Now we can tell all the others. Royko was the best. Every time someone took a dopey poll of American journalists to see which columnist had the most talent, he won. For more than 25 years, Royko pounded out five 1,000-word columns a week, when even three is a stretch for most. The best of them–from the 1960s and 1970s –stand up well against anything by H. L. Mencken, Jimmy Breslin, Walter Lippmann or any other columnist in this century. Even when he spent every word of a column knifing someone, the reader always knew who he was for: the little guy, out for a little justice and a little laugh.
Royko embodied Chicago as much as Herb Caen, who also died this year, embodied San Francisco. But Royko was hardly a gossip or a booster. He often suggested that Chicago’s official motto, Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden), should be changed to Ubi est Mea? (Where’s Mine?). His depiction of boodling judges, dozing ward heelers and the late mayor Richard J. Daley in countless columns and the 1971 best seller “Boss” will endure as central source material for how machine politics lived and died in midcentury America.
The son of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother, Royko grew up above his father’s saloon, where he met people with names like “Slats Grobnik” ( his imaginary alter ego). His most famous column was probably the one he wrote in 1979 after his first wife, Carol, whom he had met at the age of 9, died of a brain aneurysm. Its memorable ending: “If there’s someone you love but haven’t said so in a while, say it now. Always, always, say it now.”
But sentiment was the exception. Mostly, Royko’s brilliant moodiness made him an equal-opportunity tormentor: Jerry Brown (“Governor Moonbeam”) or “Jesse Jetstream” Jackson got it one day, Reaganite greedheads or gun nuts the next. His talent made him the last of journalism’s Untouchables. In 1974 he wrote of a speech delivered by his own Chicago Daily News publisher, Marshall Field: “It is not, by any means, the most foolish speech I’ve ever read. There are at least three or four others that I can recall as being more foolish.” Field ate it.
In recent years, Mexicans, blacks and gays ignored Royko’s strong civil-rights history and protested what they considered his slurs against them in the Chicago Tribune. Royko, always crotchety but no bigot, hadn’t really changed. The culture had. He was proud to be politically incorrect, but toward the end it pained him that his satire was misunderstood.
The years of dangling Pall Malls and 3 a.m. benders took their toll, and Royko died of a brain aneurysm at 64. He went out the way he once said he’d hoped to, like Ted Williams, hitting a home run his last time up. In his final column, he explained that his beloved Cubs were cursed not, as legend has it, by a billy goat owned by Royko’s bartender but by former owner P. K. Wrigley, who was slow to hire black ballplayers. “It had nothing to do with a goat’s curse,” he concluded. “Not unless the goat wore a gabardine suit and sat behind a desk in an executive suite.” Funny. Angry. The best.
