Play captures Royko the writer, misses Royko the man

Newberry Library

   
     The Royko play is back. At the Chopin Theatre until Dec. 22. Having maintained a manful silence during its first run, the smart thing for me to do would be to continue keeping my big yap shut.
     But being a newspaperman was never a particularly intelligent way to make a living, never mind being a columnist who — I think people forget — is supposed to stir the pot.
     First the short take. I saw "Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago" during its initial run in September — how could I not? — and enjoyed the one-man show, in the main. I love the part when Royko compares writing for a newspaper to being a kid playing outside at dusk, begging for just a few more minutes, another turn at bat, before he has to go into the house for a bath and homework and all the dull non-fun stuff kids are forced to do. This was in the context of the death of the great Chicago Daily News in 1978. Now we face the looming demise of the entire industry. I'm going to miss this.
     And I'm no Royko. Royko was great, the greased hub on which Chicago spun, span, and the play captures that nicely. Reading a Royko column, I used to say, was like having a computer chip implanted in your brain, a new circuit about whatever subject he was addressing. His thoughts become your thoughts. He was that good. Not all the time of course — people forget that. Royko wrote his share of duds — five days a week, you had to. But enough home runs to keep fans cheering.
     Where writer/actor Mitchell Bisschop falls short is that Royko was not the sum of his writing, but a human being, and a deeply flawed one at that. He could be menacing and mean, there at the end of the bar at the Billy Goat, sucking back his cocktails, snarling at the world. The daring suburbanite or forward young journalist who approached him did so at his own peril.

     Fame can be as addictive as any drug. It does bad things to people, and it inflated Royko's self-estimation and made him a jerk to his younger admirers. He was the king of the hill, but was also terrified of being knocked off his lofty perch. Everything was a battle for supremacy. You shook his hand, he tried to crush it. 

     I never had a good encounter with him. Not one. He once threatened to break my legs, and not in some teasing, avuncular way, but in a dead serious "I'll-break-your-fucking-legs" way.

     A little of THAT Royko might have given the play more bite. But then, I suppose Bisschop wouldn't have gotten the cooperation of the family needed to pad his play with big blocks of Royko's classic columns.

     Maybe this play will inspire someone to write an actual play about Royko, the man, and his era that doesn't quote any columns. The material is certainly available.
     Right here, I have a letter from Royko framed in my office, displayed as a kind of trophy and a reminder of the frequent price of success. Not addressed to me, but to a woman he accosted in a bar, and when she didn't recognize him, threatened with a broken ketchup bottle.
     "Please accept my apologies for my disgusting, boorish, and inexcusable behavior," Royko begins. "If I caused you any discomfort or inconvenience, I am truly sorry. Any anger you felt, and I probably gave you cause to be outraged, can't equal the self-disgust and anger I experienced when I eventually realized what a sorry fool I had made of myself."

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Mailbag

 

     Monday's mailbag of email was particularly heavy — metaphorically, of course — after my column on the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Most commented on aspects of our national healthcare disaster. But some were the kind of off-base attack that I've grown to savor because, really, how else can you approach them but as a connoisseur of contempt? I'll share two. The first correspondent, perhaps new to my column, or new to the entire idea of opinion writing, registered displeasure with both my views and my sharp prose.

Mr. Steinberg:

First, starting your article with a recitation of your issues getting a prescription refill for your pen needles made “all killing is bad” insincere at best.

Second, those with Type 1 or other insulin dependent diabetes are hardly “junkies.” Injecting insulin is not “shooting up,” and there is absolutely no reason that anyone needs to inject insulin in a bathroom.

I was disappointed in your column.

Debra S.

