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  My dad’s name is Bob. He idolizes his brother, who is twelve years older. His brother’s name is Dick.

  Their father was many things, but mostly he was a switchman and, when called upon, a griever. Those are railroad terms. Their father passes most of his life in the windblown rail yard of McCook, a town barely bigger than an afterthought. Day after day, he couples and uncouples strings of boxcars and then waits for the engines that will come to pull them apart or carry them away.

  At eight, my father gets a job as a paperboy, delivering the Omaha World-Herald. In high school, he edits The Bison, the school paper. Come graduation in 1952, the Omaha World-Herald declares him “one of Nebraska’s brightest newsboys”—who has worked his route “with diligence and dedication.” They give him a “Carrier’s Scholarship”—$150. He also earns a $450 scholarship from Northwestern University and uses it to attend the Medill School of Journalism, just like Dick, who is by now an editor at the Tribune. Dick delivers the address at my father’s commencement. The Omaha World-Herald runs a story headlined TWO BROTHERS GET ATTENTION AT MCCOOK HIGH GRADUATION. The editors print head shots of Dick and my father. Beneath them, a caption: Richard, Robert . . . Speaker, Listener.

  Five years later, in May 1957, my father graduates with a master’s degree in journalism. A few days after commencement, he packs up his room in a boardinghouse run by an Armenian woman on Foster Street. A Sigma Nu fraternity brother drives him and his suitcases down to Chicago’s Union Station, where he boards the Burlington Zephyr, bound to McCook.

  He doesn’t want to go back to Nebraska, but Dick, who is the chief of the local copy desk at the Chicago Tribune, tells him that it is all but impossible to get hired at the Tribune straight out of college. “Most of the reporters didn’t even graduate from high school. You need experience. That’s the only way they’ll respect you.”

  The McCook Daily Gazette is in search of a managing editor for a special project, and my father takes the job. The town is getting ready to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding. In 1882, the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad needs a way station between Denver and Omaha where it can switch out crews and add a more powerful locomotive for the climb through the Rockies. They name the nothingness after General Alexander McDowell McCook, a Union soldier in the Civil War who spends his prewar years wandering the frontier, putting down Indian uprisings.

  The Gazette is a small paper, but my father consoles himself with the fact that it’s a daily and it covers all of southwest Nebraska. Just as the Great Depression hits, the Gazette buys a propeller plane, christens it the Newsboy, and claims to make journalism history by becoming “the first paper in the world to be regularly delivered by airplane.” Every day, the Newsboy takes flight from an airstrip notched into a cornfield on the outskirts of town and zigzags through the skies of southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. Through a hole in the plane’s thin floorboard, the pilot of the Newsboy drops bundles of papers down onto towns even smaller than McCook. It’s all very successful until a windstorm sweeps into town and hurls the plane end over end, splintering it. So dies the Newsboy.

  The paper is published in a limestone building on Norris Avenue where, above the front door, someone has chiseled: SERVICE IS THE RENT WE PAY FOR THE SPACE WE OCCUPY IN THIS WORLD. My father dedicates himself to his work, creating the Gazette’s seventy-fifth-anniversary issue. He spends that summer interviewing old-timers and digging through records at City Hall and the town library. He edits stories for the paper, as well as reports and writes.

  One night, so the story goes, he and a high school buddy, Bob Morris, drive out of town and spend the night drinking beer. On the way back, they come across a road-construction site. My father climbs onto the earthmover and drives it toward the darkened river.

  “What are you doing?” his buddy yells, laughing on the bank.

  “Getting some experience,” my father says.

  The following morning the Red Willow County sheriff calls the Gazette—he asks for a reporter to drive out to the river. My father arrives at the scene of the crime. Once there, he interviews the officers as well as the construction foreman and then publishes a story in the next day’s paper: MYSTERY VANDAL HITS CONSTRUCTION SITE. The sheriff thanks him for helping to draw attention to the crime.

  He publishes the Gazette’s commemorative edition, says his good-byes, walks to the redbrick train station at the bottom of Norris Avenue, and buys a ticket for Chicago. His brother has gotten him a job as a copy editor on the Neighborhood News desk at the Chicago Tribune.

