“I don’t know–what kind of books did he write?”
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Don’t let this happen to you. Tonight the poetically named Freedom Museum presents Mike Royko Remembered, on about the tenth anniversary of the columnist’s death (April 29, 1997). Studs Terkel and members of Royko’s family will be there, as will Tribune colleagues Rick Kogan and John Kass.
- It was depressing to see how many of Royko’s columns over his entire tenure–about police corruption, guns, race, entertainment journalism, the futility of the Cubs, sports salaries, clout, mayoral power, racial tension, public housing, the city’s striving to be a world-class metropolis, the failures of the Veterans Administration, and war–could easily be rewritten and published today.
“It was much less demanding to embrace some empty-headed slogan–‘We got to stop the Commies somewhere, right?’ ‘The president knows facts we don’t know, right?’–and to let it go at that.
“Millions of people never looked beyond the length of Abbie Hoffman’s hair when thinking about the war. More people asked ‘why are they in Lincoln Park’ than why we were in Vietnam.”
