Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Mike asks, Would you ride in a car with Ted Kennedy?
Weekly Compilation October 11-17, 1971
To access other parts of this site, click here for the Home Page.
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 11, 1971: Namely, it’s all in the name
One of those masterful columns when Royko takes reader expectations and throws them over a cliff. It kills me that I can’t reprint this whole column. The last two sentences are just killer.
Mike considers a possible 1972 presidential election between incumbent President Richard Nixon and potential Democratic nominee Ted Kennedy. He notes that people would sing songs from “Camelot” “for a president named Kennedy—any first name will do” who whittled down a war and inflation left by the two previous administrations, and even sent an emissary to China and planned a visit himself. But they'd howl if Nixon failed to pass any legislation, tried a stupid invasion of Cuba, and "sent troops to a civil war in Southeast Asia.”
But Mike doesn’t sugarcoat Nixon. Younger Readers, don’t make the mistake of assuming that Mike was a Nixon-backer. Don't think, "old white guy, he must've been a conservative Republican."
Because now Mike lays out Nixon’s miserable personal record, including building his reputation in the U.S. Senate “by Red-baiting” and promoting the Republican “Southern Strategy.”
Mike on Nixon, bottomline, as a person: “Presumably, he has never changed, because a man never changes, unless his name is Kennedy, in which case he can change faster than Clark Kent.”
At this point Ted Kennedy had done nothing much except drunkenly drive his car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick in the middle of the night as a married U.S. Senator and leave his pretty young companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown while he saved his own life and political future.
Which Mike never even mentions. Wait for it as we come into the home stretch:
“And you still hear some people asking if you would buy a car from somebody like Mr. Nixon.”
New graph: Mike knew when to hit return on his typewriter.
“I wish that the same people, just once, would ask if you would ride in a car with Edward Kennedy.”
October 12, 1971: The past comes tumbling down
Mike was walking downtown and a guy handed him a leaflet about saving Adler & Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange Building. “When I read it, I realized I was in the presence of a madman…I figure that anybody who tries to save landmarks in Chicago is goofy enough to preach celibacy in a Playboy Club or nonviolence to Dick Butkus.”
Still, since the Stock Exchange was one of the last Louis Sullivan buildings, Mike noted that you might think the city would save it—because “when Chicago politicians sit down and figure out how much they have made from rezoning, permits and all the other fringe benefits of the high-rise boom, they should offer up daily prayers of thanks to Sullivan.”
Other great cities save their special buildings and monuments, Mike concluded. “But in Chicago, the real estate men are supreme, and the city’s political leaders figure that a suitable landmark is a sign that says: “Welcome to Chicago - Richard J. Daley, Mayor.”
October 13, 1971: Greatest mind in our schools
The grand Chicago tradition of “ghost voters, ghost payrollers, and other sly spirits” had added a new twist, Mike announced: ghost students. Someone at Gershwin School, 6206 S. Racine, padded the school’s enrollment with ghost students, no doubt to qualify for additional books, supplies or even teachers.
Illinois State Auditor Mike Howlett demanded an investigation.
Mike’s opinion: “I don’t know who at the school is behind the student-padding scheme, but whoever is responsible should be removed from his or her job immediately. Removed, and promoted and given something bigger to do downtown. This kind of brains and guts shouldn’t be confined to only one school.”
The student ghost creator should also get a parade, said Mike, since the front row of marchers in the St. Patrick’s Day parade got there “with the help of a few ghost voters. And if those aren’t ghost payrollers in City Hall, why are so few of them seen when the sun comes up?”
CORRECTION: October 14th post
I have screwed up already, one week in. I’ve copied below the original version of the post for Mike Royko’s October 14, 2021 column. But as I noted in the post itself, I wondered if I was wrong the whole time I was writing it and hitting “publish.” Satire is a tricky thing. While it didn’t make sense to me that Mike Royko would be against prison reform especially after the notorious Attica prison revolt which happened one month prior to this column, I also felt even after reading the column ten times that if it was satire, it lacked the set up to tip me off. Eventually I opted to say I was afraid it was not satire, but that I might be wrong.
That was not a satisfying conclusion, so next I asked Rick Kogan and Mike Miner, veteran Chicago reporters who were working journalists at the time and knew Mike Royko. They both believe the column was satire, but not well done. I suppose there’s no reason to listen to me, wrong after one week, but I’ll make one more observation before giving their responses:
This October 14, 1971 column fits then into the same unfortunate category as Royko’s notorious 1996 column, in which he meant to lambast and satirize Patrick Buchanan’s xenophobic rhetoric. That column went so off-kilter that 1,000 protesters converged on Tribune Tower demanding Royko’s resignation—which sounds like normal life now, but was more than unusual back then before people got canceled everyday like a typical subscription to the Columbia Record Club. Even Mike’s friends didn’t think he’d launched his satire correctly on that 1996 column. It could be that many people felt the same way about this October 14th column in 1971, but at that time, I’m thinking nobody would bother picketing a newspaper because somebody wrote something unfavorable about prison inmates.
Rick Kogan: I think he did mean it as satire though it’s not his sharpest.
Mike Miner: Royko’s column is satire in the same spirit that “Officer Krupke” is satire. He’s not mocking enemies of reform: he’s mocking the reformists. He’s mocking them as today he’d mock the “defund the police” crowd — as woefully naive. On the other hand, Attica was egregious, just as George Floyd was egregious, and Royko set up something of a straw man ( as you say), to write the easier column. Was this his only Attica column? If so, a shame.
