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("Royko was Chicago; injured boy is Glimmer Man"--May 6, 1997)

When Richard Daley died, folk song artist Steve Goodman wrote a piece called, "Daley's Gone."  If Steve were still with us, he'd probably write a similar song about Royko.  I couldn't write a whole column about Royko.  There wouldn't be enough newsprint ink left for anything else.  This was part of the "Glimmer Man" piece.

    Sometimes the news is really bad.
    I drove down to Chicago for Christmas in 1976 just a few days after then-Mayor Richard Daley died.  It was the eeriest feeling I ever had, but when I hit the city limits, I turned to The Wife and asked if she felt it, too.
    She said, "Something's missing."
    I said, "Yeah, Daley's gone."
    I didn't get down to Chicago in January, 1997, but I suspect that same emptiness was everywhere.  Mike Royko was gone.
    For over 40 years, Royko lived and breathed the city of Chicago.  In the more than 8000 columns he wrote for three different Chicago newspapers, he was the voice of Chicago, and, in many ways, its conscience, too.
    He was syndicated in more than 800 newspapers around the country and won numerous awards for his writing.  His books and columns were required reading in many college journalism classes.
    Perhaps what I like most about Royko was that he could never be pigeonholed.  He was an equal opportunity journalist.  He picked on everyone, and sometimes it got him in trouble.
    For one column he might be labeled a bloodthirsty fascist pig and for the next be called a commie pinko rat.  He once wrote that he know he couldn't enrage everyone all the time, but he was going to keep trying.  He simple tried to be honest in his work.
    I grew up reading Royko in Chicago.  I was lucky.  Sometimes, I would read his columns to my English classes.  Though they may not have known it at the time, they were lucky, too.
    When Royko passed away, I suddenly didn't feel lucky anymore.