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That’s just a thought — a thought I might have had for the first time in 2002, at the memorial service for Tom Fitzpatrick. Fitz in his day was one of the top people — a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Sun-Times. The memorial service didn’t do only him justice — it was a celebration of the generation he’d just departed and one of the funniest, sweetest 90-odd minutes of my life. Paul Galloway presided, and he had paid attention.
Galloway was one of those top people you fully appreciate once you’re grownup enough to understand who they really are. If the city room didn’t boil with his ambition — well, it boiled enough without it. He told me once that what he liked about the Sun-Times city room when he first saw was its “hyperactive study-hall kind of atmosphere, full of problem children.” He went on, “And I said to myself, ‘This is where I want to be.’”
