Mike Royko - Career

Career

Reporter Mike Royko covered Cook County politics and government in a weekly political column, soon supplemented with a second, weekly column reporting about Chicago's folk music scene. The success of those columns earned him a daily column in 1964, writing about all topics for the Daily News, a liberal afternoon newspaper. His column appeared five days a week until 1992, when he cut back to four days a week. Studs Terkel explained Royko's incredible productivity and longevity by simply saying, "He is possessed by a demon." In 1972, Royko received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary as a Daily News man.

When the Daily News closed, Royko worked for its allied morning newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, Rupert Murdoch, for whom Royko said he would never work, bought the Sun-Times. Royko commented that "No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper", and "is goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power". Mike Royko then worked for the rival Chicago Tribune. For a period after the takeover, the Sun-Times reprinted Royko's columns, while new columns appeared in the Tribune.

Many columns are collected in books; yet, his most famous book remains his unauthorized biography of Richard J. Daley, Boss, a best-selling non-fiction portrait of the first Mayor Richard Daley, and the City of Chicago under his mayoralty.

In 1976, a Royko column criticized the Chicago Police Department for providing an around-the-clock guard for Frank Sinatra. Sinatra responded with a letter calling Royko a "pimp," which Royko then published in his column. Sinatra's letter is now valued at $15,000.

Like many columnists, Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could "converse"; the most famous being Slats Grobnik, a comically stereotyped working class Polish-Chicagoan. Generally, the Slats Grobnik columns described two men discussing a current event in a Polish neighborhood bar. In 1973, Royko collected several columns of the Grobnik columns is a collection titled Slats Grobnik and Other Friends. Another of Royko's characters was his pseudo-psychiatrist Dr. I.M. Kookie (eponymous protagonist of Dr. Kookie, You're Right! ). Dr. Kookie, purportedly the founder of the Asylumism religion — according to which Earth was settled by a higher civilization's rejected insane people — satirized pop culture and pop psychology. Through his columns, Royko helped make his favorite after-work bar, the Billy Goat Tavern, famous, and popularized the curse of the Billy Goat. Billy Goat's reciprocated by sponsoring the Daily News's 16-inch softball team, and featuring Royko's columns on their walls.

Royko's columns were syndicated country-wide in more than 600 newspapers, more than 7,500 columns in a four-decade career. He also wrote or compiled dozens of "That's Outrageous!" columns for Reader's Digest.