Mike Royko 50+/- Years Ago Today: Mike Miner's first Royko

It was a fine 1968 vintage

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Mike Miner's first Royko

When legendary Chicago Reader media critic Mike Miner tasted his first sip of Mike Royko, the column was a fine 1968 vintage. It went straight to his head.

Imagine wandering down to a cold, musty wine cellar and idly plucking an undistinguished dusty bottle off the rack. You’re not expecting much as you pop the cork, pour a short draft and give it a try—then you get a jolt of something you didn’t even know you were missing.

As you’ll see, that’s what happened to Mike Miner.

Mike Miner as many will remember him, surrounded by papers in his Reader office. Photo by Andrea Bauer, I’m guessing early 2000s-ish.

Remember, Royko’s page three column in the Chicago Daily News had only begun two years earlier. Royko was big stuff in Chicago by ‘68 with one book compilation already out, but he wasn’t the nationally-known behemoth he would become, especially after the 1971 publication of “Boss.”

In fact, Royko’s name meant nothing to Mike Miner when he first saw it, from his hometown of St. Louis. He wouldn’t move to Chicago for a couple of years yet, then become its preeminent press critic for several decades via his Hot Type column in the Reader.

Royko’s first column compilation came out in spring 1967, less than a year after he started writing on page three of the Chicago Daily News. Is that nuts or what?

Mike Miner could never find that first Royko column again. That’s no surprise to Royko connoisseurs, who know scads of his best pieces never made it into a book. There just isn’t room.

It was a few years back that Mike told me about reading his first Royko, during an early conversation for this odd site. Funny how common that is—people looking for an elusive white whale of a Royko column stuck in their head.

I started looking for Mike’s white whale Royko column, with no luck. Initially I had no access to a digital Daily News archive, so I’d scroll through microfilm at the library when I had a chance. The digital archive I eventually located has an unbelievably lousy search engine. I still couldn’t find the column. At some point I forgot to keep looking.

And then I heard Mike Miner had passed away. Finding his first Royko column became yet another thing left undone or unsaid for someone important to me. Of course it’s a tiny footnote in Mike Miner’s life, of no significance. It was just something I could have done for Mike as a small thank you for the privilege of knowing him, even at a relative distance.

At that point, finding Mike Miner’s first Royko column became more important to me than it ever was for him. I sat down with that archive every spare moment the last couple of weeks until I spied the white whale spouting.

Before I haul in that white whale here, let’s look at Mike Miner’s life. Along the way, we’ll dip into some other Royko columns too since that’s how we roll here.

Mike Miner (1943-2025)

Some of the people you most admire and are thankful to know aren’t your closest friends or family. These are the sideview mirror people, closer than they appear.

Maybe you interacted with them only now and then, but their wisdom or kindness proved invaluable. Maybe they radiated an irresistible warmth and depth, but circumstances were such that you didn’t spend enough time with them to make the leap from colleague or neighbor to real pal, like an electron absorbing enough energy to jump to a higher level of orbit around a nucleus. I would say all those things, and more, about Mike Miner.

Mike Miner was one of my favorite sideview mirror people. I got to work with him as a young reporter at the Reader, a wise elder statesman journalist too shy and humble to know that he imparted lessons by simply pausing as he made an editing suggestion. In the following years I always called him first with questions about Chicago and newspapers. When he passed away May 1, he left a full life, incredibly important to his true friends and family—and also to those of us lucky enough to buzz about in his expansive outer orbit.

The incomparable Rick Kogan wrote a lovely Tribune obituary for Miner, just as he did (with Jerry Crimmins) in 1997 for Mike Royko. As Rick notes for his conclusion, Mike Miner’s papers are going to the Newberry Library, where they’ll “reside for keeps, alongside a couple of other columnists named Ben Hecht and Mike Royko.” So fitting!

To learn more about Mike Miner’s life and work, also check out former Reader reporter Steve Bogira’s 2011 excellent appreciation here, in which former Reader editor Mike Lenehan called Miner “the conscience of Chicago journalism.” The Sun-Times’ Mitch Dudek covers Miner’s life at the Sun-Times here, and former Trib columnist Eric Zorn saluted Miner in his Picayune Sentinel on Substack. Eric points out how badly Chicago media needs somebody to fill the gaping hole Mike Miner left, especially now that indispensable Chicago media columnist Robert Feder has retired.

