Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,877

This is the grave of Mike Royko.

Born in 1932 in Chicago, Royko grew up in the Polish and Ukrainian immigrant communities that had settled in that city. He wasn’t overly educated. He attended a bit of community college and then joined the Air Force in 1952. That was it. But that wouldn’t stop him from having a famous career. After his Air Force stint, he went into journalism, often writing about his neighborhood and the people in it. He started writing for an Air Force newspaper, then moved through a couple of smaller Chicago papers, before getting a job with the Chicago Daily News.

It did not take Royko too long to make a name for himself, largely because Richard Daley and cronies hated him. He had a habit of asking the questions politicians did not want to answer. He soon got a weekly political column as the Daily News. That turned into a second column per week, on the Chicago folk music scene. By 1964, Royko had a daily column. His productivity was ridiculous. Studs Terkel stated, “He is possessed by a demon” to describe this level of writing. And Studs was no slacker! In 1972, Royko received the Pulitzer for his column.

Royko pulled few punches. He wrote a pretty tough biography of Daley in 1971, exposing a lot of the nastiness of his political machine. It went deep into the Irish American neighborhoods of Chicago, the history of political machines in that city, and how Daley was completely unrepentant about everything, including his disdain for the civil rights movement and his monstrous actions in the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I don’t know how Daley himself felt about it, but it was considered one of the political classics of the era and I understand holds up pretty well today, though I have not read it.

In what is probably the most hilarious moment of his career, in 1976, Royko took on Frank Sinatra. Specifically, he criticized the Chicago Police Department for providing round the clock escorting of Frank. In the column, he also speculated that Sinatra wore a toupee, almost certainly the case. Sinatra went ballistic, calling Royko “a pimp” and threatening to punch the columnist in the face. Sinatra was such a clownish thug by this point and this is first rate trolling of a bad person. Royko then auctioned the threatening letter Sinatra sent him, giving the proceeds to the Salvation Army. Who bought the letter? The mom of Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos. You can’t make up the 70s, that’s all I’m saying.

Royko did help pioneer one of my most hated conventions in modern punditry–the fake friends who he can have conversations with columns. This serves one purpose–a way around the laziness around actually talking to people and perhaps not being able to rely on talking points. In recent decades, this has been personified by Thomas Friedman’s fake global cab drivers who all happen to have the same position on free trade and the Middle East that he does. For Royko, this was a character named Slats Grobnik, a Polish-American dude. This was intended to be humorous, by some standard of humor that I will never understand. Even more eyerolling, Royko later created a fake psychologist named Dr. Kookie to satirize all the pop culture our now aging columnist did not like. There’s nothing more gold than old people hating pop culture! Keep those columns coming Royko!!!

Royko was also the person most responsible for pushing the Curse of the Billy Goat, the idea that that Billy Goat Tavern (which was Royko’s drinking spot) owner William Sianis put a curse on the Chicago Cubs in 1945. This is not only dumb, but also really feeds into perhaps the most irritating fan base in sports, at least until they finally won the World Series in 2016. Cubs fans managed to combine incredible levels of smugness with arrogance that they are richer than White Sox fans and a great joy in losing that they just embraced. Basically, you can tell the quality of someone from Chicago based on which team they like. That got a bit harder for Cubs fans after they won and no longer had anything to live for, and now they just kind of suck and no one cares about them, which is maybe better. Anyway, I blame Royko.

Royko became one of these Grand Old Men of Journalism that dominated the newspapers when I was growing up. As happened with so many of these types, he became cranky and bitter about societal changes. What he really hated was the gays. He was grossed out by gay sex so he loathed the entire idea of gay rights and wrote column after column about this horror transforming America. Shut up. What makes all this so frustrating as well is that for much of his career, Royko was pretty good on issues of justice. For example, he routinely lambasted Ronald Reagan over cuts to programs for the poor. But the Democratic Party was changing too, leaving the economic issues that built the New Deal Coalition behind and replacing them with individualistic cultural issues that proved important in overall struggles for individual freedom but disastrous for building political coalitions, an issue that plagues the Democratic Party more than ever today.

Royko also loved him some ethnic stereotypes, which is fine when you are Polish and are making fun of the Irish or whatever. But in trying to satirize Pat Buchanan’s anti-immigration platform, he went all in on Mexican stereotypes in his columns, which really angered people and he didn’t quite get why. As his friend Mary Dedinsky, a journalism professor at Northwestern, said for his New York Times obituary, ”I guess some ethnic groups don’t think so right now, but he was not a racist. Royko didn’t change. The times did.” Well, maybe.

In 1992, Royko submitted to only being able to write four columns a week. He felt he was becoming lazy but at least had some recognition that just maybe the quality had gone down. Which it very much had.

Royko died in 1997, at the age of 64, due to heart failure. As you can see from the picture, his first wife died at the age of 45 of a cerebral hemorrhage. That was also on his birthday. He was devastated for years, as one can imagine.

Mike Royko is buried in Acacia Park Cemetery, Norwood Park, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other columnists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. David Broder is in St. James, Michigan (c’mon, you know you want this one) and Charles Krauthammer is in Washington, DC and I know good and damn well that you want this one. Previous posts are archived here and here.