by Roger Ebert
“Tell Roger the one about the atom being split,” Dick said.
“After the war,” McPhaul said, “they had a ceremony under the grandstands at old Stagg Field to commemorate where the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction took place. Our photographer from the Times got down to the U of C late, and a flack rounded up Fermi and his team.
“ ‘I got a great idea for a series of three photos across the top of page one,’ the photographer tells them. ‘You’re puttin’ in the atom, splittin’ it, and standing around lookin’ at the pieces.’ ”
When Friday of my first week came around, I joined a general emigration to Riccardo’s, where reporters from all four papers gathered to gobble free hors d’oeuvres. I felt a glow of camaraderie. I knew I lacked authenticity in this company. I was young and unseasoned, but I discovered there was nothing like drinking with the crowd to make you a member. I copied the idealism and cynicism of the reporters I met at Riccardo’s and around the corner at the downscale but equally famous Billy Goat’s. I spoke like they did, laughed at the same things, felt that I belonged.
At about six p.m. on New Year’s Day of 1967, only two lights on the fourth floor were burning—mine and Mike Royko’s. It was too early for the graveyard shift to come in. Royko walked over to the Sun-Times to see who else was working. A historic snowstorm was beginning. He asked me how I was getting home. I said I’d take the train. He said he had his old man’s Checker car and would drop me at the L station. He had to make a stop at a twenty-four-hour drugstore right where the L crossed North Avenue.
Royko at thirty-five was already the city’s most famous newspaperman, known for complex emotions evoked with unadorned prose in short paragraphs. Growing up as the son of a saloon keeper, he knew how the city worked from the precinct level up, and had first attracted attention while covering city hall. He was ten years older than me and had started at the old City News Bureau, the cooperative supported by all the dailies that provided front-line coverage of the police and fire departments. Underpaid and overworked kids worked under the hand of its editor, Arnold Dornfeld, who sat beneath a sign reading: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. When I met him he’d been writing his Daily News column for two years. It was his writing about Mayor Richard J. Daley that took the city hall word clout and made it national. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and spoke in a gravelly poker player’s voice. He drank too much, which to me was an accomplishment.
That snowy night the all-night drugstore was crowded. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Let’s have a drink at the eye-opener place.” He told me what an eye-opener was. “This place opens early. The working guys around here, they stop in for a quick shot on their way to the L.” It was a bar under the tracks so tiny the bartender could serve everyone without leaving his stool. “Two blackberry brandies and short beers,” he said. He told me, “Blackberry brandy is good for hangovers. You never get charged for a beer chaser.” I sipped the brandy, and a warm glow filled my stomach. It may have been the first straight shot of anything I’d ever tasted. I’d been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in the eye-opener place. I was a newspaperman. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.
“Jeez, they’re scoring like crazy!” I said, after the third goal in less than a minute.
“Where you from, kid?”
“Urbana,” I said.
“Ever seen a hockey game?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”
I began to be welcome in Royko’s cubicle. It amused him to explain the obvious to the downstate kid. He wrote on an old manual typewriter—not his own, just one from the office pool, with keys that stuck and ribbons that jammed. His office was filled with newspapers, books, letters, coffee cups, ashtrays, and ties that he had taken off and thrown in the corner. It contained a holy relic: The wooden city room hat stand from the old Daily News Building on Wacker, which was brought along when the paper moved into the new building on the river.
Mike sat in a swivel chair with his back to the river, and there was a straight-backed chair for his visitors. He had a lot of visitors. Mike could have written his column at any time from anywhere and his editors would have been happy to have it, but he spent eight hours a day, sometimes longer, at the paper. He was the soul of the Daily News and the honorary soul, by osmosis, of the Sun-Times. No journalist in Chicago was more admired. Any time of the day, if you glanced back there, someone would be standing in the door of the cubicle or sitting inside. It might be one of his legmen, who had their own desk just outside. Or a press agent like the boxing promoter Ben Bentley or Danny Newman from the Lyric Opera. Most likely it was a fellow reporter. Mike always had time to talk. Even when he was in the middle of a column, he had time to talk. He was the most prolific of columnists, turning out five a week at such a high level that I never heard anybody look up from the paper and say, “Royko wrote a bad column today.”
