Columnists: Love & Hate in Chicago

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Royko had no intention of making' journalism a career until he landed in the Ai" Force. Threatened with a job as cook or MP at Chicago's O'Hare Air Force Base, he stumbled onto the fact that the base newspaper needed an editor and talked his way into the job. It didn't last long. He wrote a story about a softball pitcher whose tour of duty had been extended so that he could play in a championship game. When the expose appeared, the base commander shut down the paper and transferred Royko to officers' quarters as an orderly.

Assorted Affections. After his discharge, Royko returned to newspapering. He started out with a small North Side community paper in Chicago, then moved to the City News Bureau, which sent him to work in every corner of the city. In 1959, he got a job as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Daily News. There, his wry style made such an impression that he was offered a weekly column. Before long, former Editor Larry Fanning let him write a column three times a week; today he turns out an astonishing five.

"I love neighborhood characters," he says. And his writing continually reflects his affection for widely assorted types. There was the winsome old lady who wandered out daily for two quarts of beer, and deftly navigated icy winter streets by sliding from parked car to telephone pole to parked car. Then there was Murray ("The Camel") Humphreys, the late ace recruiter of new talent for the Chicago syndicate. "He could reach into the backwoods and find talented machine-gun players the way George Halas sometimes spots star material in small colleges."

Not to be outdone by Chicago's horde of boosters, who are always dreaming up new ways to celebrate the virtues of their city, Royko once proposed a unique affair. "We are only a few gunshots away from recording our 1,000th 'gangland slaying'—nine away, to be exact. A city wide 1,000th-Hit Festival could be held. There could be a fireworks display in Soldier Field—with exploding cars. Someone from the police department might even make a speech about its role. Since it has solved only two of the 991 cases, the speech need not take long."