My favourite writer was a bartender

Mike was born above a Chicago bar.

It was only appropriate. His father was a bartender. His mother was a bartender.

Mike, too, became a bartender at the tender age of 13. He continued working as a bartender until after some arrests he was ordered to attend a high school locally known in his area of Chicago as “Last Chance High.” Many of the students at the school had problems. Some had serious problems.

Students in other schools in the Chicago school district knew of the school. Teachers could give a warning to problem students they might be sent to “Last Chance High” if they didn’t straighten up.

Mike left the school to join the Air Force. He served in Korea as a radio operator.

When he was assigned to serve state-side, after his tour in Korea, he found himself right back in Chicago, assigned to O’Hare Field. To get out of being assigned duty as a military policeman, he lied. He told air force brass he used to be a news writer in civilian life, at The Chicago Daily News. It was a bald-face lie, but it got him a plumb assignment.

Mike was given placement at the O’Hare Field base newspaper. That’s where he learned how to write.

Discharged from the air force, Mike continued writing for little publications until he actually ended up on the Chicago Daily News.

His writing a column proved so popular with the newspaper an editor offered him his own column space, under his own name. That was after one year on the paper. Mike was told to write about anything he wanted to.

That’s a dream job for any writer.

Mike loved the work. He lived it. He breathed it. Mike became the voice of working-man Chicago, with a working-man’s outrage at the privileged and the hustlers and the slumlords and the corrupt politicians. Mike was working class and his writing was stuff working-class people could relate to.

Mike was also underrated. He wasn’t just a columnist who liked a drink in a bar.

Mike could play his column like a virtuoso plays a violin.

When the legendary Spanish artist Pablo Picasso was commissioned to create a sculpture for the plaza of a new Chicago government office and courthouse, the wait was five years before the sculpture, a giant of a thing, was installed and covered and waiting for the Chicago elite to be assembled in front of it in fold-up chairs for the unveiling. The Chicago mayor, Richard J. Daley, was there to unveil it. The best of Chicago was seated. After all, it was a Picasso. This promised to be a great artwork for the city.

The damn thing was 50 feet tall. It weighed 160 tons. This thing was one hell of a Picasso. It cost $350,000 in 1967 dollars. Picasso, who never visited Chicago, and wasn’t there for the unveiling- he called Chicago a “gangster” city when he accepted the commission- turned down the $100,000 commission fee, saying his sculpture was a gift to the city.

The unveiling. The mayor pulled the cord and the 160 ton steel sculpture was bared for the gathered throng, dressed in their finest. There was silence. It was a large metal thing. What exactly, no one knew. But it was a Picasso. Paid for. Shipped all the way from Spain. But what the hell was it? It could be two metal lungs and maybe the flat metal representation of an esophagus. Or it could be two big odd-shaped wings playing a giant ukulele. Maybe it was a giant dying bird spreading its wings while leaving the wreckage of a cage. (Picasso actually modelled the thing as an abstract of his dog’s face, an Afghan Hound. It sort of looks like that. Maybe. If you squint. A 160 ton dog’s face.)

The gathered throng left, one by one, leaving the empty chairs in the building plaza, facing that big 160-ton metal thing.

Mike wrote, “Interesting design, I’m sure. But the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean.”

Then Mike wrote why this strange metal thing perfectly described Chicago.

“Everybody said it had the spirit of Chicago. And from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it.

Up there in that ugly face is the spirit of Al Capone, the Summerdale scandal cops, the settlers who took the Indians but good.

Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner to make it all possible.

It has the look of the dope pusher and of the syndicate technician as he looks for just the right wire to splice the bomb to.

Any big time real estate operator will be able to look into the face of the Picasso and see the spirit that makes the city’s rebuilding possible and profitable.

It has the look of the big corporate executive who comes face to face with the reality of how much water pollution his company is responsible for and then thinks of the profit and loss and of his salary.

It is all there in that Picasso thing, the I Will spirit. The I will get you before you will get me spirit.

Picasso has never been here, they say. You’d think he’d been riding the L all his life.”

When the great Jackie Robinson died Mike wrote a column about the time he attended a Cub’s game at Wrigley Field as a kid just to see the great Robinson play with the visiting Brooklyn Dodgers. On that day black fans strained to see the first player out of the Negro League to play pro ball in the National League, with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“The whites tried to look as if nothing unusual was happening, while the blacks tried to look casual and dignified. So everybody looked slightly ill at ease.

For most, it was probably the first time they had been that close to each other in such great numbers.

We managed to get in, scramble up a ramp, and find a place to stand behind the last row of grandstand seats. Then they shut the gates. No place remained to stand.

Robinson came up in the first inning. I remember the sound. It wasn’t the shrill, teenage cry you now hear, or an excited gut roar. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall, middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.”

My favourite column of his is entitled, Farewell to a Summer Cottage. Mike wrote it after his wife, Carol, died. Painfully grieved, Mike took two months off work. Returning to his desk he typed out this column, reproduced in part, but for the full emotional impact you should find the column and read the whole thing.

“He worked odd hours, so sometimes they wouldn’t get there until after midnight on Friday. But if the mosquitoes weren’t out, they would go to the empty beach for a moonlight swim, then sit with their backs against a tree and drink wine and talk about their future.

They were young and had little money, and they came from working-class families. So to them the cottage was a luxury, even though it wasn’t any bigger than the boat garages on Lake Geneva, where the rich people played.

The best part of their day was dusk. They had a West view, and she loved sunsets. Whatever they were doing, they always stopped to sit on the pier or deck, and silently watch the sun go down, changing the colour of the lake from blue to purple to silver and black. One evening he made up a small poem.

The sun goes down,

Like a golden tear,

Another day,

Another day.

She told him it was, but that she liked it.

This past weekend, he closed the place down for the winter. He went alone.

He worked quickly, trying not to let himself think that this particular chair had been her favorite chair, that the hammock had been her Christmas gift to him, that the lovely house on the lake had been his gift to her.

He didn’t work quickly enough. He was still there at sunset. It was a great burst of orange, the kind of sunset she loved best.

He tried, but he couldn’t watch it alone. Not through tears. So he turned his back on it, went inside, drew the draperies, locked the door, and drove away without looking back.

It was the last time he would ever see that lovely place. Next spring there will be a For Sale sign in front and an impersonal real estate man will show people through.

Maybe a couple who love to quietly watch sunsets together will like it. He hopes so.”

Mike could pound out columns that could make you feel a part of a club, or admire a thing no one could admire. The man could pull teardrops from your very eyes with the deftness and sincerity of gentle written words. There was simply no one who could type out a newspaper column like Mike Royko.