Eric includes a terrific post from former Trib columnist Mary Schmich, who remembered so well how reporters used to make a beeline for newly delivered Readers, turning straight to Mike’s Hot Type to see who might be praised or dissected that week.

Of course, it wasn’t just the subject, but how Mike Miner addressed it, that made Hot Type invaluable. As Steve Bogira observed, the column was “ostensibly about the media, but really about human nature.” Miner could both pick apart a passing parochial Chicago media brouhaha and philosophize about its place in the larger journalism world, always with a keen understanding of the people involved in matters big and small. Click here for a great local example from 1980 where Mike explains an imbroglio featuring Royko, Jane Byrne, Jay McMullen, Bill Griffin, Mike Sneed, and best of all, Walter Jacobson.

OMG, Jane Byrne, Mike Royko, and Walter Jacobson—who could ask for more!?

Mike Miner grew up mainly in St. Louis, earned a journalism degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and served a tour of duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Steve Bogira describes Mike Miner’s first job out of college selling vanilla extract door-to-door, which fortunately didn’t work out. He ended up at the St. Louis UPI office, and a few years later, made his way to Chicago and a seven-year stint with the Sun-Times. I’ll soon post a companion THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 featuring some of Mike’s memorable early work.

Admittedly, Mike Miner didn’t come to Chicago for Royko.

“I came here because I was working for UPI in St. Louis and I quit because I wanted to go to Europe and travel around, which I did with my girlfriend,” Mike told me in one of our first conversations for this site. “I came back in April of 1970 and I didn’t have any work. And it didn’t look like I could find anything in St. Louis, so I had a friend here working for the Sun-Times so I came up to visit, and he said well you’re here, why don’t you apply.”

Miner talked to Ralph Otwell at the Sun-Times, who happened to be desperate at just that moment for someone to work nights as a rewrite man— exactly what he’d been doing for UPI in St. Louis before his European jaunt.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

Those were heady days for young reporters questioning how their profession worked. Mike was thrilled to sign a protest letter with fellow reporters in 1971 after the Sun-Times endorsed Mayor Richard J. Daley for a fifth term over his opponent, Better Government Association president Richard Friedman. (See the first installment of my series on that great moment in Chicago press history here.)

It was a gutsy thing to do for anybody who needed a paycheck, as Mike Miner did, and even more so for the new guy who’d only been in town for a year. But Mike never considered *not* signing that protest letter. Fifty years later, he giggled like a silly school boy remembering how fun it was.

Soon after arriving in Chicago, Mike met his wife, Betsy Nore, with whom he would have three daughters. But first, as Betsy described for Mitch Dudek’s Sun-Times obituary, Mike took a short leave from the paper to cover the Vietnam War as a free lancer when the Sun-Times wouldn’t send him:

“While he was there, four days before the fall of Saigon, he met a doctor and his wife and two kids, ages 4 and 1, who were all trying to get out of the country, and the doctor asked Michael to pretend to be his wife’s husband. So Michael signed some papers saying he was the husband, and because he was an American he got them on a plane to France where this whole family ended up settling.”

When the Daily News folded in 1978, some staffers moved to the sister-paper Sun-Times, including of course Mike Royko. Many News and Sun-Times staffers were laid off, including Mike Miner. He was quickly asked back—sounds kind of DOGE-y now—but decided against returning. Instead, Miner joined the Reader. He’d contributed to the Reader’s first issue in 1971, and sent them a few articles in the years since.

It was no coincidence that Mike Miner took over the Reader’s Hot Type media column, the work that filled his next three decades or so. He’d been studying Chicago media and writing about it almost since he’d landed in town.

He’d been thinking about it even longer.

Back in St. Louis, Mike told me, he happened to be at a library and paged through either Time or Newsweek. He stopped at an article about the Chicago Journalism Review.

Cover by legendary editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin

CJR was a wonderful but short-lived magazine (1968-1975) started by Chicago reporters disgusted by local coverage in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic convention and police riot.

