The New Editor has this DELIGHTFUL POST that gives you a rare, bittersweet glimpse of Chicago’s late great, award-winning columnist Mike Royko, perhaps the BEST columnist of the 20th century. (Wikipedia on Royko is HERE. )
If you love 16-inch softball this link will take you to the Billy Goat Tavern (which Royko wrote about often), where you can “be there” while a highly-animated Royko sits at a table discussing his passion.
If you’re an aspiring journalist, a blogger who wants to write beyond “blogspeak,” an aspiring columnist, or just love to read short pieces with a wallop that can either outrage you, make you laugh out loud or even shed a few tears GO HERE and check out his books on Amazon (NOTE: TMV is NOT on any Amazon associate program, so we don’t get a commission for this).
A personal note: When I was at the Medill School of Journalism getting my masters from June 1972-1973 I discovered Mike Royko, who was writing for the now defunct Chicago Daily News. I had been in India as an intern on The Hindustan Times when I was a senior at Colgate University. So after journalism school I returned to New Delhi, India, where I became the Chicago Daily News’ officially accredited stringer correspondent. My byline was Chicago Daily News Foreign Service (the CDN even ran a mug shot of me on some of the analysis pieces). It was also there that I met this site’s newest co-blogger, Swaraaj Chahuan (who went onto have a great career on some of India’s most prestigious daily newspapers and now teaches and mentors journalists).
I visited the CDN’s offices once to meet the then Foreign Editor, Nicholas Shuman. While there I was in awe because sitting at a desk in front of me was…Mike Royko. He was beloved on the paper for his talent and for his one-of-a-kind personality….which comes out on the video post linked above.
Watch the video. Then, if you want to read the best, order a few collections of his works. Guarantee: you will read the collections over and over throughout the years. And most of his pieces stand up…and can’t be duplicated by anyone on the scene today.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.