     I didn't know quite where to begin on that one — if you're supposed to take fast-acting insulin five minutes before you eat, and you're at a restaurant, where are you supposed to take it? At the table? Should it be considered a kind of weird subcutaneous cousin of breastfeeding? Not me. Not yet anyway. Trying to introduce the idea that not everything is for everybody, I replied:

Dear Ms. S.:

Thanks for writing, mistaken though you are, on several levels. First, both my opening and my belief that killing is bad are completely sincere. Odd that you would pretend to look into my mind and conclude otherwise. Second, as a vivid writer, I am allowed to couch my life experience in whatever terms I like. While it is a shame you are disappointed, the problem is yours, not mine, since I write for people who like what I do. If you don't, then it is not for you. Why would I take advice from people who don't like my work? Anyway, here's hoping you stick around, and perhaps like future columns better or, barring that, find someone whose writing matches your internal demands for ordinary, literal prose.

Best,
NS

     Then there was the reader irked that we had ignored the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Email is a cold medium, and I can't tell whether this guy is a fan who expressed himself poorly, or someone touting the past and future president. 

Neil,
     Couldn't help but wonder if the 47th president elect, Commander Bone Spurs attitude towards our men and women in uniform** had anything to do with the fact that there was no mention in Saturday's Sun Times edition of "the date that will live in infamy"

Bill C. ( the faithful reader from Highland Park whose fears you calmed during the paper's printing fiasco with your speedy reply to my e-mail)

     ** "they are all suckers and losers"

     I wondered where he was coming from — someone trying to blameshift Trump's treason onto us? How did that jibe with his citing the bone spurs, plus his being a "faithful reader?"
 I probably shouldn't have unleashed the dogs of snark. Perhaps I was being too literal myself, but then, I am an imperfect vessel myself, and was set off by the Remember Pearl Harbor! complaint, which I've been pelted with for decades by people who certainly need no reminding. I replied:

     Really? You did? The short answer is "no." For starters, because of the linearity of time — the liar, bully, fraud and traitor expressed his contempt for our soldiers years before the Sun-Times did not mark the 83rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Thus the chances of the latter being responsible for the former are zero.

               Does that help?

               NS

We can't kill our way out of our healthcare woes.

 

"The Gates of Hell," Auguste Rodin (Rodin Museum, Philadelphia)

     Last Wednesday, the same day UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, an assistant pharmacist at Walgreens phoned me.
     The prescription for needles that fit my insulin pen, she said, can no longer be filled, because my insurance company, Aetna, is now insisting it must be done through the mail, in 90-day batches. I might be able to get an exception, but should call Aetna.
     No problem! Calling people is what I do for a living. I phoned the number on the back of my insurance card, jumping online — multi-tasking! — during the long delay to try their website.
     Online, a form to fill out and mail to Texas, along with my credit card number. I gazed at the form and tried to imagine it resulting in boxes of BD Nano 2nd Gen 4 mm Pen Needles showing up on my doorstep. Unlikely.
     Meanwhile, on the phone, I was passed along to several people whose mastery of English was sub-ideal. My suggestion of an exception meant nothing. Negotiations for obtaining the needles via the mail went nowhere. Eventually, what we worked out was that I should have my doctor call in a 90-day prescription to CVS — did I mention that CVS owns Aetna? It's true. My cost for three boxes — a 90-day supply — would be $78.
     Now I've liked CVS ever since Nicholson Baker published "The Mezzanine," a lapidary little novel about a man who breaks his shoelace and goes to CVS to buy a new one. Excellent, but not enough to snatch brand loyalty away from Walgreens, a venerable Chicago company that invented the malted milkshake. I can ride my bike to Walgreens. Plus I know people there, thanks to routine visits to secure the seven prescriptions I need every day so as not to die from diabetes.
     Social media exploded with joy at the slaying of Thompson. Many Americans are denied medical care, either because they can't navigate the insurance labyrinth or because companies say no to necessary treatment in some arbitrary fashion. Countless people have endured the agony of watching loved ones suffer and die because an unseen bean counter wouldn't check a box.
     Let me be clear. All killing is bad, but Thompson's slaying is especially bad because it was a targeted assassination. There are many countries in the world where helmeted assassins on mopeds routinely gun down executives on crowded city streets then roar away. We don't want to live in one of those countries — well, we already do, given last week's slaying. We don't want it to get worse.