  # # #

  By September 1957, my mother has been working at the Tribune for almost five years. She starts when she’s sixteen, still a senior at Gage Park High School. My mother ends up there because my grandmother sees a help-wanted ad in the Tribune classifieds. Years later, my mother sends the ad to me. My grandmother had kept it packed away and my mother uncovers it after she moves her into Central Baptist. My mother scribbles a note: Mike, A step back in time. Love, Mom

  GIRL FOR TRIBUNE

  16 TO 19 YEARS OF AGE.

  ERRANDS, CLERICAL, IN NEWS DEPT.

  DAY SHIFT. 40 HOURS A WEEK.

  MUST BE WILLING TO WORK SATURDAYS

  AND SUNDAYS. THIS JOB AVAILABLE

  AFTER AUGUST 28. ANSWER BY LETTER

  ONLY TO TONY STEGER, NEWS DEPT.

  4TH FL. TRIBUNE TOWER

  435 NORTH MICHIGAN AVE.

  When my father arrives from Nebraska, my mother is barely twenty-one years old, a gal Friday for the paper’s editorial cartoonists. She attends college part-time but will not graduate. She’s too in love with the newspaper life. Later she will work on the Tribune’s Radio-Television desk, writing up listings for the television guide.

  “The Tribune was the happiest time of my life,” she tells me.

  In a room full of crusty old guys with cigarettes singed to their lips and half-drained bottles rattling in their desk drawers, she stands out. “She was all our daughters,” one of them tells me years later. “We adored her.” She blossoms under their attention. She begins to see there is a world beyond the world she knows. A world of smart, knowing men. A world at the center of the world. A world that knows what’s happening. A world where things happen. Like the day Bob Hope drops by. She gets her photo taken with him. Her parents can’t believe it. Or the day she goes down to the Radio Grill and buys drinks for the guys. A slew of screwdrivers in paper cups on a plastic cafeteria tray that she carries across Michigan Avenue and up the elevator into the City Room. Twenty drinks, to go. Her idea.

  “I thought it’d be funny,” she tells me. “All the guys loved it.” Then she does that thing she always does—waves her hand and looks away and says, “I don’t know.”

  All the while, she’s living with her parents in the West Elsdon neighborhood, by the runways of Midway Airport, on the city’s Southwest Side. A small, tidy house among row after row of small, tidy houses built on old prairie, just after World War II was won and the men came home. Each with a small yard. In theirs, my grandfather plants a silver maple. Broad-limbed and overarching. Its seeds, come spring, green and conjoined. Thin wings. As a boy I would gather handfuls of them. Split them from each other. Cast them to the wind. Watch them helicopter to places beyond my reach.

  In the fall of 1957, the man who will become my father walks into the Tribune newsroom and starts working with his brother as a copy editor. I have a photo of the two of them sitting face-to-face at the copy desk, my uncle speaking, and my father, listening.

  My father covers the city. He writes a feature about the construction of Chicago’s new water-filtration plant. (WORLD’S BIGGEST WATER FILTRATION PLANT HERE NEARLY A THIRD COMPLETED); he writes about a man trying to get the Dukes, a West Side gang, off the streets (DUKES NO LONGER HAVE THEIR DUKES UP; HERE’S WHY); he writes a piece about the dead-letter office (DEAD LETTERS? POST OFFICE SLEUTHS KEEP ’EM ALIVE); the 4-H Fair (DOZING ENTRIES BELIE BUSTLE AT 4-H FAIR); the tale of a man named O
tis T. Carr, trying to raise money to build the flying saucer he wants to fly to the moon (TRIP TO MOON? OTIS IS READY); about a reunion of men who’ve been saved by the Pacific Garden Mission (SKID ROW GRADS HOLD A REUNION—EX-ALCOHOLICS PRAISE GOD AND MISSION). He cuts these stories from the paper and mails them home to Nebraska, where his mother pastes them in another scrapbook.

