by Pamela Cytrynbaum

Pam Cytrynbaum

The following in an excerpt from the story “The Royko Chronicles: The Scoop on what it was like to work for ‘Mr. Big’” that appeared in the April 25, 1999 issue of Chicago Tribune Magazine.

For nearly three years, from 1992 to 1995, I had the best seat in town. I was Mike Royko’s reporter/assistant / legman or, as he preferred, “legcreature.”

Mike knew I took notes while I worked for him. I’d have been crazy not to. In his more than three decades of writing daily columns, only 16 people—one at a time—have worked as Royko’s assistant. I was No. 15. Working for him was like getting paid to perch on Hemingway’s shoulder for a living. You had to hold on white-knuckle tight, and you’d better not blink or you’d miss something.

I confessed my scribblings right up front. At first he said: “I’ll break every bone in your little fingers if you ever write about me.” A few days later he amended: “Just wait’ll I’m dead, kid.” But then he began calling me into his office, and I’d run in, notebook flying open. He’d start each story with: “You’d better put this one in your goddamn little journal.” So I did.

The letters poured in relentlessly, tens of thousands of lonely, adoring, raging, desperate, and oh-so-smug bundles of need addressed to: “World’s Greatest Columnist,” “Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Polack,” “Big Jerk Columnist,” “Sir Michael (the OTHER Bull).” Sometimes they simply read: “Royko, Chicago.”

Mrs. Husband’s-a-Deadbeat, Mr. Bankrupted by-the-IRS, the Hon. I-Swear-I’m-Innocent, Ms. Social-Services-Took-My Kid, Mr. Beaten-by-the-Cops, Mrs. Can’t-Catch-a-Break, Mr. Wrongly-Accused—they spilled in anguished piles all over my desk.

The letters were extraordinarily painful to read. They were filled with true stories of people in terrible straits, seething missives from venomous bigots and sad scrawlings of broken souls who would write Mike daily as if he were a friend. I took it all very personally. So did Mike.

"The letters were extraordinarily painful to read. They were filled with true stories of people in terrible straits, seething missives from venomous bigots and sad scrawlings of broken souls who would write Mike daily as if he were a friend. I took it all very personally. So did Mike.." -- Pamela Cytrynbaum

He read every letter he got. I opened them, scanned them first, put them in piles according to column potential, and he’d read them all.

The phones shrieked in ceaseless rings. “You gotta let me talk to him!” readers begged. “I can’t talk to nobody but him,” they insisted. “He says in his columns that he was talking to some guy on the phone, so I figured he talked to people…. I been reading him for 30 years….No one else has the guts to write this….Is he too chicken to come to the phone?…Please. He has to help me. I have nowhere else to go. No one else will listen.”

For more than three decades, until his death on April 29, 1997, Chicagoans read Royko’s column in the Daily News, the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. They read him and chuckled over their dad’s shoulder at the breakfast table, read him and cursed at bus stops and on “L” trains, cut him out lovingly and sent him to Grandma in Arizona, read him out loud to mothers and brothers, co-workers and cousins, laughing until it hurt. Sometimes they read him on bar stools sitting next to him.

They’d call and Royko would help them; then they, in turn, would help him. Their stories became his columns, and his thick fingers would pick and jab across the keys and turn someone’s life into 800 words, four or five times a week, that went out to more than 600 newspapers nationwide.

They demanded a personal relationship with Chicago’s legendary columnist (he hated being called that; hated the whole “ink-stained wretch” thing, hated “voice of…” anybody. “It’s just what I think,” he’d bark. “It’s just my voice.”) because that is what he had with this city. He knew them. They knew him.

People from every state wrote and called to pitch funny, pathetic, and outrageous column ideas. They read him on the op-ed pages of their local newspapers. He’d hit hard, and they’d dash off a quick smooch of a note or hiss disdain into his phone.