During that first year I was also a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, where I failed French as usual but grew absorbed in a class on Milton taught by George Williamson, who treated Paradise Lost as history and once said, “But Satan is clearly wrong, because on the next page, God tells him…” On April 1, 1967, the feature editor, Robert Zonka, told me I would become the paper’s film critic. This came without warning, although I’d written some pieces on the movies. I couldn’t be the film critic and a graduate student at the same time, and I didn’t return to Chicago the next autumn. That was just as well. I loved the life of studying English literature but would never have made a competent academic. During 1967–68, as a means of keeping my draft deferment, I taught freshman English in a Chicago city college on the South Side, at Seventy-Sixth and Pulaski, where I swore my students to secrecy and told them I wouldn’t teach the syllabus if they didn’t tell anyone. I assigned books I thought would excite them, like Gatsby, In Cold Blood, Crime and Punishment, and E. E. Cummings.
My deferment ran out, and I was drafted in 1968. There was a farewell party at O’Rourke’s. Everybody chipped in for the pizzas and beer. Mike wrote a check. I had rented my apartment, sold my car, and put my books in storage. The next day I left for Urbana to report for induction. They put me on the Panama Limited back to Chicago, where I reported to the induction center and flunked the physical. I walked back into O’Rourke’s the same night. John McHugh from the Daily News, who had organized the farewell party, told me, “Royko heard you were coming back and stopped payment on his check.”
When the Daily News folded in 1978, Mike worked at the Sun-Times until Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in late 1983. Mike had been involved in backstage negotiations that would have allowed Jim Hoge to buy the paper. Marshall Field, who owned half the paper, said he was willing to sell to that group, but Murdoch offered $10 million more than Hoge could raise, and Marshall’s brother, the movie producer Ted Field, insisted they take it. This was a crushing blow to Mike. He went home and had a few drinks, and when the local TV stations brought their cameras into his den, he announced that a Murdoch paper was “not fit to wrap fish in.”
The next afternoon I sat with him at Billy Goat’s.
“I guess I resigned, huh?”
“Murdoch doesn’t care what you say about him,” I said.
“It’s not what I said about him,” Mike said. “It’s that after describing a Murdoch paper that way, how can I work there?”
Before the Daily News was folded, the city rooms of the two papers shared the fourth floor. They had separate but equal facilities, except that the men’s room of the Daily News had real bars of soap, and the men’s room of the Sun-Times had liquid soap from a dispenser. Office legend explained the real soap was a concession wrung from Marshall Field IV when he bought the Daily News from John S. Knight. The city rooms of the two papers were separated by a glassed-in no-man’s-land called the wire room, ruled by copyboys/pot dea
lers, where Teletypes chattered and printers turned out wirephotos. On either side of the wire room were the copy desks of the two papers, and then the desks of editors and reporters receded into the distance in both directions, until when you got to the far corners there was Royko at the Daily News and me at the Sun-Times.
The city room was a noisy place to work. Typewriters hammered at carbon-copy books that made an impatient slap-slap-slap. Phones rang the way phones used to ring in the movies. Reporters shouted into them. They called out “Boy!” and held up a story and a copykid ran to snatch it and deliver it to an editor. Reporters would shout out questions on deadline. “Quick! Who was governor before Walker?” There were no cubicles, except for Royko’s. We worked at desks democratically lined up next to one another, row after row. Ann Landers (actually Eppie Lederer) had an office full of assistants somewhere else in the building but insisted on sitting in the middle of this chaos, next to the TV-radio critic, Paul Molloy. Once Paul was talking on a telephone headset, tilted back in his chair, and fell to the floor and kept on talking. Eppie reached in a file drawer and handed down her pamphlet Drinking Problem? Take This Test of Twenty Questions.
