Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Famous Chicago attorney Philip Corboy helped destroy Adler & Sullivan's Old Stock Exchange
Weekly Compilation October 18-24, 1971
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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.
October 18, 1971
Phil T. Slobb the squelcher
One in an ongoing series of accounts of Phil T. Slobb, who among many talents can stop inane conversation every time. Mike thinks of Phil when he witnesses a waitress forced to listen to a tableful of diners discuss whether she looks like someone’s sister Edna.
“What can anyone say to this inanity?” asks Mike. “With millions of people in the world, we all look like somebody else….Who in hell cares?....The only person I’ve ever known who could handle that sort of thing was Phil T. Slobb, who has never been uncomfortable in any social situation.”
Phil knew just how to respond to the dreaded guy at the office who says you were in his dream last night, and tells you what happened. He’d listen, then say, “‘Well isn’t that a coincidence. I had a dream about you a couple of nights ago, too. And do you know what you did?’ And he would describe a colorful perversion.”
“In every case, he was never again told about another dream. Most people never spoke to him again, which is even more desirable.”
October 19, 1971
Waiting for the wrecker
Oh, seriously, oh my God. This is one of those astonishing Royko columns that just hit you over the head with every short hammer of a sentence, and you think, “Thank you Mike, may I have another?” Sorry I can’t just reprint the column, which would be obviously better than any summary.
Until now, the owners of Adler & Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange were hidden by a land trust. As the world cried out to save the Exchange, they quietly made a load of blood money replacing an irreplaceable architectural gem with an utterly unremarkable modern highrise.
Now, Mike names these eight men. True, their identities were probably already revealed elsewhere before this column. But Mike doesn’t just name these guys. He asks them the tough questions, and lets their own words reveal their shallow venality. With a few trenchant observations tossed in, of course.
“How does it feel to profit from the destruction of an architectural landmark of worldwide importance?” Mike asks to kick off the column. (Royko signature: The lede paragraph is one sentence, like many paragraphs to come. Say, Royko would have been a natural at Twitter.)
“Not bad,” Mike answers. “Maybe the heritage lovers are wringing their hands in misery at the impending destruction of the Old Stock Exchange Building. But the eight La Salle St. money men who own it are rubbing their hands in anticipation. They bought it for only one reason—to destroy it and put up something new—and their only regret is that it is taking so long. Delays cost money.”
Mike acknowledges that most of these names will be unfamiliar to readers, but promises that they are all well known in La Salle street financial circles, all politically connected. The only name still familiar to most Chicagoans is Philip Corboy, the hugely successful personal injury attorney who died at 87 in 2012.
As the Old Stock Exchange came down, Corboy had been in private practice for almost 20 years. He would become wealthy enough to give Loyola’s law school its biggest ever donation, so classes now meet in the Philip H. Corboy Law Center.
Everybody remembers Corboy representing victims of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings and the 1979 American Airlines crash at O’Hare. We forgot he helped wreck one of Chicago’s treasures. Mike noted Corboy refused to talk, because “he did not care for the line of questioning."
Others foolishly spoke to Mike. “It is a homely monstrosity,” said owner William J. Friedman. Re architectural experts:“I don’t think they know what they’re talking about,” he said, adding as back up that he knew Frank Lloyd Wright as a dinner party guest of his parents.
Another owner, Harold Friedman, said the Old Stock Exchange should come down for the benefit of the city. What would be beneficial to the city, asks Mike. Answer: “A structure worthy of La Salle St.” Mike, parentheses his: (There are some who believe that La Salle St. could use a jail.)
Mike finishes with a killer last line: “As one might say on La Salle St.: Beauty is only ledger deep.”
October 20, 1971
Baboon wants to better itself
One of Mike’s regular columns of reader letters, with his “comment” following. Today, reader Susan Martin of Chicago writes, “While I don’t doubt the sincerity of the people who want to save the Old Stock Exchange and other landmarks, I think they are being unrealistic.”
When buildings get old and unprofitable, wrote Martin, the owner shouldn’t be forced to take a loss. Mike’s comment: “That’s not what happened. The eight owners of the building bought it for the sole purpose of tearing it down. And the former owners acquired it with the same goal in mind.”