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Grindstone Elementary

     I attended Fairwood Elementary School in Berea, Ohio. It was about a mile from my house — 1.1 miles I see now, from Google maps — and I walked every day, with my older sister, before she transitioned to the junior high for 7th grade, and my little brother when he began kindergarten when I was in 5th grade.
     I don't remember much about those walks — there was a bully, Trent Caruthers. There was a large weeping willow whose branches we'd break off, strip of their leaves and make into whips that would whistle through the air.
     After I left Berea, I went back to Fairwood a couple times on visits to my hometown. There was the same Winslow Homer reproduction of New England fishermen, the same brown and beige floor tiles. The place was  very small. To drink out of a water fountain, I had to fall to my knees, which is quite symbolic — the person you are now, humbled before the person you were then. 
     Then Fairwood school was gone. Berea was changing, populations shifting. When we went back on our way out east for Thanksgiving, there was a new school, huge — our host said seven former elementary school districts funnel into it. The name stunned me.
     "Grindstone Elementary School."
     I don't have to say anything more, right? It would be too obvious for Dickens. I suppose I should point out that Berea was known for sandstone — to this day, there is a Berea sandstone. The town's lakes — Baldwin Lake, Wallace Lake — started as sandstone quarries. The sandstone was made into paving stone, building stone, and grindstones, large circular discs, bigger than a manhole cover, used to grind grain. If you were a longstanding Berea family, you showed off with a grindstone in your front yard.

     Still. Grindstone Elementary? Really? 

     On the upside, the kids must have a field day with the name. 

Facebook bludgeons Norman Rockwell

     Now that X has become an odious sewer, fled by the feeling, is Facebook next?
     And really, it's amazing, once some sort of critical mass was reached on Bluesky, a few weeks ago, how quickly Elon Musk's hallelujah chorus of haters and nutjobs became unbearable. I visit it now the way you hurry down a darkened street lined with drug addicts and derelicts. 

     Now Facebook is ... threadbare. What was once a pleasant coffee klatsch of your friends and relatives showing off newborns, surgical scars and lunch has, become, for me at least, a dumptruck unleashing its load on my head every visit.
     The breaking point came for me Friday, when I realized I was being pelted with Normal Rockwell paintings, some not even by Rockwell.
     Don't get me wrong — I like Norman Rockwell, or did, before Facebook grabbed me by the nape of the neck and began rubbing my face in his work. For years he was underrated, as a kitschy booster of American small town values. Even though he's not only an incredible stylist, but also an artist with a strong moral sense. Yes, he painted nostalgic, patriotic tableaus; but he also produced jarring dispatches from the civil rights era. He was a dramatist. He told stories.
     In 2015, driving out of Boston, I made a point of stopping in his studio and museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Well worth a visit, particularly to see his almost invisible brushwork. He is America's Michelangelo.

     So maybe this is my fault. Maybe a few weeks ago I clicked on one of the histories that went along with a Rockwell painting that Facebook was serving up. Because suddenly I was getting them continually, every third post it seemed. I went to see who was sharing them, and found odd Facebook pages that didn't look like they were from actual people, but Korean kittens and oddly-named non-persons who only posted Rockwell's work. Some had the same Rockwell caption on various other paintings. Some ID'ed work of another artist as Rockwell.
     I started vigorously blocking  these AI Rockwell aficionados, requesting to see this kind of thing less. And it seemed to work, regarding Rockwell. But other artists, and old movies, and random historical facts, rain down. 
     Now Facebook seems like those slideshows before a movie — crude ads for used car lots and knick-knack boutiques. Many, many high end socks. All that trivia, all that capsule pop history. Enough already. Who needs to spend their life doing this? It's not interesting anymore. 

      In a way, I'm grateful, and sorry it took them this long to alienate me. Now I'm going to post my column every morning and scram, or try to. As I write that, there does seem a "two drinks is my limit" quality to saying that. Naive. I do like checking my memories on Facebook — 16 years of life served back at me. So one has to be careful, too, regarding sweeping pronouncements of that kind. Not a good idea to sign checks that you can't cash.