When you went on an interview, you took eight sheets of copy paper, folded them once, and ripped them in half using a pica stick. Then you folded them again. Now you had a notebook of thirty-two pages to slip in your pocket with your ball-point. You had a press card. You were a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times. In the 1990s one of my young editors asked if it was really true they allowed reporters to smoke at their desks in the old days. Yes, and drink too, if they could get away with it. Reporters sent Milton the copyboy out the rear loading dock to Billy Goat’s to fetch them a drink in a paper coffee cup. Copyboys were known as wiseass insiders with an angle on everything, but Milton became a legend. He buttonholed reporters on deadline with his opinions about being and nothingness. He had been a University of Chicago student and still lived in Hyde Park. That explained everything. One day an inspector from the Chicago post office came to Ralph Otwell, the managing editor, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Ralph asked Milton for his address. Milton, whose tasks included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’s pamphlet Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, Milton was philosophical: “Hundreds of kids can thank me they were even conceived.”
Billy Goat’s and Riccardo’s. Billy Goat’s was a dive so subterranean that after you were already on the lower level of Michigan Avenue you had to descend another flight of stairs. There really was a short-order cook like John Belushi’s SNL character shouting Chizzbooger! Chizzbooger! Cheeps, no flies! Riccardo’s was a good Italian restaurant at the other end of the block, facing Rush Street, with a bar shaped like an artist’s palette and paintings representing the arts, including one by the famous Ivan Albright, who among other distinctions was the father of Jim Hoge’s wife, Alice. A tall, mournful guitarist and a short, cheerful accordion player circulated while playing a limited but well-chosen repertoire. Here the front booth harbored such regulars as Bill Mauldin, Studs Terkel, and John Fischetti. It was said that when the original Riccardo’s future wife walked into the bar and asked where she should sit, Riccardo told her, “On the floor.” His son, an actor, took over the operation and lived above the restaurant. When he sold the restaurant, he was interviewed by our Pulitzer-winning columnist Tom Fitzpatrick. He said that he’d enjoyed running the restaurant, except “on Friday nights, they let the animals out of the zoo.” John McHugh studied this and said, “Ebert, he means us.” Fitzpatrick possibly saved my life during 1968’s Days of Rage (a phrase he coined) before the Democratic Convention. We were watching a crowd of demonstrators run down a narrow street in Old Town. Fitz reached out, grabbed my belt, and hauled me to the ground just before a cop car, speeding in reverse, would have blindsided me.
Jim Hoge ruled a gifted staff that collected six Pulitzers. He financed an elaborate sting in which the paper opened and operated a bar called the Mirage and was able to develop a thirty-day series of articles about the graft and corruption involved. After Murdoch bought the paper, Hoge became the publisher of the New York Daily News and later the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He was back in Chicago in early 2011 and at a brunch with some survivors of those days, he said, “We were right there on the edge of doing something great.” There was still pain in his voice.
The city room was filled with colorful characters. Many years later our columnist Neil Steinberg complained at lunch, “I feel like I missed the boat. There were all these eccentrics on the staff and they all hung out together in bars after work. Now all we do is work and go home.” “Neil,” I told him, “you did miss the boat.”
He missed, for example, Paul Galloway, a handsome man with senatorial hair and an expression that showed him amused by the peculiarities of life. He had a southern accent. His favorite note was puzzlement about the things people do. He was well educated, and that was reflected by the richness of his writing. He worked by seeming to tell a story straight and then sneaking in well-chosen words to set it subtly askew. That reminded me of Mark Twain. He told me, “I was named after my father. Our only difference was, his name was preceded by Bishop, and mine was followed by Junior.”
