Love & Hate in Chicago

Chicago's recent riots in the city's Puerto Rican section resulted in eight persons shot and dozens more injured by rocks and flying glass. No one was more riled than Chicago Daily News Columnist Mike Royko. But as usual, Mike's anger had an unexpected target. Mayor Richard Daley, he wrote, was quite right when he blamed the trouble on "outside influences." One of those out side influences, continued Royko, "was Mayor Daley. He manages to attend many wakes in his part of town. But when the Puerto Ricans invited him to a banquet last week—their biggest social event of the year, except for the riot—he couldn't make it."

"Another outside influence," added Royko, "is Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson. He says he has just discovered that his men and the Puerto Ricans don't get along too well. I don't know why the police don't like Puerto Ricans. With all of the shooting they are supposed to have been doing during the rioting, they managed to avoid hitting any policemen while suffering numerous wounds themselves."

Decline of Indignation. In a city where newspaper columnists are almost always civic boosters, Mike Royko, 33, is a constant critic. A foe of all forms of cant and pomp, he carries on a love-hate affair with his home town. He writes tenderly of its ethnic neighborhoods, its traditions and folkways; he fires at will at its politicians and their pretensions. When public officials raced to outdo each other issuing outraged statements after an attempted gangland killing, Royko sadly noted the decline in the "quality of indignant statements." If enough such statements "come pouring out after someone is shot or blown up," he wrote, "it is almost as good as solving the crime." When a Polish alder man proposed renaming an expressway after the Polish General Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko, Royko explained why the idea would never work. "In fact, 98% of all policemen cannot spell it, so it would be impossible for anyone to get a ticket."*

Royko pummels Mayor Daley more than anybody else ("The greatest public-works director in the country; he just doesn't dig people"). But he has as much fun flattening lesser dignitaries. When he took out after Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, Royko wrote: "Remember, back in 1959 Quinn was the person who put Chicago under its first atomic alert. He blew all the air raid sirens late one night because he got a kick out of the White Sox clinching a pennant. And anyone who can talk his way out of sending people into the streets in their shorts to await doomsday can talk his way out of anything."

Family Saloons. Royko remembers his boyhood as just the right background for a future columnist. Born in a middle-class Polish neighborhood, he got to know the city by tagging along after his father, a "tavern tycoon," who bought and sold one saloon after another. As he grew older, he graduated to important jobs, such as transporting money for a bookie operating out of one of his father's taverns.