By
Nona Polichick
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Mike Royko ~
Any of you who pay attention to my political columns should know this one tribute was inevitable. Who better for me to pay tribute to than the guy who said, "No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper… His goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power"? Mike Royko may have been working-class and plain-spoken to the core, but that didn’t preclude him from having keener insight into the nature of rulers and carpetbaggers than most. His Murdoch remarks, made at the time he quit the Chicago Sun-Times when Murdoch acquired that paper in the early ‘80s, presaged the all-out bid Murdoch made to push his right-wing agenda onto the American masses when he founded FOXNews a decade later.
Born in September 1932, Mike Royko spent thirty years as Chicago’s voice of reason and observer of idiocy. His Pulitzer prizewinning column, which commented on the day’s political and cultural events in a no-nonsense, working-class voice, was a fait accompli in many ways. After a tour of duty writing for the Glenview Naval Air Base newspaper while in the service, he started out with the Chicago Daily News as a reporter covering the City Hall beat. But his blunt, pomposity-puncturing questions sent city officials scurrying for cover when they saw him coming. Consequently, the paper suggested he might be more suited to op-ed. The son of an immigrant tavern-owner and washerwoman, Royko initially scoffed at the suggestion; he didn’t think sitting around mouthing off his opinions counted as an actual job. Nonetheless, he tried it out and began with a weekly political column for the Daily News. He supplemented this with a lighter, more humorous column on the local entertainment scene. When the Daily News folded, the Sun-Times offered him another op-ed slot, alternating and sometimes combining the two topics in twice-weekly columns.
Royko made the most of his column, liberally garnishing his observations of everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran-Contra to the William Kennedy Smith rape trial with deadpan wit and a regular cast of "characters" he kept around to help spice things up with their off-the-wall observations. The most famous and lovable of these was Slats Grobnik, a working-class Polack with whom Royko would occasionally "discuss" politics and pop culture. Another was Dr. I.M. Kookie, a "psychiatrist and noted expert on lotsa stuff", who would ramble through theories about the secret neuroses of everyone from longtime Chicago mayor Richard Daley to Nixon to Ted Kennedy. Dr. Kookie also attempted to shed light on pop-culture fads such as the need of yuppies to own thousand-dollar dogs, the wild popularity of singer Madonna, and the onset of the Computer Age. Then, of course, there was "the blonde" – actually Royko’s wife - who decried Royko’s pitiful lack of sophistication in matters of culture, such as the definition of a "Prix Fixe" meal at a swanky French restaurant.
His sarcastic writing style was unique among most op-ed humorists in the respect that he always viewed the day’s events through working-class eyes. He never lost his perspective as an Everyman, perplexed with the nonsensical behavior of the rich, powerful, beautiful and famous. His political position remained resolutely centrist – he held an equally cynical view of both left-wing big-government social engineering and right-wing payola and graft.
Mike Royko died in April of 1997 of complications following a stroke.