Now Mike takes a swing at those former owners:
The former owners “included Jerrold A. Wexler, who is responsible for such new monstrosities as Outer Drive East, at Randolph and the lakefront. People with tastes such as Wexler’s should not be allowed to decide which architectural landmarks are to be ripped down, and overgrown outhouses put up.”
Members of the Outer Drive East condominium association may be surprised to hear their home described as an overgrown outhouse.
In any case, Mike points out that when an important building like the Exchange goes up for sale, the government should get a chance to buy it first to save it.
“But there is big dough to be made in new buildings,” he concludes, “which is why I’ve always said that this city’s official slogan should be: ‘Ubi Est Mea.’” Royko fans all know what that means, whether they know Latin or not.
“Where’s Mine?”
October 21, 1971
“Baboon wants to better itself”
Ugh, yes, this is the same headline as yesterday. Why oh why do I have one Mike Royko column dated 10-20-1971 and one dated 10-21-1971, and they are the exact same column? Answer:
Because I was duped by the crazy number of editions put out by newspapers in days gone by, and the confusing way they are duplicated on microfilm.
As I explain for the younger crowd (via a classic episode of "Columbo") in the upcoming Chapter Three of “Roseland, Chicago: 1972," newspapers updated their actual physical printed copies several times a day, printing up whole new batches and sending them out to news stands.
I copied Mike’s column from the October 20, 1971 Red Streak edition--the last edition of the day, I believe--
—and then I copied his October 21, 1971 column from that day’s “State Edition,” which looks like it ran copy from the previous day's city edition.
I can’t believe I did that. It’s exactly the same type of mistake the murderer makes in Columbo, and I watched that episode multiple times, even before using it in Chapter Three. No wonder Columbo always figures it out.
I'll get Mike’s real October 21 column soon.
Bonus, from the July 23, 1973 Chicago Today “Marilyn Beck Hollywood” column: Don’t believe rumors that Peter Falk will quit “Columbo”: “Execs at both the network and studio remind me that Peter also played ‘I quit’ games...last year—when there was still time to negotiate..."
October 22, 1971
A ‘historic’ bit of nothing
Wow--Mike reacts to the very first Shakman decree. Background For Younger Readers (FYR) will be. necessary, plus a quote from "Boss" for context. The wait for Ald. Vito Marzullo is well worth it.
Mike isn’t impressed by the first legal win for what would become known as the famed Shakman decree, which Chicagoans know outlawed requiring government employees to volunteer for and donate to elected politicians—meaning Democratic Machine politicians. It’s historic.
Background: Michael Shakman sued the Democratic party among others in 1969 after losing an independent run for the state constitutional convention, “charging that his constitutional rights were violated by the party’s use of patronage workers against him,” as the Daily News explained.
Wednesday, October 20, 1971 brought Shakman’s first win. Mayor Daley’s Democratic organization agreed to a federal consent decree, handed down by Judge Abraham Marovitz, declaring the party wouldn’t force workers to electioneer or donate to politicians.
This first decree didn’t answer how political sponsorship would work in hiring government workers. “Marovitz said the court will try that question ‘on its merits,’” said the News. And Marovitz was in charge of enforcement.
This is the same Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz that Royko wrote of in his then still best-selling biography of Mayor Daley, “Boss,” published earlier this year (1971). “Daley put him on the federal bench,” wrote Royko there, and the. two men were still great friends:
“With the Hatch Act forbidding federal judges from doing any politicking, what other judge spends every election night in the charmed inner office of Democratic Headquarters, sitting with Daley as the returns come in? That’s friendship.”
In today’s column, Royko notes how Judge Marovitz gravely handed down the consent decree on Wednesday, and Mayor Daley “gravely stated that…he thought it was just fine…That was on Wednesday.”
The next morning, Mike related that a young assistant state’s attorney went to work. “Another employee called him over and said: ‘Here’s your two tickets. You owe $50.’” The tickets were for a political fundraiser. “‘Sell ‘em or eat ‘em’ he was told,” wrote Mike.
This, says Mike, shows why the consent decree won’t work—even civil service employees were afraid not to volunteer and buy tickets to fundraisers.
