Flashback 1995: Bob Watch debuts

Illustration by Jeff Heller

     Journalism is disposable. Reporters who don't get that are fooling themselves. A fraction of the population ever sees our work, fewer still read it, and that handful forgets what they read the next day, if not the next minute.
     That said, scraps of my oeuvre linger. Every few years someone will dredge up my 2004 book "Hatless Jack" and, oblivious of what it's about, seek out my opinion on how Kennedy killed hats. 
     And Bob Watch, the monthly ad hominem vivisection of Tribune columnist Bob Greene that debuted in the Chicago Reader 30 years ago Monday, Jan. 27, 1995, under the slogan, "We read him so you don't have to."
     I'm not sure why, of all my stuff, Bob Watch should persist. Perhaps it has a sharp-edge that people like. A crystalline meanness. The great Gene Weingarten recently cited Bob Watch after dredging up a Bob Greene column on Bob Evans, which he identifies as the worst column ever written, a prize that Greene seemed to vigorously vie for. I felt honored that the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner remembered me.
     I should tell the story. Spy magazine had come out and I decided: "These are my people." I flew to New York and spent some time with founding editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson. While I was there, I pitched stories, including Bob Greene — but he was already in works, and I ended up writing the sidebars to Magda Krance's gleeful keelhauling of Bob. (My favorite was "How a Press Release Becomes a Bob Greene Column," where I selected columns of his that obviously had come from corporate ballyhoo, then contacting the companies to get ahold of the relevant releases that sparked Bob's muse. I'll have to dredge that up and share it someday. The similarities alone should have cost Greene his job, had anyone in authority at the Tribune been paying attention. Spoiler alert: they weren't).
     The Spy pieces caught the fancy my friend of Cate Plys, then an editor at the Reader, who suggested I take a whack at Bob every month. This was my first entry. I'm surprised at how brief it is: a mere 428 words But I manage to pack a lot of scorn in a small space. It's poignant to be sharing it now, as the Reader is laying off its staff and seems destined to crumble and be swept into the dustbin that awaits us all. I hope they can survive — the Reader has always provided an important outlet for perspectives that would never otherwise be shared in the mainstream media. Like Bob Watch, which ran for two years, and began this way:

     Those who sincerely admire and respect Bob Greene – who read his columns aloud to entertain their dozens of cats, perhaps – should leave the room now. We don’t want to upset them.
     That leaves those of us who can rationalize his existence only by inverting the normal expectations of readership – instead of excoriating his faults, savoring them. We pick up his column with a tingle of anticipation – how awful will it be? Will he content himself with another effortless sputtering of baby talk, lavished over one of his pitiful handful of themes and interests? Or will he reach some new benchmark of idiocy?
     Bob loves imperiled kids, and himself holds a key role in the chain of abuse. Parents torture their kids, DCFS ignores them, the schools and the courts bungle the situation, and, finally, the tiny emaciated survivors are led into a room where Uncle Bob awaits, cooing sympathetically while he boosts them onto his knee for the Final Abuse, the flopping out of his revolting pity.           This week he sallied day after day, again and again, to the defense of “a little boy in deep, terrible trouble,” an unfortunate he called, “with typical folksiness, “Joe.” Last week it was a class of handicapped students who had lost the services of a speech therapist. The last sentence of this column, where Bob appeals to Mayor Daley to personally intercede, is a joy. You can see the mayor of Bob’s fantasy world – porkpie hat, big cigar, sitting in the bathtub – crushing the paper in his little fists and squeaking “Why, why, this is an outrage!”

     The next day, Bob rewrote the New York Times obit of Victor Riesel, the columnist blinded in 1957 when acid was thrown in his face by union thugs. Bob begins the tale by conjuring up his beloved idyll of 1950s Columbus, Ohio, where little Bobby Greene learned about the courageous newspaperman who wouldn’t back down. Though Bob gets almost halfway through the column before he remembers to mention Riesel’s name, he implies that the “kid reading the paper [who] wondered about the man behind the glasses” was inspired by Riesel’s example. We are left marveling how a blind man’s bravery helped embolden one special little boy to someday become Bob Greene, nostalgist of courage, boldly speaking his truths and letting the chips fall where they may, whether he is daring to openly worship Michael Jordan or mourning the passing of toaster covers.
     Bob doesn’t quite come out and say it but, from his vantage point, Riesel’s sight must seem a small price to pay.