Mike Royko 50 Years Ago Today: Mike's 39¢ ashtray

July 17-23, 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.

Jump down the rabbit hole in the Weekend Edition, last item!

July 17, 1972

Mike and a few pals took a much needed break from the raucous 1972 Democratic National Convention last week in Miami and rented a deep-sea fishing boat.

“They all seem to be owned by men named Cap’n Jimmy, Cap’n Johnny, Cap’n Billy, or Cap’n Jack. Surprisingly, Miami Beach doesn’t have even one Cap’n Irving or a Cap’n Sol.”

Mike and his friends picked Cap’n Jimmy because he looked sober.

“We hopped aboard and before long the hooks were baited and in the water, and we were heading due east in the sun and the breeze. The Miami skyline began fading, and with it, the angry, noisy disputes. Out here was only the quiet throb of the engine.”

But it wasn’t quite the peaceful afternoon they expected, once they got to talking with Cap’n Jimmy’s helper.

“He was a muscular, black-haired man, bare from the waist up and deeply tanned. He wore wrap-around sunglasses, white deck pants, no shoes.”

He looked healthy, “the envy of smog-filled City Man.”

Except the healthy helper is from Chicago, it turns out, and everything went south for him figuratively as well as literally after he left his happy life of 18 years as a bartender on Rush Street.

“The people who worked on Rush St. were like a big family,” he remembers wistfully for Mike and his pals. “Everybody knew everybody else. When we’d close at 4 a.m., I’d go over to this restaurant and everybody would be there—the bartenders, the waitresses, the pimps, the hookers. I’d have breakfast and maybe get me one of the broads. It was like one big happy family.”

But the Rush Street clientele became “crummy,” not the “high class” crowd he was used to. He left bartending for one failing business after another, with political and social problems at each one. It’s a sad tale of thwarted entrepreneurial dreams, with big losses each time.

“….and that’s how come I’m down here working on this boat,” the helper finally finishes.

“They weren’t biting, so we headed in,” Mike concludes. “As we stepped ashore, it felt good to be back on land, away from the sea and all the talk of business monopolies, social injustice, religious intolerance, and the separation of church and state.”

Did you miss coverage of the 1972 Democratic Convention at THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972? It’s right here waiting for you.

July 18, 1972

Mike’s convention coverage isn’t complete without a look at the Miami nightlife.

“Many Republicans became angry in 1968 after I wrote about the many ladies of the night who were present during their convention,” he opens. “I wrote about them only to ask what had happened to law and order, which was the GOP theme.”

Republicans were also mad that Mike didn’t write about the ladies of the night at the 1968 Democratic convention.

“But as things went in Chicago, we had so much law and order that the only ladies I saw at night were emergency room nurses.”

After an entertaining description from a Miami cab driver on how that city’s prostitution works, Mike leaves us with this anecdote from the Poodle Lounge in the Fontainebleau Hotel, where he saw two beautiful young, blond and tanned women walk in wearing white cocktail dresses.

“In the dim light, they looked like movie starlets.

“Two elderly men at the bar gaped at them for a moment, then one of them urged the other: ‘Go on, ask ‘em.’

“The second man got up, pulled in his paunch, and sauntered over. He and the girls talked for a minute or so, then he shuffled back.

“‘What did they say?’ his white-haired pal asked.

“‘Two hundred and fifty each—for two hours,’ he said, getting back on his stool.

That’s $1,687.50 in 2022 money.

“Both took sips from their drinks. Then…the one who had waited, chuckled and said:

“‘Two hours. What would I do with all that time?’”

July 19, 1972

Mike’s fear of flying is a frequent and fruitful topic, as it is today.

See June 9’s “Getting there half the battle” for his column on booking an Amtrak train ticket to attend the Democratic convention in Miami, and the June 10-11 Weekend Edition for a look at Royko biographer Richard Ciccone’s first meeting with Mike in 1977—which leads to a drunk plane ride home from Washington, D.C., and Mike’s description of that flight in a column a few days later, “Taking a real flier in the interest of science.”

In today’s column, Mike remembers how he spent the train ride to the Miami convention. He seriously considered the various recommended cures for fear of flying, and figured out why none would work for him.