As CJR contributor and later editor Leonard Aronson would write a few years later, the magazine was spawned “in a crucible of outrage and distrust…Many of the early contributors had an axe to grind and blood was let all over town.”

The inaugural October 1968 issue declared its intentions in a scathing unsigned “prologue.” Per CJR’s editors, Chicago publishers had “nervously” let reporters cover the convention violence accurately, but when the national and international press left town, management reverted to form:

“Mayor Daley was permitted to take over the media. Our own editorialists told us that we didn’t really see what we saw under those blue helmets. The violent scenes of police crowd dispersal had become ‘riots.’

“….There is an alternative. There must be. In search of it we are publishing this journal….The CHICAGO JOURNALISM REVIEW will provide a continuing critique of media coverage in the city, explore problems created by official news management, and by the news gathering system that now exists.

“….No other city has a similar publication. No other city needs one more.”

The scathing opener for the first issue of Chicago Journalism Review, the first publication of its kind.

“And I was so thrilled to read this,” Mike Miner recalled. “I thought, ‘Finally my profession found a place for itself in the 60s.’”

CJR became a natural second home for Mike Miner. Chicago Daily News reporter Hank De Zutter was CJR’s first editor, assisted by associate editors Christopher Chandler, Ron Dorfman and Ken Pierce, with Dorfman soon taking the lead editing job. Mike Miner began contributing to CJR at least by 1973. My CJR collection isn’t 100% complete, because the bound copies I found at the library have an irritating number of missing pages. So he may have started sooner, but I can definitely see that Miner joined the editorial board for the January 1974 issue.

By March that year, Dorfman had decided to move on. It took a committee of four editors to replace him—initially, Leonard Aronson, Michael Miner, Paul O’Connor, and Michael Sneed. Some juggling would ensue for the magazine’s final issues, but as far as I can see, Mike Miner stuck around until the bitter end—just as you’d expect.

In the coming companion TCD1972 post, we’ll survey some of Mike Miner’s work for CJR and the Sun-Times. I’ll give you one Miner piece here from the February 1974 CJR, because it involves Mike Royko. Next, the Royko column that inspired it; and finally, the follow-up outraged letter to the CJR editor from venerable former Tribune reporter Kenan Heise, then editing the Action Line column at Chicago Today. You might keep in mind as you read Mike’s piece below that he was all of 31 when he wrote it.

Chicago Journalism Review, February 1974

Mike Miner was inspired here by Mike Royko’s December 13, 1973 column which starts out this way:

This is a second follow-up to one of Royko’s most celebrated columns, “A Faceless Man’s Plea” from December 10, 1973. That column and its first follow-up the next day, “The VA Does a Fast Reversal,” appear in “The Best of Mike Royko: One More Time.” It’s the unbelievable story of young veteran Leroy Bailey, who lost his face in battle. The VA declined to cover an operation so Bailey could eat solid food again.

Day one, 12/10/73:

12/10/1973

Day Two:

December 11, 1973

Back to some excerpts from Royko’s 12/13/73 Christmas charity column, the better to appreciate Kenan Heise’s coming outrage:

You gotta love Heise’s letter below, criticizing media critic and Royko alike. I’m surprised Heise doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor here. While Heise would go on to bigger and better things, don’t sniff at Action Line or Chicago Today! See here for just one Action Line featured in THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972. Chicago Today is one of my favorite parts of reading 1972 papers, and Action Line wonderfully reflected the paper’s irreverence. Action Line’s genius lay in the choice of letters as much as its sometimes snarky responses. Heise had to have something to do with that. Anyway, here’s his CJR letter:

Chicago Journalism Review, March 1974

Now, back to Mike Miner and his first Mike Royko column.

July 17, 1968: You, sir, ain’t a gentleman!

You want a shocker? Chicago’s main media critic for the latter part of the 20th century never met Chicago’s star newspaper columnist of that same period. The two Mikes, Miner told me, just talked “a few times” on the phone, even though they worked in the same building for seven years.

“He was never particularly approachable,” Mike Miner explained. “I remember Ron Powers telling me that when he got his column, TV critic, he went bounding down the hall to Royko’s desk. ‘Hey, guess what, I just joined you, I’m a Chicago columnist too!’ And Royko glared at him and told him to fuck off and sent him on his way.”

