one.’
“I suggested that it might make a popping sound, like a suction cup, when it was withdrawn,” writes Mike.
“‘No, I never heard anything like that coming from my closet,’ Dunne said.”
“Like most political accusations, it is one man’s word against another’s,” Mike concludes, “so we will probably never know if a payroller was John Nimrod’s skeleton in George Dunne’s closet.”
October 20, 1972
Another of Mike’s occasional columns of “Letters, calls, complaints, and great thoughts from readers”:
“JOSEPHINE MILLER: I couldn’t believe my ears this morning.
“By accident, I turned on Howard Miller, and there he was encouraging Catholics to call the Archdiocese and pressure it to keep Jane Fonda from speaking before some Catholic church group.
“Here’s a man who’s become a millionaire by expressing his views on the public airwaves, and he’s trying to stifle someone’s right to free speech.
“Even when he was one of the biggest hawks in the country, telling his listeners how good it was that their boys were going off to Vietnam, where I’m sure many of them died for nothing, I didn’t call his employer and demand that he be fired.
“Now because somebody is talking in favor of peace, he’s encouraging censorship. I think I’ll disconnect my radio.”
We know how Mike feels about Howard Miller!
We first read Mike on Howard Miller in his Dec. 13, 1971 column, “Gee Howard, stop fiddling!”
Recall Younger Readers that Howard Miller was Rush Limbaugh before Rush Limbaugh—a loud right-wing radio talkshow host. Miller also had a weekly TV show on Ch. 32. As we noted last December (1971), Miller for years was morning host on WIND, jockeying for top ratings with WGN’s legendary Wally Phillips.
Miller was Wally Phillips’ evil twin in every way—and they both famously wore silly toupees, too. Miller got bounced off WIND in 1968. At that time, he and Wally were neck-and-neck, each owning 25% of ALL Chicagoland morning radio listeners.
Miller also hawked real estate in Arizona, which just has to be part of where David Mamet came up with “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Boy I’d love to know.
Miller got fired from WIND after he reportedly said on-air, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, that a special day should be held for the police and firemen who worked during the ensuing riots. Then Miller announced that 3,000 Black youths were planning to march on the East Chicago armory. “Let them try it,” he added.
From 1969 to early August 1971, Miller did short stints at WCFL and then WGN, while continuing his Channel 32 TV talk show. In late August 1971, Howard Miller set himself up as chairman of a $250,000 fund-raising drive for the State’s Attorney police indicted along with Ed Hanrahan for conspiracy to obstruct the investigation of the raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Mike wrote about Howard Miller on December 13, 1971 because Howard quit his TV show and threatened to run for the U.S. Representative seat being vacated by Roman Pucinski to run for the U.S. Senate. That is Mike’s district. Mike was anxious to find out whether Miller might really get into the race:
“The excitement is getting to me,” Mike wrote. “I even spent most of Sunday getting ready for the political campaign by painting a sign to put in front of my house. The sign says: ‘For Sale.’”
In April 1972, Howard Miller dropped back onto the air waves via WMAQ’s morning drive. Mayor Daley called in for Howard’s first show, and Howard said, “Mister Mayor, it’s pretty early in the morning to ask anyone to be profound, although I’m inclined to think you’re profound 24 hours a day.”
That catches you up on Howard Miller.
Mike’s answer to Josephine Miller, who we assume is not a relation:
“COMMENT: You know that flag Howard is always waving? He wants to stuff it in other people’s mouths.”
October 21-22, 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.
Say, how about a look at Richard Christiansen’s review of Mike’s first book of columns, “Up Against It”?
This is from the April 29, 1967 Daily News.
“The first Mike Royko column appeared in The Chicago Daily News on Sept. 6, 1963, and it told about a man who was up against it,” starts Christiansen.
“In a fanciful interview, Royko talked with a taxi driver who had once been a tavern keeper, but who had been driven out of his job by forces that included suburbia, the syndicate and the middle class. In the course of the conversation, opinions also were tossed out on the Chicago Cubs, the Chicago River, Old Town, the Little League, folk music, hi-fi equipment, and fancy cocktail lounges where women who ought to be home keeping house were drinking martinis.”
That column, Christiansen notes, is not included in “Up Against It,” but it “had within it many of the themes and much of the tone, pace, style and personality of future works.”
What makes Royko “a daily habit for thousands of readers”?
“The columns, most obviously, are the work of a native Chicagoan and a natural reporter….This life-long experience and day-to-day assignment has enabled him to draw major subjects and minor sidelights that give his writing an unmistakable authenticity and richness in detail. Only a writer immersed in the city and its ways could view the Stevenson Expressway as a hoodlum burying ground, and only one who has knocked around its streets and known its people could come up with so moving and so chilling an obituary for big Angie Boscarino, the tough who met his end in the gutter.”
Christiansen admires the construction of Royko columns. “Journalism indeed may be ‘literature in a hurry,’ but in that area, these columns qualify as literature,” he writes. Often, good reporter that he is, Royko lets his subjects tell their own stories, “particularly if they are Chicago aldermen.”
“In all of these columns, in either imagined or real situations, one can see Royko and his people forever fighting to retain their self-respect and individuality,” writes Christiansen. “He captures the uneasy impersonality of a crowded automatic elevator and he parodies that painful process of trying to maintain some dignity ordering wine at dinner….through it all, he is trying to stave off the onrush of modern urban life against that private preserve of the individual.
“In that struggle, Royko and his readers are all up against it. And it is that common battle, and Royko’s successful daily jousts with it, that help give his work its broad and resounding appeal.”
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. Our purpose here is to give you some good quotes from the original columns, plus the historic and pop culture context that Mike’s original readers brought to his work. Sometimes you can’t get the inside jokes if you don’t know the references. Plus, many iconic columns didn’t make it into the collections, so unless you dive into microfilm, there’s riveting work 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 which includes a foreword by Studs Terkel and commentaries by Lois Wille.