Before reading the excerpt below, recall there were 59 skyjackings worldwide in 1972, 28 involving U.S. airlines. D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane earlier in the year, and he’s had many imitators since, all requesting ransoms and parachutes.

“Positive thinking is another popular idea,” writes Mike. “One of its proponents told me that before I get on the plane, I should think of something that would really make me happy, something that would give me great pleasure.”

“….But before I got on a plane, the thing that would make me happy, that would give me great pleasure, would be to not get on the plane, and I wouldn't.

“One of these days, I’ll find the answer. But I’m not looking forward to it. I once had a dream about what would happen.

“In it, the plane is flying along, when suddenly I stand up, my hand in my coat pocket, as if I have a gun. I tell the stewardess:

“‘Follow my instructions carefully. I want a parachute.’

“The passengers scream: ‘It is a skyjacking.’

“The stewardess remains calm and says: ‘All right. And how much money do you want?’

“And I say: ‘No money. Just a parachute.’”

July 20, 1972

“On my desk is a plain glass ashtray, the kind you buy for about 39 cents in a dime store,” Mike opens today.

“This ashtray does the job. It sits there and collects ashes, matches, cigaret butts, cigar butts, even orange peels.”

But some people, he notes, prefer bigger and fancier ashtrays, like Richard Martwick, Cook County superintendent of schools.

Oh boy, Mike’s going after Richard Martwick again!

Though a name now lost to history, Martwick may be Mike’s best target in 1972.

“There is nothing the Daley Machine likes better than a real family man. So the Machine should be very pleased with Richard Martwick, who was elected in 1970 as the Cook County superintendent of schools,” Mike wrote for his May 30 column.

“Mr. Martwick has shown that he is a real family man by loading his payroll with members of his family.”

That includes Martwick’s new wife, a $9,804/year ($66,177 in 2022) administrative assistant who was found by one reporter “sitting at her desk, writing ‘thank you’ wedding notes while watching a soap opera on a desk TV.”

Then, on June 29, Mike reported that Martwick subsequently told his staff that anybody who speaks to Royko will be fired.

Mike tried to ask Martwick about that prohibition, but he was shunted to Martwick’s PR guy, Morton H. Kaplan, who also wouldn’t talk to Mike “because he did not like the publicity I provide.”

Now that Mike can’t talk to Martwick, he poses questions directly in his column to save time, like today.

Mike wants to know about the $50,000 worth of new furniture Martwick ordered for his new office, which includes $126 for 18 ash trays with a 7-inch round walnut base and a 6-inch glass liner.

That’s $7 per ash tray, Mile notes—almost $50 in 2022 money.

“Normally, I would not care how much a person spent on his ashtrays, but these are being bought with public funds,” writes Mike.

He has questions, including:

“QUESTION: You also ordered a $383 desk and specified: ‘Wood top—not plastic.’ What do you have against a cheaper plastic model? They don’t scuff or stain. You can even tap dance on them, should you feel in high spirits.”

and

“QUESTION: Which one of your relatives will be sitting in the $114 executive armchair?”

“Chairs and ashtrays,” Mike concludes. “Either way, a politician’s butt costs money.”

If you dig Mike Royko, you’ll want to see the news he’s writing about. Check it out here!

July 21, 1972

Another installment today of the always fun “Letters, calls, complaints and great thoughts from readers”.

Most letters today concern Mayor Daley and his fellow elected Chicago delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, who were kicked out in favor of Ald. Bill Singer and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s alternative slate of delegates.

Mike shocked everybody in his July 6 column, “A hard look at ‘Singer 59,’ when he wrote in an open letter to Ald. Singer, “if I were a delegate in Miami Beach…I would vote to seat ‘Daley’s 59,’ not your 59.”

Mike made two major points. First, he pointed out that the Singer-Jackson delegates were no more representative than Daley’s people. The Singer-Jackson slate gave little to no representation to older voters, the working class, and “white ethnics” like Italian, Polish and Jewish voters.

“While [Mayor Daley] doesn’t have a perfect balance either, his delegates come much closer to reflecting the people who vote as Democrats in Chicago than yours do,” Mike wrote.