I met him in the early 1970s at the Sun-Times, where he was a reporter and feature writer, effortlessly stylish. The most famous story is about the Friday night when Paul went out the back door to Riccardo’s and started to brood about some undefined atrocity committed by Jim Hoge. His indignation grew. A statement had to be made. He stalked back to the Sun-Times, entered via the freight elevator, emerged on the fourth floor, picked up an office chair, and hurled it at the window of Hoge’s office. “Something I had not foreseen,” Paul told us back at the bar, “was that the window was made of Plexiglas. The chair bounced back and almost hit me.”
The newsroom stood transfixed. Paul walked over to the city desk and said firmly, “Log it.” The desk assistant said, “Forget it, Paul.” Paul said, “I said log it, damn it.” The chair-hurling incident was duly logged. On Monday morning, he was hunched over his desk, trying to keep a low profile. His phone rang. It was Hoge. He got up and walked slowly across the city room. All eyes were on him like a man on his way to death row. Hoge had the city desk log open in front of him. He said, “Paul, I understand you have a problem with the interior decoration.” Paul said he replied, “No sir! I find it excellent! Nothing whatsoever wrong with it! Enviable, in fact!” Hoge said, “That’s a relief. Now get back to work.” After the success of the movie Tootsie, Paul recruited professionals to costume him and do his wig and makeup like Tootsie. Then he walked down Michigan Avenue, followed by a photographer. “I didn’t mind if I wasn’t mistaken for a woman,” he wrote, “but I was disappointed I wasn’t even mistaken for Tootsie.”
There was the day Art Petacque and Hugh Hough won the Pulitzer for their coverage of the Valerie Percy murder case. Hough was a superb rewrite man. Petacque was our mob reporter. Nobody ever actually saw him typing. He was priceless for his sources. He was the only Chicago newsman who knew all mob nicknames. It was rumored he invented many of the nicknames himself. Nobody ever complained. What would Joey “the Clown” Lombardo do? Write a letter to the editor? Petacque and Hough were a familiar team in the city room. Petacque would walk in looking like the cat that ate the canary, take a chair next to Hough, pull out a sheaf of notes, and start whispering in his ear. Hough would type, stopping occasionally to remove his cigar and say, “You’re kidding!” Then Hough would write up the notes, and the story would appear under a shared byline. The day they won the Pulitzer, Hough was on a golf course. Petacque walked in, got a standing ovation, climbed onto a desk, bowed, and said, “I only wish Hugh Hough was here to tell you how happy I feel.”
Bob Zonka became my best friend and father figure. He was a chai
n-smoker with thinning hair and a gut, and such charm that he was devastatingly successful with women. He was the last editor at the paper who worked himself up from copyboy, a passionate editor and a decent man. When Polish jokes were an epidemic in the 1970s, he refused to listen to them: “When a joke diminishes anyone, it diminishes me.” At his funeral, Jon Anderson, a former Daily News columnist, said, “I spent more hours talking with Zonka than anyone except my three wives. And more quality time than with anyone.”
Zonka’s desk was just in front of mine. One day he was leaning back with his feet up, surveying the city room, and said, “Ebert, you’re single. Why don’t you ask Abra Prentice out on a date?” She was a tall, good-looking brunette, famous because while she was covering the Richard Speck trial, the nurse murderer never took his eyes off of her.
“She’s not my type,” I said.
“Ebert, Ebert, Ebert,” Zonka said. “When you grow up, you’ll learn that a Rockefeller is everybody’s type.”
“Huh?” I said.
Abra married Jon Anderson, and together they wrote a gossip column at the Daily News titled Jon & Abra. When they left to start Chicagoan magazine, the column was renamed Mort and inherited by Governor Dan Walker’s press secretary, Mort Edelstein. “It makes me feel creepy when our space has been taken over by Death,” Jon told me. Yes, Abra was a Rockefeller. Once when Jon and Abra and I were visiting London at the same time, we made a deal: I would buy lunch, they would buy dinner. Lunch would be bangers and mash in a pub. Dinner would be in a place with no prices on the menu. One night after dinner we were riding in a taxi through Soho and passed the famous Raymond Revuebar.