'There is a fear.' Students at Sullivan give thanks in gathering political gloom

Evelyn Levin

     Just because your family flees their home doesn't mean the usual griefs of adolescence give you a pass. Years in a refugee camp don't lessen the heartbreaks of youth. Walking for miles through hostile territory, dodging bandits, won't make school any easier when you finally get there. You can reach your goal, America, and yet feel out of place and alone. And then your father, whom you adore, dies.
     "My family had to move from Syria and go to Jordan when I was 4 years old because of the civil war," said Sebba Saad Allah, 16, standing before assembled classmates, teachers and community members Wednesday evening at Sullivan High School. "I was raised in Jordan for six years with my parents and my two brothers ... In 2019, I moved to the U.S. with my family and I was very unsure if I wanted to be here or not. I wasn't ready for new beginnings ... It was a hard year for my family and I ... I started learning English and helped my family, translating. When I was only 11 years old, COVID hits, and I stopped my education because I didn't know how to use technology to study; 2022, I was back to school, but it was the most challenging year for me because I lost one of the most important people in my life. I lost my father because of cancer. A truly remarkable person for my family and I, who touched the lives of everyone fortunate enough to know him. I miss listening to him saying the prayers before we break our fast..."
     Here the sophomore started crying. People clapped, encouragingly, calling out, "You've got this!" 

     Enfolding teens as they struggle to be who they are and become who they will be, moving from strangers in a strange land to seasoned Americans, has long been a specialty at Sullivan, in Rogers Park, famous as Chicago's immigrant high school. Two-thirds of Sullivan's 724 students are refugees, immigrants or enrolled in their "English Learners" program. As many as 10% live in unstable housing situations.
     Add to that an ever more threatening political climate. The event Sebba Saad Allah was speaking at was Sullivan High School's 8th Annual Thanksgiving Celebration, begun in 2016 after Donald Trump was first elected president on a wave of xenophobia. This year feels even more ominous.
     "There is a fear," said Evelyn Levin, the English language program teacher at Sullivan. "There's a lot that is unknown right now. There have been a number of students who just dropped out. There's no way of tracking them to see if they're still living in shelters."
     More parents are reluctant to tell the school where they live.
     "Being listed in any sort of database is frightening to them," Levin said.
     The school is trying to be proactive, to simultaneously assuage student fears while preparing them for whatever might occur next month — Trump has promised to begin deporting immigrants, including legal citizens, "on Day One."
     "We have given students and families information about legal services that are available," Levin said. "There was a legal clinic here right before Thanksgiving break."
     ‘Their resilience is unbelievable’
    As winter arrives, difficulties mount.
     "We have kids living on the train," said STLS advocate Cindra Hart. "I've got kids living on the street. When it first got cold outside, I had to get coats, boots, hats, gloves."
     How?
    "I'm begging," she said, adding that gift cards, such as from McDonald's, are helpful for impoverished students trying to get through Christmas break. "I need to be able to feed a kid while they're gone from me for two weeks, because I know they're going to eat while they're here."
     Hart said the city's aid to her students was abruptly shut off.

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Sebba Saad Allah, left.

Flashback 2000: Comforts few, but it feels like home

     There can be odd resonances in this job, echoes over the decades. This column came up twice this past week. Once in upstate New York, on Thanksgiving Day, when I was chatting with my younger daughter-in-law's grandmother. Not a woman to mince words, she asked, in essence, "How can you do it? How can you write things that jar people's lives?" And I said, basically, that I try not to rattle folks unnecessarily, try to make sure my subjects understand they will be in a newspaper story that others will then read. 
     But the bottom line is, you can't predict how a piece of writing will affect others. This reader, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, was mentioned again in Tuesday's entry from the vault, and several readers expressed interest in learning more about my reader in Yekaterinburg. Read it now, and try to guess what very real repercussion this had in Chicago after it ran. I'll explain afterward.

