Mike Royko

Mike Royko
Born	September 19, 1932 Chicago, Illinois
Died	April 29, 1997(1997-04-29) (aged 64) Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	News journalist
Nationality	American

Michael "Mike" Royko (September 19, 1932 – April 29, 1997) was a newspaper columnist in Chicago, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Over his 30-year career, he wrote over 7,500 daily columns for three newspapers, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

Young reporter

Mike Royko grew up in Chicago, living in an apartment above a bar. His mother, Helen (née Zak), was Polish, and his father, Michael Royko, Ukrainian (born in Dolina).^[1] He briefly attended Wright Junior College and then enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1952.^[2]

On becoming a columnist, he drew on experiences from his childhood. He began his newsman's career as a columnist in 1955 for The O'Hare News (Air Force base newspaper), the City News Bureau of Chicago and Lerner Newspapers' Lincoln-Belmont Booster^[3] before working at the Chicago Daily News as a reporter, becoming an irritant to the City's Democratic Machine politicians with penetrating and skeptical questions and reports.

Career

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 a daily column in 1964, writing about all topics for the Daily News, a liberal afternoon newspaper. His column appeared five days a week until 1992, when he cut back to four days a week.^[4] Studs Terkel explained Royko's incredible productivity and longevity by simply saying, "He is possessed by a demon."^[5] In 1972, Royko received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary as a Daily News man.

Boss (1971), Royko's unauthorized biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley spent 26 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

When the Daily News closed, Royko worked for its allied morning newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, Rupert Murdoch, for whom Royko said he would never work, bought the Sun-Times. Royko commented that "No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper", and "[H]is goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power". Mike Royko then worked for the rival Chicago Tribune.^[6] For a period after the takeover, the Sun-Times reprinted Royko's columns, while new columns appeared in the Tribune.^[7]

Many columns are collected in books; yet, his most famous book remains his unauthorized biography of Richard J. Daley, Boss, a best-selling non-fiction portrait of the first Mayor Richard Daley, and the City of Chicago under his mayoralty.

Like many columnists, Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could "converse"; the most famous being Slats Grobnik, a comically stereotyped 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 the founder of the Asylumism religion — according to which Earth was settled by a higher civilization's rejected insane people — satirized pop culture and pop psychology. Through his columns, Royko helped make his favorite after-work bar, the Billy Goat Tavern, famous, and popularized the curse of the Billy Goat. Billy Goat's reciprocated by sponsoring the Daily News's 16-inch softball team, and featuring Royko's columns on their walls.^[8]

Royko's 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.

Death

Royko died of a brain aneurysm, aged 64. Royko is entombed in Acacia Mausoleum, Acacia Park Cemetery, Chicago.

Personal

Royko was a fervent devotee of 16-inch softball as a player and team sponsor. After his death, he was inducted into the Chicago 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame, an honor Royko's family insists he would have considered as meaningful as his Pulitzer—in the closing seconds of "Royko at the Goat," the documentary by Scott Jacobs, Royko is heard saying, "The Pulitzer Prize can't compare" to hitting a home run.^{[citation needed]}

Royko was a lifelong fan and critic of the Chicago Cubs. Every spring he would devote a column to a "Cubs Quiz", posing obscure trivia questions about mediocre Cubs players from his youth, such as Heinz Becker and Dom Dallessandro. Just prior to the 1990 World Series he wrote about the findings of another fan, Ron Berler, who had discovered a spurious correlation called the "Ex-Cubs Factor". Berler and Royko predicted that the heavily favored Oakland Athletics, who had a "critical mass" of ex-Cubs players on their Series roster, would lose the championship to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds achieved an upset outcome in a four game sweep of the A's, with Royko's sponsorship propelling the Ex-Cubs Factor theory into the spotlight. Carl Erskine repeats Royko's claim of the Ex-Cubs Factor, and applies it to the 1951 Dodgers, in his book Carl Erskine's Tales from the Dodgers Dugout^[9]

Honors

• 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 Arrival"^[10] is an IFR arrival procedure at O'Hare International Airport.