People from Chicago wrote and called because he did a column about their uncle. Remember? The one about the cop who kept on writing city officials parking tickets no matter how much heat he took. And now they can’t get their garbage picked up. Or some cop bum-rapped their brother-in-law, or the insurance company won’t pay for their toddler’s bone marrow transplant. So they did what everyone around town did when they were ticked off or in a pinch: They called Royko.

Chicagoans called Royko because he bought them a beer when their factory shut down, or when their wife left them for some fancy-talking stiff; because he’d talked them off some ledge; or because he’d written about their school, their tavern, their neighborhood or their dad.

They called Royko because they knew they’d be heard. Why? Because everybody knew somebody who’d gotten a piece of him—whether he knew it or not.

JOURNAL ENTRY: JULY 8, 1993

I went to a used- and rare-book store on Lincoln Avenue.

“I’m gonna tell you something about Royko,” says the guy behind the counter, short, balding, kind eyes. “Years ago I used to work for the state. We’d get these department memos written so poorly, making no sense, really stupid memos. I’d send around a note saying, ‘Would you like to see this end up in Royko’s column? I’m sure he would have something to say about it.’…That’s all I needed to say.”

Royko’s writing uniform rarely varied: tweed jacket with battered suede elbow patches, baggy khaki work pants, set off by turtlenecks in maroon, black, blue, or forest green, argyle socks, beat-up loafers. The summer line exchanged turtlenecks for short-sleeve shirts.

Before he wrote each day, usually around 4 p.m., he warmed up by telling stories—marvelous yarns of naked politicians saluting from downtown high-rise balconies, respected names I’d read about in high school; winding, spiraling recollections of being a skinny Polack kid from the Northwest side with a “heroic” beak and a keen mind who fell in love with—and miraculously married—the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood; about paying off cops for his old man’s tavern; about being the too-smart Marshall Field’s stock boy with the basso profundo voice who got that opera audition where they told him he could be a star; about the brick crashing through his living room window, barely missing his son’s head, after he wrote a column in support of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The story of the next day’s column shook loose in the telling and retelling of stories from columns past. After a while, he’d stop, lift his feet off the desk and whip sideways to face the glow of the blank computer screen. His wire-rimmed glasses would slink down from atop his forehead and he’d disappear into tomorrow’s tale. For nearly two hours, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Most columns were tapestries of conversations, recollections, interviews and observations, plus police reports, court transcripts, legal documents, letters, reporting done by his legman. Though he’d grill me endlessly during the day about what my reporting turned up, he’d always call out questions while he wrote. All questions came in the staccato of mid-thought. “…this guy from the Northwest side?…. show him a badge?…a waitress for how long?…he say ‘shiv’ or ‘knife’?…Ph.D. in what?…what’s the cross street?” You’d better know the cross street. Mike thought in terms of neighborhoods. He knew every street in Chicago, every ward, what they are and what they once were. When something happened on one of those streets, the names of the street and the neighborhood were always part of the story.

Sometimes he’d throw me out of the office while he wrote, then bellow questions as I sat at my desk a few feet away. Most times I’d fold my arms over the edge of the desk and speak only when spoken to.

“Wanna read the top?” he’d ask. I’d lean over the desk and read and know that at that moment I had the first glimpse of what hundreds and thousands of people would soon tear open the paper to read.

I was the warm-up band before the big show, and the clean-up crew after. When the column was written, he’d lift his hands way above the keyboard in a mock-Liberace flourish and smile with a wicked wink: “Take a look at this, will ya, kid? Edit it for me. You went to journalism school.”

He’d unhunch his shoulders from over the keyboard and unfold his hulking frame. (People were always surprised at how tall he was in person. He often said he thought his picture in the paper made him look like “just another old, bald geezer.”)

I’d slide behind that Cadillac of a dark wood desk, sink into the battle-weary leather swivel chair with the Royko butt-print and place my hands on the keyboard, my fingers arched in the air with mock-Liberace flourish before they’d land.

As many times as I’d done this, I still felt like squealing in that way that you did when you were 5 and your dad let you take the steering wheel and you actually thought you were driving.