Second, Mike noted that half or more of the Singer-Jackson delegates had run in the primary election, and “got stomped” by Mayor Daley’s delegate candidates. Others, like Jesse Jackson himself, didn’t even run in the primary—and as noted, Jackson didn’t vote.

Mike also pointed out in various columns that the progressives who pushed Mayor Daley out of the Democratic Convention were possibly being shortsighted, if their ultimate goal was assuring that the Democratic nominee would beat President Nixon in November. No one really knows if a Democrat can win Illinois without Chicago, or win Chicago without Mayor Daley’s support.

“DOLORES CIZEK, Hinsdale, (4th District Muskie Delegate): My God, you’re beginning to sound like a regular ward committeeman.

“Do you really think it is conceivable that the Daley organization is going to urge people to vote for Nixon and vote Democratic for the rest of the ticket?….Not on your sweet bippy. Sometimes the party is dumb, but never that dumb.”

bip·​py | \ ˈbi-pē: Remembered today mainly as a punchline on “Laugh-In,” Merriam-Webster defines the word this way: “used euphemistically for an unspecified part of the body; generally understood as equivalent to butt or ass”.

“COMMENT: What kind of new politician are you, talking about my ‘sweet bippy?’ Even Paddy Bauler never said shocking things like that. And this is the first time anyone has ever told me I sound like a ward committeeman. But, then, this is the first time the city’s reformer-liberals have been this mad at me. If I sin again, what will my punishment be: to be told I look like Parky Cullerton?”

But as always, Mike is not easy to pin down, and the topic of Mayor Daley’s 59 delegates is a perfect example.

“JACK BURNS, Chicago: What happened to Mayor Daley was one of the worst injustices I have ever heard of.

“How can a person who gets the most votes be kept out of an office. I find it unthinkable.”

“COMMENT: Not at all. Just ask the people who ran against Parky Cullerton, Sheriff Elrod, and other Machine candidates over the years. There’s wry justice in this injustice.”

“JUANITA JARARD, Dolton: I just learned that Ald. Burke reprinted and distributed copies of your columns on Ald. Singer and Jesse Jackson to delegates in Florida….May I say it serves you right. There may be a time and place for purists in this world but Chicago in 1972 is not one of them.

“I share your humiliation at being brought so low by Daley’s Democrats.”

“COMMENT: Although I wasn’t humiliated by it, you are correct: Daley’s people distributed thousands of copies of my column at the convention to support their arguments. In fact, some of them said that if they won, my columns would be responsible. You should consider their humiliation. When they get so desperate that they need my help, these are dark days in Bridgeport. By the way, why are you talking about what we need in Chicago, when you live in Dolton?”

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.

July 22-23, 1972

From the Mike-In-Other-Papers Department:

Here’s a small ad in the May 18, 1967 Tribune for “The Phil Lind Interview” on Channel 26, with guest Mike Royko. Given the timing, this should be an appearance to promote Mike’s first book of columns, “Up Against It,” despite the episode title, “A doctor looks at menopause.”

A few weeks later, Mike was subbing for Lind. From the Trib’s June 10, 1967 TV listings:

Hard to believe “That Girl” was already in reruns.

Sadly, as far as I can see, both episodes are lost to time. I wonder who Mike’s guests were on the evening he substitute hosted.

So who the heck was Phil Lind? A very well known, and as we’ll see a very well-off, Chicagoan.

Here’s Phil Lind in a colorful full-page ad from the March 25, 1968 issue of “Broadcasting: The Business Weekly of Television and Radio.”

As Tribune reporter Liam Ford’s 2002 obituary recounts, Phil Lind was “a World War II hero, professional singer and an Emmy-winning Chicago radio interviewer”.

Lind’s father and three brothers formed a singing quartet who performed all over the city. After their father split off to become the cantor at Anshei Sholom Synagogue at Independence Boulevard and Polk, wrote Ford, the brothers continued performing on their own until World War II.