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 (1988). Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Plume reprint ed.). 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 (reprint ed.). Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-30896-X. 
• Royko, Mike (1985). Like I Was Sayin (reprint ed.). Jove Books. ISBN 0-515-08416-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=qVoSAQAAIAAJ. 
• Royko, Mike (1989). Dr. Kookie, You're Right (EP Dutton ed.). ISBN 0-525-24813-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=0wgUAAAAYAAJ. 
• Royko, Mike (2000). One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. The University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-73072-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=MXc6IS_OHrAC.  With a Foreword by Studs Terkel
• Royko, Mike (2001). For the Love of Mike: More of the Best of Mike Royko. The University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-73073-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=MNn0gqjrTvcC.  With a Foreword by Roger Ebert
• Royko, Mike (2010). Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago. The University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226730776.  A reprint of Up Against It with a Foreword by Rick Kogan
• Royko, Mike (2010). Royko in Love: Mike's Letters to Carol. The University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226730783. http://books.google.com/books?id=qCjj3FWtKuwC.  Edited by David Royko

See also

• List of newspaper columnists

References

1. ^ Jackson, Kenneth T.; Markoe, Karen; Arnie Markoe (1998). The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives: 1997-1999. Simon and Schuster. pp. 499–501. ISBN 0684806630. http://books.google.com/books?id=7QsOn9_NviAC&q=Royko#search_anchor. 
2. ^ Applegate, Edd (1996). Literary Journalism: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 221–223. ISBN 0313299498. http://books.google.com/books?id=dWQpXRudQPwC&q=Royko#search_anchor. 
3. ^ St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
4. ^ Terry, Don (1997). Mike Royko, the Voice of the Working Class, Dies at 64, New York Times
5. ^ Terkel, p. 206
6. ^ Terkel, p. 205
7. ^ Jacob Weisberg, I Like Mike, Why Royko of Chicago was our greatest columnist. Slate.com, April 11, 1999
8. ^ Billy Goat Tavern History
9. ^ Carl Erskine's Tales from the Dodgers Dugout, p.36, retrieved October 12, 2001.
10. ^ Instrument procedures for Chicago O'Hare International Aiprort

Further reading

• Ciccone, F. Richard (2003). Royko: A Life in Print. Public Affairs. ISBN 1-58648-172-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=koffneZjvcoC. 
• Crimmins, Jerry (April 30, 1997). "Mike Royko 1932-1997: Newspaper legend Mike Royko dies. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist was the voice of Chicago for more than 30 years". Chicago Tribune. 
• Moe, Doug (1999). The World of Mike Royko. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-16540-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=9JdjKyGmDIoC. 
• Weisberg, Jacob (April 11, 1999). "I Like Mike". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/23389/. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
• Terry, Don (April 30, 1997). "Mike Royko, the Voice of the Working Class, Dies at 64". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/30/us/mike-royko-the-voice-of-the-working-class-dies-at-64.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. 
• Terkel, Studs; with Sydney Lewis (2007). Touch and Go, A Memoir. The New Press. pp. 269. ISBN 1595584110, 9781595584113. http://books.google.com/books?id=zKqNPwAACAAJ. 

External links

• Mike Royko Chicago Sun-Times
• Royko in Love in Chicago Magazine, March 2009
• Royko at The Goat video interview on 16-inch softball
• Collection of columns including Ex-Cubs Factor
• Illinois History
• Mike Royko on Find-A-Grave
• Mike Royko Papers online inventory, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois
• Studs Terkel and Mike Royko at a Chicago Bar
• Studs Terkel and Mike Royko at a Chicago Bar Full Video
• Even Earlier Royko O'Hare News columns from 1955

Persondata
Name	Royko, Mike
Alternative names	Royko, Michael
Short description	American writer and newspaper columnist
Date of birth	September 19, 1932
Place of birth	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Date of death	April 29, 1997
Place of death	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.