Love & Hate in Chicago

Chicago's recent riots in the city's Puerto Rican section resulted in eight persons shot and dozens more injured by rocks and flying glass. No one was more riled than Chicago Daily News Columnist Mike Royko. But as usual, Mike's anger had an unexpected target. Mayor Richard Daley, he wrote, was quite right when he blamed the trouble on "outside influences." One of those out side influences, continued Royko, "was Mayor Daley. He manages to attend many wakes in his part of town. But when the Puerto Ricans invited him to a banquet last week--their biggest social event of the year, except for the riot--he couldn't make it."

"Another outside influence," added Royko, "is Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson. He says he has just discovered that his men and the Puerto Ricans don't get along too well. I don't know why the police don't like Puerto Ricans. With all of the shooting they are supposed to have been doing during the rioting, they managed to avoid hitting any policemen while suffering numerous wounds themselves."

Decline of Indignation. In a city where newspaper columnists are almost always civic boosters, Mike Royko, 33, is a constant critic. A foe of all forms of cant and pomp, he carries on a love-hate affair with his home town. He writes tenderly of its ethnic neighborhoods, its traditions and folkways; he fires at will at its politicians and their pretensions. When public officials raced to outdo each other issuing outraged statements after an attempted gangland killing, Royko sadly noted the decline in the "quality of indignant statements." If enough such statements "come pouring out after someone is shot or blown up," he wrote, "it is almost as good as solving the crime." When a Polish alder man proposed renaming an expressway after the Polish General Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko, Royko explained why the idea would never work. "In fact, 98% of all policemen cannot spell it, so it would be impossible for anyone to get a ticket."*

Royko pummels Mayor Daley more than anybody else ("The greatest public-works director in the country; he just doesn't dig people"). But he has as much fun flattening lesser dignitaries. When he took out after Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, Royko wrote: "Remember, back in 1959 Quinn was the person who put Chicago under its first atomic alert. He blew all the air raid sirens late one night because he got a kick out of the White Sox clinching a pennant. And anyone who can talk his way out of sending people into the streets in their shorts to await doomsday can talk his way out of anything."

Family Saloons. Royko remembers his boyhood as just the right background for a future columnist. Born in a middle-class Polish neighborhood, he got to know the city by tagging along after his father, a "tavern tycoon," who bought and sold one saloon after another. As he grew older, he graduated to important jobs, such as transporting money for a bookie operating out of one of his father's taverns.

Royko had no intention of making' journalism a career until he landed in the Ai" Force. Threatened with a job as cook or MP at Chicago's O'Hare Air Force Base, he stumbled onto the fact that the base newspaper needed an editor and talked his way into the job. It didn't last long. He wrote a story about a softball pitcher whose tour of duty had been extended so that he could play in a championship game. When the expose appeared, the base commander shut down the paper and transferred Royko to officers' quarters as an orderly.

Assorted Affections. After his discharge, Royko returned to newspapering. He started out with a small North Side community paper in Chicago, then moved to the City News Bureau, which sent him to work in every corner of the city. In 1959, he got a job as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Daily News. There, his wry style made such an impression that he was offered a weekly column. Before long, former Editor Larry Fanning let him write a column three times a week; today he turns out an astonishing five.

"I love neighborhood characters," he says. And his writing continually reflects his affection for widely assorted types. There was the winsome old lady who wandered out daily for two quarts of beer, and deftly navigated icy winter streets by sliding from parked car to telephone pole to parked car. Then there was Murray ("The Camel") Humphreys, the late ace recruiter of new talent for the Chicago syndicate. "He could reach into the backwoods and find talented machine-gun players the way George Halas sometimes spots star material in small colleges."

Not to be outdone by Chicago's horde of boosters, who are always dreaming up new ways to celebrate the virtues of their city, Royko once proposed a unique affair. "We are only a few gunshots away from recording our 1,000th 'gangland slaying'--nine away, to be exact. A city wide 1,000th-Hit Festival could be held. There could be a fireworks display in Soldier Field--with exploding cars. Someone from the police department might even make a speech about its role. Since it has solved only two of the 991 cases, the speech need not take long."

*Other spelling problems posed by landmarks bearing Polish names: Bobrytski Woods, Pulaski Park, Grabreski Road, Kosciuszko School.

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