Mike Royko

[kmusser]

If you grew up in Chicago then Mike Royko was a household name, he was a daily columnist for various Chicago papers, writing from 1963 to 1997 - that's a lot of columns, over 7,000 in all. I've been reading a collection of his best columns and find it fascinating, it's like diving into a time capsule, having the same person writing about seeing Jackie Robinson play up to criticizing the Gulf War. His early columns especially were new to me and I had not realized how early he started calling out racism, reading those were reminders of both how far we've come and how far we still have to go. Also interesting to see his writing change, those early columns often contained casual misogyny which mostly disappeared in the later ones. Anyway, definitely recommended, there are some excepts online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/730719.html, the 2nd one there is the Jackie Robinson one, which was one of my favorites.

Comments

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

He was also syndicated nationally. I grew up reading his columns in Rhode Island. (I can't remember if he was in The Providence Journal or The Woonsocket Call – we got both and I read both.)

[russell-moore.livejournal.com]

I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Royko and regularly see and speak to him at the original Billy Goat Tavern while living in downtown Chicago ... he was a genuinely interesting person to have conversations with and his many columns were examples of his basic down to earth average schmoe ... he spoke for all of us in a way we understood and mostly agreed with