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Nicodemus’s greatest hour at the Sun-Times may have been neither a story he wrote nor a contract he negotiated but an exodus he refused to join. In early 1984 Rupert Murdoch took over the paper, and the top editors and writers headed for the hills. Nicodemus stayed. He later told me: “To have the Tribune as the only major journalistic print voice in town would be a disaster, and therefore preserving and fighting for the quality and the existence of the Sun-Times is a moral necessity from my point of view. I had opportunities at a major western paper and a wire service, and I never in any way considered them.
Devine was the Murdoch editor who in 1986 set Nicodemus loose on the central library story — the city wanted to convert the Goldblatt’s building on State Street and put a new library there. That, Nicodemus argued in a series of stories, was a stupid, unfeasible idea that was unworthy of the city — and in the end Chicago held an architectural competition and a new central library was built instead. The Harold Washington Library Center is as much Nicodemus’s monument as it is Washington’s.