     What does Rex Rickard miss most about Chicago, now that he's living deep in Russia?
     "Head lettuce," he wrote, "and corn on the cob."
     Of all the occasional correspondents I've accumulated over the years, via this column, one of the most distinctive is Rickard, 51, who got his start in St. John the Baptist Parish, around 50th and Halsted, but for the last two years has made his home in Yekaterinburg.
     His e-mails are filled with details of the daily triumphs and tragedies of life in that city, 900 miles east of Moscow, cradled in the Ural Mountains.
     "You could liken it to Denver," wrote Rickard.
     Well, not quite.
     "Last week at my tram stop there was a dead man lying in a pile of snow," he mentioned in a recent missive. "Apparently to keep his remains fresh while the cop radioed for pick-up service. Folks just took a passing glance at the corpse, if at all. Of course I was mildly shocked."
     It was the fourth corpse he's seen in public in the city, the largest in the Urals.
     Then there is the weather.
     "Winter snows begin in mid-September and I've seen the last snowfall on June 7," he wrote, quoting a local saying: "June isn't quite summer yet, and August isn't quite summer anymore."
     Between the bodies in the street, the snow, the shortages, the lines, the alcoholism and the air pollution ("they have no conception of catalytic converters") it sounded like a pretty grim existence to me, particularly as I pressed him for more things he misses about Chicago. Head lettuce and corn? There must be something else.
     "Of course, when the drinking water comes out of the tap BLACK on occasions, unless it has been `temporarily' shut off for some unknown reason for a week at a time, it gives a person pause," he wrote. "So I guess that I can say that I miss turning on the tap in Chicago and getting a sparkling clean and PURE glass of cold water equal to anything sold in a bottle."
     My God, I said. Why stay?
     "I've got loads of friends here, which I lacked in the U.S. They tend to stay friends for life here. The reason is that they don't move around the way we do. Once they are in a flat, that's it for several generations.
     "And holidays," he wrote. "My Lord do they have 'em! They say that the next holiday is only a bottle's throw away. The usual thing is to sit around a table and do the obligatory toasts to meeting; the holiday; to friends; to the ladies; and on and on till they get into the singing mode. And do Russians LOVE to sing!"
     He added that, as a gay man, he feels a lot more secure in Russia than he did back home.
     "I don't get called `faggot' or the other slurs that I was constantly getting in my beloved hometown," he wrote. "I don't walk down the street in mortal fear of my life."
     In fact, he said, it was the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard that inspired him to settle in Russia, which he had been visiting since the early 1970s.
     Rickard makes his living teaching English and, like teachers everywhere, is strapped for classroom materials. He asked if I knew of anybody who could pass along canceled stamps or stickers of any kind (he gives them out as prizes). His address is: P.O. Box 3, Yekaterinburg, 620151 Russia.
     And how are kids in Yekaterinburg?
     "Kids are the same everywhere," he wrote, with the universal world-weariness of a teacher. "Watch out for them starting at about age 11 or 12. Now I know WHY the Catholic nuns used to whack us!"
     While I find Rickard's messages invariably interesting, what really gnawed at me, as a person who yearned for Chicago bratwurst, even in the gilded comfort of Venice, was what he hankers for from home.
     "Oh yeah," he wrote, finally providing an entirely satisfactory answer. "I still do miss White Castle hamburgers."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 30, 2000

     After it ran, Rex's brother phoned, quite angry. It seems his son attended a Catholic School, and of course had told his classmates about his Uncle Rex in Russia. What he hadn't said — perhaps didn't know — was that his uncle was gay. The kids learned of it from this column and tormented him mercilessly,. The father seemed to think it was my fault. I said I was sorry, but I'm not responsible for the actions of bullies. Still, the moment stuck with me, obviously, as a reminder that you never know how these things are going to resonate. It's hard not to feel a little bit guilty.

     My last email from Rickard was in 2015. I made inquiries, but have not yet found out any new information about him.