“The agreement had so much impact on the Machine that some ward bosses hadn’t even heard of it,” writes Mike, who called several and quotes their reactions. Best of all, Ald. Vito Marzullo:
“One of them, Ald. Vito Marzullo, the tough, tiny boss of the West Side’s 25th Ward, said: ‘Forget about it. Let ‘em rule anything they want to. Nobody’s gonna stop any activities as far as good government is concerned. No judge is gonna stop me or anything else.’”
WEEKEND EDITION
As always, we note that weekends were sad for a Chicago Daily News family in 1972, because there was no Mike Royko column in the single weekend edition of the paper. Instead, we look elsewhere for Mike Royko on the weekend. Again this week I picked up the compilation “I May Be Wrong, but I Doubt It,” and reread:
April 5, 1968
Millions in His Firing Squad
This is Mike’s brilliant column following the assassination of Martin Luther King. The lede: “FBI agents are looking for the man who pulled the trigger and surely they will find him.”
“But it doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t. They can’t catch everybody, and Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions.”
Every single line is gold. Every line indicts and then convicts not just the easy targets, like the “Southern redneck,” but Mike’s own family, friends, neighbors, and Daily News readers--
—at a time when criticizing racism would earn you a brick through your window, not a huge following on Twitter. This is brave writing. Mike includes himself, too, with the repetitious use of “our” and “we.”
This writing did earn Mike picketers in front of his modest home, and a brick through a window in the middle of the night. He didn’t use those incidents to pat himself on the back. You read about them in his biographies, not in his columns.
In this column, Mike says it would be “too easy to point at the Southern redneck and say he did it.” What about Northern commentators pouring hate out every morning, what about Northern mayors against poverty programs, and—
“…the Eastern and Southern European immigrant or his kid who seems to be convinced that in forty or fifty years he built this country. There was nothing here until he arrived, you see, so that gives him the right to pitch rocks when Martin Luther King walks down the street in his neighborhood.”
“They all took their place in King’s firing squad.”
And the powerful conclusion: “We have pointed a gun at our own head and we are squeezing the trigger. And nobody we elect is going to help us. It is our head and our finger.”
Doug Moe and Richard Ciccone detail Royko’s writing and experiences covering racism and civil rights in their wonderful biographies.
Son David Royko remembers getting home from school and wondering if he could get in his house through the picketers, in Moe’s “The World of Mike Royko.” After wife Carol Royko escorted her son inside, David looked out the window just in time to see an egg hit the side of the house.
The brick through the window barely missed sleeping son Rob Royko, writes Moe: “’I think my dad went down to the bar, found the guy who threw it, and confronted him,’ Rob says.”
Ciccone’s “Royko: A Life In Print” puts the pickets in fall of 1966, the year Rev. King moved to Chicago and led marches through white neighborhoods, and the West Side exploded in a hot summer riot and looting that forced Mayor Daley to call in the National Guard. Through it all, says Ciccone, Royko wrote columns “blasting white racism.”
As Ciccone points out, Royko never traveled for work other than national political conventions—with one exception. The single other reporting trip Royko chose to make was to Selma, Albama in March 1965, where he spent one week covering civil rights protest marches there—just as a white minister planning to join in had been murdered.
The Selma columns, says Ciccone, include Mike’s description of the peaceful town before a protest march: “A police dog sleeps in the back seat of a squad car, dreaming of good things to eat—if he can catch them.”
Another column covers Mike’s second day in Selma, when he returned to his car late at night after covering a march and noticed another car parked a few spaces behind with four men and a sheriff’s helmet in the rear window.
Ciccone quotes, “When I pulled out, they pulled out. When I turned right, they turned right. When I turned left, they turned left. They did everything I did except sweat and shake.”
Mike escapes with a quick U-turn. “I parked, reached the hotel bar in two great leaps, ordered enough drinks for everyone and drank them all myself.”
Lois Wille told Ciccone that the newsroom was proud of Royko’s civil rights columns, but a “man named Ken Johnson who was head of Daily News circulation used to storm up” to Mike’s boss’s office “about twice a week to complain about Mike’s columns…in the circulation department, they were angry. The Daily News was losing circulation, all afternoon papers were.”
We’ll close with one more amazing line from Mike’s column on the assassination of Martin Luther King:
“The bullet that hit King came from all directions. Every two-bit politician or incompetent editorial writer found in him, not themselves, the cause of our racial problems.”
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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