Note: I don’t know if it was his only Attica column, because it is extremely time-consuming to go to the library, get the microfilm, and go through old newspapers looking for stories and even Mike Royko columns. So I didn’t cover the month in between Attica and this October 14th column. Maybe as we go forward, Royko will take another crack at it.
October 14, 2021: The ‘victims’ behind bars
This is one of those occasional Royko columns that mightily puzzled young Steve Bertolucci, the ten-year-old whose story we tell in “Roseland, Chicago: 1972.” That’s because in his lede, Mike poses a premise that doesn’t sound quite right:
“Every time a prison riot occurs, demonstrators appear on the streets to demand that all prisoners be released. They argue that anybody who winds up behind bars is a ‘political prisoner,’ a victim of political-social-economic conditions found in this country.”
Steve was confused when he read that, because he had not heard that anybody wanted to throw open the doors to all the prisons and let out all the criminals.
Steve didn’t know the term “straw-man argument.” Or satire. But I'm pretty sure Mike didn't mean this as satire. Except I could be completely wrong. The more I’ve thought about it all week, I am probably wrong. Am I wrong? I don’t know.
Have we given the impression that Mike Royko was always perfect, all-knowing, and wise? Oh my no! He was not. Like most people, he could and did sometimes fail to rise above being just a typical man of his time and place. Though frankly, to me, that makes it all the more amazing how often Mike did transcend the potential limitations of his parochial background.
And he could be very, shall we say, grumpy. We know of one young reporter who worked with Mike and never spoke to him. “He terrified me,” she says.
So this column would not make it into any Royko Hall of Fame. Though he never says so, Mike must have been reacting to the widespread calls for prison reform following the September 9 Attica prison riot, the worst in U.S. history. Per Wikipedia, 1,281 prisoners out of 2,200 took over the prison for four days, and by the end, 43 people were killed. Sen. Birch Bayh had just co-sponsored prison reform legislation in Congress in response.
I would love to say that Mike was masterfully, satirically batting down arguments against prison reform, but it didn't read that way to me, even though I read it 10 times *trying* to make it read that way to me. I would love to be wrong. Maybe I’m wrong! It’s very possible that this is satire, but Mike didn’t set up it quite well enough for me to be sure.
There is definitely one good thing about this column, which is that Mike found an excuse to describe some denizens of his “old neighborhood” on the northwest side, always entertaining.
“I agree with them,” Mike wrote. “Several young men from my old neighborhood went to prison….I can’t think of any who didn’t go there because of political-social-economic conditions. Eddie the Lip, for instance…Eddie was influenced by a value system that stresses ownership of a car. By the time he was 20, he had stolen 12 of them, because he didn’t like to work. If somebody had given him a car, he wouldn’t have got in trouble.”
October 15, 1971: The last bust for balloonist
Today Mike takes up a small story of a small-time Chicagoan, not destined to go down in the history books, but a common Chicago story: The cops keep busting an inoffensive guy for no apparent reason. In this case, young mild-mannered Ron Wiggins, who had just gotten arrested for the third time for selling balloons and smiley buttons on Michigan Avenue, even though he had a peddler’s license.
For younger readers, we should mention that smiley face buttons were unaccountably popular at this time. That's why the April 1972 issue of Mad Magazine is covered with smiley face buttons—with one button instead exhibiting the usual smirk of Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman.
This is Steve's older brother Tony's copy of that Mad Magazine.
Wiggin the balloon peddler tells Mike that the cops always tell him why he’s getting busted: Because their district commander told them to lean on peddlers. Now Royko readers get one of the treats we savor most: Mike questions the authority figure.
“There is no vendetta against Mr. Wiggins,” Commander John O’Shea tells Mike. Then why do O’Shea’s men keep arresting him, Royko asks.
Next the classic authority figure answer we hoped for: “I think some of those peddlers come up to this area and they probably engender an abrasiveness either by their actions or possibly their appearance and engender complaints.”
Finally the classic Royko plain folks explanation of the public official answer: “I’m not sure, but translated that might mean that somebody doesn’t like the way Wiggin looks or acts.” Wiggins decided to move to San Francisco.
WEEKEND EDITON: October 16-17, 1971
Weekends were sad for a Chicago Daily News family in 1972: no Royko column. So we look elsewhere for Mike Royko today. I picked up the compilation “I May Be Wrong, BUT I DOUBT IT,” and the first thing that caught my eye was Mike taking any opportunity to insult the Tribune.
Until Royko felt forced to take his typewriter across Michigan Avenue to Tribune Tower after Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times—and perhaps afterward too—his relationship with the Tribune was akin to George Bailey and Mr. Potter. Royko was a brick bungalow, and Tribune Tower was Potter’s mansion.
In his terrific biography “The World of Mike Royko,” Doug Moe recounts how the Tribune tried luring Mike away from the Daily News in 1971 when his contract was up. “I couldn’t see myself working for the Tribune,” Moe quotes Royko. “All my life the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I read the Trib.”
So sometimes you’ll read an old Royko column and out of nowhere, he takes a swing at the Trib. Here, from “DARlings on the Move,” Mike contemplates the news that the Daughters of the American Revolution were trying to change their stuffy, racist, old-fashioned reputation.
“The Illinois DAR convention was held this week and I dropped in to see how the face-lifting program was going….Several nice elderly ladies were in the press room, reading Tribune editorials.”
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 with Mike Royko in 1972? If you came here from social media, you may not know it’s part of the book being serialized, one chapter per month: “Roseland, Chicago: 1972.” It’s the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here.
To get MIKE ROYKO 50 YEARS AGO TODAY in your mailbox weekly along with THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 and new chapters of the book—
SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!