“Mr. Lind was hailed as a hero in early 1945, when he was awarded a high military honor for saving a fellow soldier from drowning or being crushed to death during a landing in the Philippines,” wrote Ford. “Mr. Lind, then an Army private, was among a group of soldiers leaving a ship to board a landing craft when one of his friends fell into the water. ‘Lind clambered down a cargo net and succeeded in pulling the injured man to safety,’ according to a Jan. 8, 1945 news report.”

After the war, wrote Ford, the Lind brothers toured the country with their act before establishing Boys’ World, a clothing store on 95th, then opening a second location on Devon in a converted theater featuring sporting goods and some “amusement park-style” rides.

Tribune, 1953

From the sparse accounts, it sounds like Boys’ World closed on 95th—though it would have to be after this 1953 ad—and the Devon location was wiped out by a fire in 1955. The brothers finally went their separate ways in business, and Phil Lind was set on the trajectory that would cross paths with Mike Royko.

Phil Lind went into local radio. Most accounts say he was first a disk jockey, then began interviewing. But a March 5, 1959 Daily News article without a byline, which reads suspiciously like a PR piece sent in by Phil describes him this way:

“Hyde Parker Phil Lind will make a new entry Monday in the logbook of his long show business career.

“That’s when he will launch his latest venture in the entertainment world, a 12 to 1 p.m. music-interview disk jockey show on station WAIT.

“The new show’s programming will be similar to that of his current 3:30 to 5 p.m interview show on staton WTAQ, which he will continue.”

Per this article/press release, “Despite the success of his current radio career, in which he sells all his own time and services his own accounts, he is planning another venture in television.”

Phil is a busy guy—how many disk jockeys sell their own advertising? Other articles note episodes like attempting to produce a play here, but getting thwarted in acquiring the rights; and suing Alberto-Culver, already a giant cosmetic company, for not paying him a percentage on an alleged deal in which he got them some endorsements.

By the late ‘50s, Phil Lind was a regular in Herb Lyon’s Tower Ticker column in the Tribune. In 1961, the Trib’s TV/radio critic Larry Wolters wrote approvingly about Lind’s interview skills, then being used for a daily WAIT show running 3:35-6 p.m.:

“In about 1,300 interviews a year, Phil Lind gets a lot of variety,” wrote Wolters. “His subjects range from entertainers [Eva Gabor and Dodi Goodman] to top atomic scientists. Phil never uses prepared questions. He briefs himself as adequately as he can on his subjects, and then hopes for the best. The results are usually sprightly exchanges with considerable spontaneity.”

Wolters also noted that the male members of the Lind family had been cantors for five generations, and Lind’s two brothers had followed their father into becoming cantors too. At that time, father Joshua served at “Hyde Park Hebrew temple,” according to Wolters, while brother Murray was at Temple Shaare Tikvah and brother Dale at B’nai Jacob.

By 1963, Lind was doing a two-hour show on WAAT on Saturday and Sunday, telling the Tribune’s Walter Oleksy that he wanted to “make radio move, not just sit on top of your night stand and play sleepy-time music.”

“We’re going to take radio back outside, where things are happening,” Lind told Oleksy. “Radio was and still can be a powerful instrument of news, entertainment and influence.”

Oleksy listened to Lind’s first WAAT show and pronounced it “stimulating.”

“There was a visit with the Black Muslims which didn’t pull many punches, talks with inmates of the House of Correction, and interviews with Danny Kaye and Henry Youngman. This week-end Phil studies juvenile delinquency by interviewing the Vice Lords and Cobras, two south side teenage gangs, and talking to members of the Better Boys foundation.”

“In future weeks we’re going to track down dope peddlers with policemen, interview doctors who are working on new surgery techniques, and hear from atomic scientists,” Lind told Oleksy.

Television shows, Lind said, cut most of the film they shot. “Our show will have enough air time to go into things deeper.”

Here’s Phil Lind in a 1964 Tower Ticker:

Fritzel’s! See Robert Billings’ June 3-4 ode to Fritzel’s in the Daily News as it prepared to close its legendary Loop restaurant. It’s easy to imagine Phil Lind getting an award during a luncheon at Fritzel’s.

Photo thanks to John Chuckman’s superlative Photos on Wordpress.

