Everything about Mike Royko totally explained
Michael "Mike" Royko (
September 19,
1932 –
April 29,
1997) was a longtime newspaper
columnist in
Chicago,
Illinois.
Young reporter
Mike Royko grew up in Chicago, living in an apartment above a bar. His mother was Polish and his father Ukrainian.
(External Link
) On becoming a columnist, he drew experiences from his childhood, becoming the voice of the Everyman Chicago. Although caustically sarcastic, he never condescended to his readers, he always remembered he was one of them.
Royko began his newsman's career as a columnist for the
Naval Air Station Glenview newspaper and the
City News Bureau of Chicago before working at the
Chicago Daily News as a political reporter, becoming an irritant to the City's Democratic Machine politicians with penetrating and skeptical questions and reports.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and best-selling author
Reporter Mike Royko covered
Cook County politics and government in a weekly political column, soon supplemented with a second, weekly column reporting about Chicago's
folk music scene. The success of those columns earned him regular writing about all topics for the
Daily News, a liberal afternoon newspaper. In 1972, Royko received the
Pulitzer Prize for
commentary as a
Daily News man.
When the
Daily News closed, Royko worked for its allied morning newspaper, the
Chicago Sun-Times. In
1984, when
Rupert Murdoch bought the
Sun-Times, for whom he said he'd never work:
No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper and that,
His goal isn't quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power. Mike Royko then worked for the rival
Chicago Tribune, until dying of a
brain aneurysm at age sixty-four. His columns were syndicated country-wide in more than 600 newspapers, more than 7,500 columns in a four-decade career. He also wrote or compiled dozens of "That's Outrageous!" columns for
Reader's Digest.
Many columns are collected in books; yet, his most famous book remains his unauthorized biography of
Richard J. Daley,
Boss, the best-selling non-fiction book portrait of Daley as corrupt and racist; it's a principal book about Mayor Daley and the City of Chicago under his mayoralty. On its publishing, the Mayor of Chicago forced 200 Chicago private bookstores to not stock
Boss, but public demand for the book over-rode the Mayor, and book stores sold
Boss, later, the Mayor's wife was caught vandalizing copies.
Like many columnists, Mike Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could "converse"; the most famous being Slats Grobnik, the epitome working class Polish-Chicagoan. Generally, the Slats Grobnik columns were two men discussing a current event in a Polish neighborhood bar. In 1973, Royko collected several columns as
Slats Grobnik and Other Friends. Another of Royko's characters was his pseudo-psychiatrist Dr. I.M. Kookie (eponymous protagonist of
Dr. Kookie, You're Right! [1989]). Dr. Kookie, purportedly founder of the Asylumism religion, according to which Earth was settled by a higher civilisation's rejected insane people, satirize pop culture and pop psychology.
16-inch softball and the Cubs
Royko was a lifelong fan and critic of the
Chicago Cubs. Just prior to the
1990 World Series he wrote about the findings of another fan, Ron Berler, who had discovered a seemingly spurious correlation called the "
Ex-Cubs Factor". He predicted that the heavily-favored
Oakland Athletics would lose the Series to the
Cincinnati Reds. The accuracy of that unlikely prediction, in stunning fashion (four game sweep) propelled the Ex-Cubs Factor theory into the spotlight.
The book (2004) includes short stories from former Dodger pitcher
Carl Erskine. Royko is prominent in many of these stories.
He was also fervently devoted to
16-inch softball and was inducted into the Chicago 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame shortly after his death, an honor Royko's family insists he'd have considered as meaningful as his Pulitzer.
Honors and final resting place
To follow up on his 1972 Pulitzer Prize, Royko won the
National Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award in
1990 and the
Damon Runyon Award in
1995.
The "Royko Two Arrival" is an IFR arrival procedure at O'Hare International Airport.
Mike Royko is entombed in Acacia Mausoleum,
Acacia Park Cemetery, Chicago.
Trivia
- In the film Continental Divide (1981), John Belushi, filmed in the Chicago Sun-Times building, plays "Ernie Souchak" a loose interpretation of Mike Royko; Contrary to popular belief, Belushi wasn't his godson.
Royko coined Governor Moonbeam, the derisively-accurate nickname for the California Governor Jerry Brown. The 1978 nickname derives from Gov. Brown proposing that California own a communications satellite for handling emergency communications in the state, Royko named him "Governor Moonbeam", a characterization that follows Jerry Brown.
After his second marriage and subsequent move to the posh North Shore suburbs of Chicago, he joined the Sunset Ridge Country Club, and, after his death, the bartenders, waiters, and waitresses of the Club fondly remembered Mike Royko as one of the few members who never condescended to them, and was always a generous tipper.
Books by Mike Royko
Royko, Mike. (1967) Up Against It. H. Regnery. .
Royko, Mike. (1968) I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. H. Regnery. .
Royko, Mike. (1972) Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. Plume reprint edition (1988). ISBN 0-452-26167-8.
Royko, Mike. (1973) Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends. Popular Library. ISBN 9780525204954.
Royko, Mike. (1983) Sez Who? Sez Me. Warner Books reprint. ISBN 0-446-30896-X.
Royko, Mike. (1985) Like I Was Sayin. Jove Books reprint. ISBN 0-515-08416-6.
Royko, Mike. (1989) Dr. Kookie, You're Right. EP Dutton. ISBN 0-525-24813-7.
Royko, Mike. (2000) One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. (Published posthumously, with a foreword by Studs Terkel) University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-73073-5.
Royko, Mike. (2001) For the Love of Mike: More of the Best of Mike Royko. (Published posthumously, with a foreword by Roger Ebert) University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-73073-5.Further Information
Get more info on 'Mike Royko'.
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