Godalmighty Brief

At the Chicage Tribune Rick Kogan pays tribute to the life and work of newspaper columnist Mike Royko, who died twenty years ago this month:

Royko, a vital part of people’s daily lives, was the best newspaper columnist this city had ever known. He started writing a column at the Daily News in 1964, and when that paper folded in 1978, he moved to the Sun-Times and then to the Tribune in 1984 until his death.

“He wrote with a piercing wit and rugged honesty that reflected Chicago in all its two-fisted charm,” I noted with my then-colleague Jerry Crimmins in Royko’s obituary.

“His daily column was a fixture in the city’s storied journalistic history, and his blunt observations about crooked politicians, mobsters, exasperating bureaucracy and the odd twists of contemporary life reverberated across the nation.

“It was Royko’s inimitable combination of street-smart reporting, punchy phrasing and audacious humor that set his column apart, along with his remarkable durability in facing daily deadlines for more than three decades.” (You can read the obituary here: chicagotribune.com/roykoobit).

It has been 20 years since his death, and there are thousands of young people to whom the Mike Royko name means very little or nothing at all.

For others, old enough to remember turning to the Royko newspaper column first thing, memories may have gotten dusty. He wrote close to 8,000 columns in his life — most of those banged out at a five-day-a-week clip — and though many of them are collected in books and two biographies have been written about him (Richard Ciccone’s “Royko: A Life in Print” and Doug Moe’s “The World of Mike Royko”), there is no immortality for newspaper writers. We forget.

Royko was New York columnist Jimmy Breslin’s contemporary. Breslin died this year at the age of 88. In other words Royko’s death in his 60s deprived us of years more of his brilliant column, barbs and brickbats hurled at local pols, and Slats Grobnik.

Mike Royko lived just nine doors south of me. When he left Chicago for the suburbs he moved next door to two of our dearest friends. We will not see his like again.