Lind sounds in many ways like a proto-Phil Donahue, and definitely sought controversial guests. Here’s an ad in the Daily News from 1965:

Lind began his television show on Channel 26 in 1967, winning a local Emmy in his first year and a punch from comedian Mort Sahl. Here’s the story in Tower Ticker:

But the Daily News’ Dean Gysel was not enamored with Phil Lind’s TV incarnation.

“No interviewer could be more courteous or invitingly soft-spoken than Lind,” wrote Gysel. “He never browbeats an unarmed man, though he has indulged some mental cripples.”

Lind plays the devil’s advocate with a quiet messianic fervor, a holy innocence that is at once suspect and annoying. He makes some interviews sound like morality plays with himself as the judge.

On Thursday night Lind invoked the Bible by asking a homosexual if he realized that Moses and St. Paul spoke against homosexuality.

The man one-upped Lind by saying Christ was everyone’s God.

Lind seemed similarly disturbed, in a discussion of bingo, that the poor squander all their money on gambling.

He prefaces his weekly show by announcing that he is seeking the truth and that if adults think they will be shocked, they should not listen. At the conclusion, he vows next week ‘to seek more of the answers,’

What voyeur can resist that invitation?

Sounds like Phil pioneered trigger warnings!

In 1959, Phil Lind was living in the posh 5490 South Shore Drive co-op building in Hyde Park.

5490 S. Shore Drive

By 1967, the year he interviewed Mike Royko on TV, Phil Lind was living in the much posher 1000 N. Lake Shore Drive, then just two years old, rising on the key plot of land at the northwest corner of Oak Street and Michigan Avenue.

And this is how we know that Phil Lind, interviewer, was very well-off. In 1967, just a couple of months after interviewing Mike Royko, Phil made the front page of the Daily News and the Tribune—and probably the Sun-Times and Chicago’s American too, but they don’t have digital archives covering this time period:

Tribune

Lind’s 22nd floor apartment was burglarized in most ingenious fashion.

Phil Lind went out to dinner and a show with his wife and teenage daughter. He returned to find the rear door of the apartment ajar, and jewels and furs worth $50,000 gone.

“Detective Robert Hinman of the Damen avenue burglary unit said no signs of forcible entry were found,” wrote Trib reporter John Paster. “He said the thieves apparently picked the lock or used a passkey.

“Stolen were a 7-carat diamond dinner ring valued at $20,000, brooches, pins, pearl earrings, and two fur jackets—a chinchilla and a mink each valued at $2,200,” reports the Trib. Per the Daily News, they were bolero-style fur jackets.

“Lind said the jewels were not covered by insurance. ‘We usually keep them in a vault,’ he said, ‘but we have a number of parties scheduled and we thought we’d keep them out for a while.’”

Daily News, by Jack Fuller

The furs were insured.

Here’s the ingenious burglary strategy: A female accomplice apparently got into the apartment. Then, two young men drove up to the building at 6:30 and told the doorman they had an appointment with Lind. When the doorman called upstairs, he thought he was talking to Lind’s daughter—who said to sent one man up, while the other waited in the car. The doorman found nothing odd in that, which makes sense—parking in the area is and was a difficult and expensive proposition.

“Police said the building’s elaborate burglar alarm system had been turned off since Saturday,” wrote Jack Fuller in the News. “Several false alarms had sounded recently, and the system was turned off for repairs.” The Tribune says police are investigating whether the malfunction is connected to the Lind heist.

Luckily, the thieves passed up paintings “valued at $25,000.”

Police “speculated that the woman who answered the telephone in the Lind apartment may have walked out of the front door of the building wearing one or both of the furs.”

I speculate no—this happened in August, and even one fur in August would have been a tad suspicious.

Phil Lind retired in 1972 according to his Tribune obituary, which seems mysteriously young—he would have been just 54. But he disappears from the newspapers by 1969, with his last television listing in the Tribune on Jan. 2 that year.

What happened to Phil Lind? I would love to know. He just doesn’t sound like the kind of guy to throw in the towel if his TV show got canceled. If I can update this post, I will—and if any readers remember Phil Lind and have anything to share, please do let us know.

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, plus 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 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.

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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