Young Reporter
Mike Royko grew up in Chicago, living in an apartment above a bar. His mother, Helen (née Zak), was Polish, and his father, Michael Royko, Ukrainian (born in Dolyna). He briefly attended Wright Junior College and then enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1952.
On becoming a columnist, he drew on experiences from his childhood. He began his newsman's career as a columnist in 1955 for The O'Hare News (Air Force base newspaper), the City News Bureau of Chicago and Lerner Newspapers' Lincoln-Belmont Booster before working at the Chicago Daily News as a reporter, becoming an irritant to the City's Democratic Machine politicians with penetrating and skeptical questions and reports.
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“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
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