Our Own Royko

The Springfield News-Leader has a metro columnist now. His debut is entitled “Springfield as good a place as any“. Highlights:

Springfield, in my estimation, is as good a place as any. It’s got its own drama and history. It has highlights and faults.

It has culture and religion and art. And, if you’d prefer to avoid a 15-hour flight for comparisons, you can just take my word for it.

. . . .

I’m not saying I’ll never leave Springfield, but it’s got enough to continue my curiosity, for awhile.

This piece, by way of introduction, is to explain what I’m doing as the News-Leader’s metro columnist.

I am pretty sure he’s serious.

The newspaper, meanwhile, is almost to the point of its distributors taping it to rocks and throwing it through living room windows.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

4 thoughts on “Our Own Royko

  1. We remember him fondly because he passed away before the The Great Shift in the beginning of this century. Given his liberal predilections, it’s entirely possible if not likely that after the election of George W. Bush, Royko would have turned nasty partisan with glib insults for people who believed differently than he did. It happened a lot, even among popular fiction stalwarts like Ed McBain and Robert B. Parker.

    I read a short mini-biography of Royko in 2012 that emphasized his connection to Saul Alinsky.

  2. And the Chicago Tribune still has the best metro columnist in the country: John Kass.

  3. He might have, indeed, and I’m certainly old enough to rose-color my rearview mirror. But he was getting grief from the PC crowd because he didn’t like the loop-the-loop speech patterns and labels they insisted on, and while I like you am 100% certain he’d have had no brief for Pres. Bush, I don’t know how he’d have been on 9/11 and Pres. Obama is exactly the kind of lightweight gasbag he liked to aim at. He was contrary enough that he might have done it just because people didn’t want him to.

    And I’m completely with you on Kass, too. I often don’t know the actual news stories he’s writing about but he’s always on the list to read.

Comments are closed.