Media critic Mike Miner wrote about Mike Royko plenty, nonetheless. As time went on, this often meant writing about Royko at his worst moments, such as the notorious 1996 column (and two follow-ups) in which Royko claimed to be parodying arch-conservative Pat Buchanan’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Nobody got the joke, least of all Chicago’s Hispanic community, many of whom rallied around Tribune Tower calling for Royko’s job. A fair number of Trib staffers would have liked to see Royko walk at that point too.

In such a heated atmosphere, Mike Miner could tamp down the flames and shine some clarifying light with that week’s Hot Type, methodically working through the column, the objections, Royko’s responses, and Tribune management’s damage control.

“I think he was a very difficult personality, behaved badly on a number of occasions,” said Miner when I asked for an overall assessment of Royko’s career. “I think he was a great journalist, a great writer. I regretted that I only seemed to be writing about him when I had some case to make against him, and I thought he’d done badly…It wasn’t until he died that I could write about how much I admired him, how important he was to me.”

“The stories people tell about him tend to be stories of really unfortunate encounters. He was a nasty drunk. And I think the only paper he was really comfortable working at was the Daily News….I don’t think he ever wanted to be at the Tribune, but they offered him a lot of money and Rupert Murdoch made it impossible to stay where he was.”

I asked Mike Miner what he’d say to the many people who couldn’t get past columns like the Pat Buchanan-Mexico pieces. It seemed to me that some people acted back then as if the few clunkers Royko had written ruined everything that came before. Some people, perhaps, still believe that.

“It doesn’t,” Mike Miner stated flatly. “I mean, how could a column he wrote in 1996 invalidate a column he wrote in 1964? That’s ridiculous. I mean I remember, I did have to say to my daughters once in a while, ‘You’re wrong about Royko.’ Because it became fashionable to be dismissive of him, to say he was sexist and illiberal. Y’know he found it difficult, I think, the transition from Daley 1 to Daley 2. People wanted the him to just go on writing anti-Daley columns, they wanted the same old same old with Richie that they’d gotten with his dad, but he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t think it was fair.”

And that’s when Mike Miner paused and remembered the first time he came across Mike Royko. Here’s his memory below, verbatim. I’m including the clip from the tape too, though the quality is poor. It was pretty loud. We were lunching at the old Julius Meinl on Southport, which had tile floors and nothing else anywhere it seemed to absorb sound. If you can’t stand listening, skip to my transcription. But I wanted to give people the option of hearing Mike Miner’s wonderful voice.

“My first encounter with Royko was when I was in St. Louis working for UPI at night. And I went down to the teletype room. We were located in the Post-Dispatch building and when I had a little time I’d go down there and look at the teletype just to see what was going on in the world. And I went down there and the Daily News wire was spitting out a Royko column.

“I’d never heard of Royko. He was on the Daily News wire. But he wasn’t yet the name he would be. Or I can be really obtuse, everybody else can know about somebody and I don’t. [NOTE: Mike Miner was never obtuse. It isn’t at all surprising that he’d never heard of Royko at this point.] This is probably ‘67 or ‘68. Must’ve been ‘68 because it was a column about a kid who wrote a banker, I think complaining that he didn’t lower his flag at half mast when Martin Luther King was assassinated. He just wondered why. It was a polite letter a 12-year-old boy would write, who has a sense of right of wrong but doesn’t presume to lecture anybody, especially the president of a bank.

“And the banker was just outraged that somebody would question him and dressed the kid down, terribly. Wildly overreacted. The letter wound up with Royko. I imagine the kid’s father sent it to Royko. And Royko just laid into the guy. Magnificent.

“And back in that time, there were precious few voices in the media who had a sense of right and wrong that sort of matched our own. I mean y’know it was still, in a way, 1963, and the Chicago papers, papers everywhere, were disapproving of King, disapproving of the March on Washington, very cautious, very uncritical of the powers that be. And here’s a guy who wasn’t. He just found the banker contemptible and didn’t hesitant to say so in the funniest of language.

