Sons have endless questions about their fathers. Michael Hainey is a journalist, someone more given than most to asking questions, and his father died when he was six. The mystery of the man was large enough to fill a book.
This is a child’s memory. Why does it move me as I read it? Why do I remember the Sun-Times newsroom of the same era in roughly the same way—as a conglomeration of simple elements? Shouts. Typewriters. Telephones. Tobacco. Hainey continues: “Clouds of cigarette smoke hang over the room like storm clouds in miniature. Some of the men are older than my father. They have hard guts and greased-back hair. When my father walks with us through the newsroom, his hands on our shoulders, guiding us through the labyrinth of desks, men stop us. ‘Your boys, Bob?’ A cigarette jangles from the man’s lip and he slides a red pencil behind his hair-pocked ear. ‘Put ‘er there, son.’”
About six weeks after Bob Hainey died I went to work at the Sun-Times. They put me on nights. There was plenty of in-house lore to catch up on, and the death of Bob Hainey was one of the first stories I heard. I won’t repeat it here because Mike Hainey has a right to reveal it in his book, but it’s a good story about the odd people who come together in a newsroom, and it’s god-almighty sad. It’s a story that belongs in a book that is ultimately an elegy to a vanished era of newspapering, an era I apparently look back on like a wistful six-year-old.
Natty Bumppo was one of the copy editors on the desk run by Bob Hainey and then Tom Moffett. He was also a law school student named John Dean. Reading Garry Wills’s 1970 book Nixon Agonistes, Dean came across a passage that described the Kennedy-era United States “facing the world with brash nonideological savvy and self-confidence, blazing a new spiritual frontier with Natty Bumppo shrewdness and verve.”
I mention these details because the only possible way for me to read Mike Hainey’s book was in the context of its time; and it turns out that was exactly what he intended. “I wanted to write an homage to that era, that world,” he tells me. “I grew up loving newspapers because it was a way to love my father. The time was just so beautiful, right? I wanted to write something you guys would all want to say, ‘Yeah, that was us.’”
