Chicago, Mike Royko

“Like a famished alley mutt, he digs away at the bone of truth”

Chicago is most often called the Second City by people prepared to drive six hours rather than spend a weekend in their own part of the Midwest. Chicago also is a city where holding opinions is confused with intelligence, contrariness is taken as proof of individuality, and the metropolitan style seems hopelessly frozen in an era when everyone wore hats.

As proof of this last observation, consider how Mike Royko is presented by his publishers in his recent collection of columns (Sez Who? Sez Me!): cigarette butts spilling out of an ashtray, filthy coffee cups everywhere, a ratty cubbyhole they call an office, and a newspaperman in a crumpled shirt hunching over an old Remington typewriter. His beat is Chicago, and he knows more about barroom hangouts, backroom politics and bureaucratic pettiness than any palooka on the street. He has a heart of gold, a ready hand for the Little Guy and the love of a whole city.

Come on, I find myself saying, this is beginning to sound like a Bogart movie called “Dead Men Don’t Eat Quiche.” Nonetheless, mention soon is made of the stockyards, the old neighborhood, Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, and all the rest so tiresomely familiar that one can only blush when Studs Terkel is dragged out to say that Royko is “like a famished…