“I mean there wasn’t a lot of humor back then. People were very conservative or they were very angry, but there wasn’t much wit at large in the country back then. There’s nothing funny about SDS. There’s nothing funny about—unless you found Abby Hoffman hilarious—there was nothing particularly funny about antiwar demonstrations.

“And I was sort of giddy with excitement about Royko. I didn’t know that anyone was writing like that. I said ‘My God, what a comic he was.’ I was just thrilled.

“And I never—I never forgot how I felt right then.

“And when I came and started reading him every day, y’know he was consistently that good. And this is one of the columns I’ve never seen anthologized anywhere. A column I’ve never read again. I remember I went looking for it once and couldn’t find it.”

Most likely Mike Miner couldn’t find the column because you’d expect it to run somewhere in proximity to the assassination of Martin Luther King. But it didn’t.

As I mentioned, the digital archive I can access has an awful search engine that will barely find the word “Royko” much less let me search with obvious key words. So I began the slow process of going through every Chicago Daily News, starting on April 5, 1968, and checking page 3. The Royko gold I combed through was almost unbelievable in April, May, and June. From major news, his magnificent piece on King’s assassination, plus Lyndon B. Johnson dropping out of the presidential race, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The minor news topic columns glittered just as brightly.

I began to think Mike Miner’s memory had simply glitched on the timing or the assassination. But I kept going because that seemed so unlikely. Finally I hit it on July 17. Mike Miner had, after over 50 years, remembered the column almost exactly—it’s just that a girl wrote the letter, at age 17. That was the only bit misremembered, after half a century.

BTW, there’s still a bank at 2720 W. Devon. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, Miss Solomon’s $250 would be worth $2,297.96 in April 2025.

2720 W. Devon in 2024…Thanks Google Streetview.

As Mike Miner recalled, Deborah Soloman’s letter was short, polite and to the point. Her letter contained exactly one sentence. She said she was withdrawing her money “due to the fact that you did not lower your flag upon the death of the Reverend Dr. King”. She signed it “Sincerely”.

And as Mike Miner described to me, bank president Mr. S.L. DeLove’s letter was lengthy, vicious, and bizarrely off-point. Royko included several excerpts, including:

“You have the unalienable right to mourn for Dr. King and fly the flag at half-mast during the mourning period as proclaimed by the President.

“And we likewise…have the inalienable right not to mourn for Dr. King and not to fly the flag at half-mast for him.”

and

“Any attempt on your part to coerce us to think you do or do like you is despicable, Un-American and nothing but totalitarian tactics.

“We do not admire Dr. King, and we do not want to be hypocritical and follow the sheep, and it is our unalienable right to express our convictions without interference and dastardly threats of removing your savings account.”

Here’s where Royko’s barbs really began to kick in:

“Let us pause here before banker DeLove twirls his mustache and ties the young lady to the railroad tracks,” Mike suggests. [*Younger Readers, see footnote at end if this sentence makes absolutely no sense to you.]

“The girl doesn’t deny your right to fly your flag any way you wish. She is simply offended by your attitudes and would rather bank with someone who does not offend her.

“Also, those who admired Dr. King and mourned his death are not, as you put it, sheep. There are some people who are saddened when any human being dies—violently or otherwise, for a principle or otherwise.”

Let’s savor the entire column end as Mike Miner read it in 1968, coming off a teletype machine:

Look for a companion piece on Mike Miner’s work from Chicago Journalism Review and the Sun-Times, coming in this site’s companion section THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972.

Did I mention subscribing is free?

*SNIDELY WHIPLASH: Re Mr. DeLove potentially twirling his mustache and tying Miss Solomon to some railroad, Mike refers to the iconic character of Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Do-Right segments on the genius “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoon series, which ran 1959-1964 and continues in reruns, streaming and hearts everywhere.

Snidely Whiplash instantly became the embodiment of all establishment evil, while he himself was a parody of evil characters from the silent film era. Snidely Whiplash loves to tie women to railroad tracks, and the opening sequence for “Dudley Do-Right” has him tying Dudley’s girlfriend, Nell, to some tracks. I assume this basic scenario must have happened in some silent film seen by the cartoon’s inventors. I see now that sometimes he’s green, which must be a way of unconsciously connecting him with the Wicked Witch of the West.

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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