  For the next couple of years, he will move from general assignment reporter to copy editor to assistant picture editor. It’s a lot of movement because the “Old Men,” as management is known, have marked him as an up-and-comer, and they want him to get experience.

  By 1957, the Tribune is the biggest and most powerful of Chicago’s five dailies. As a morning paper, it competes with the Sun-Times. The Defender is also a morning paper, but since it is for the city’s black population, the other dailies don’t pay much attention to it. The two afternoon papers—the Daily News and the Chicago American (which later changes its name to Chicago Today)—are sister publications of the Sun-Times and the Tribune, respectively. The Tribune still labors under the shadow of “the Colonel”—Colonel Robert McCormick, the recently dead owner. Grandson of the paper’s founder and grandnephew of Cyrus McCormick, the man who developed the reaper, the Colonel is a rabid Republican and uses the paper to crusade against the New Deal, back Joe McCarthy, and rant against the Commie threat, wherever he imagines it to be. He plants an American flag on the banner and dubs the Tribune “An American Paper for Americans.” In November 1948, it is the Colonel and his obsessive Republican wishful thinking, as much as any editor’s ineptitude, that results in the Tribune’s most infamous headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. The Colonel dies in 1955—four days before Richard J. Daley gets elected to the first of his six terms as mayor—but his presence looms over the paper for years. “That’s not the way the Colonel would want it” is what men say in the newsroom to keep someone in check. A paper edited by a dead man.

  #

  In one of my father’s scrapbooks, there is an 8½-x-11 black and white, shot by one of the Tribune photographers. It’s a crowd scene, and there, on the edge of the red carpet that unspools up and out of the picture, is my father—crew-cut, notebook in hand, alone in a cluster of dignitaries crowding the steps of the Ambassador West hotel. In front of my father stands Prince Philip. In front of him, his wife, the young queen—Elizabeth. In the photo, all eyes are on her. She is white-sun-hatted and white-dressed, and about to step from a wide and deep whitewalled Lincoln convertible. Men, waiting for her to alight, hold ajar her suicide doors. Her white-gloved hand touches the side of the black car. Mayor Daley watches her. And he—my young father, off to the side—watches this woman hardly older than he, really, as she prepares to ascend the steps. It is 1959 and the queen has come to Chicago to celebrate the completion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking Lake Michigan and the Atlantic Ocean, linking Chicago to the world. From here, finally, a man can sail unimpeded.

  The next day, July 7, my father’s story runs with the subheadlines:

  ROSES, QUIPS

  BRIGHTEN MEAL

  FOR ELIZABETH

  ————

  QUEEN EATS A LITTLE,

  LAUGHS A LOT

  My father tells Chicago what Elizabeth ate at lunch (lamb and duck, local) and what Governor Stratton of Illinois gives her as a gift (Carl Sandburg’s six-volume set of books on Abraham Lincoln).

  #

  The first Saturday in May 1959. Derby Day. My father and his pal from McCook, Bob Morris, the same guy who was with him at the Gazette, are tossing a Kentucky Derby bash to break in their new apartment. My dad thumbtacks an invite to the newsroom bulletin board. It’s BYOB.

  My mother’s just broken her engagement to a man she had been dating for a year. She ends it after she realizes he drinks too much. She breaks down in front of her parents at their kitchen table, telling them between sobs that she doesn’t love the man. My grandparents stare at her. They do not have the vocabulary for this. My grandfather says, “You need to talk to the priest.”

  As my mother tells me years later—“There I am, twenty-two years old and living at home, my life falling apart, and what do my parents tell me to do? Go talk to the priest. I walk over to the rectory of Saint Turibius, ring the doorbell. I hated it.”

  Her girlfriends at the paper, looking out for her, tell my mother she should go to the party.

  “You know,” says Diane Lenzi, who works in the Tribune’s Morgue, “Hainey looks like a nice one. Why don’t you see if you can get him to date you?”

  When my mother tells me this, I ask, “Did you go to the party alone?”

  “Of course not,” she says. “I brought a six-pack.”

  #

  She borrows my grandfather’s Ford Fairlane. A ’55. Blue and white. It’s the first car my grandfather has ever owned, as he doesn’t get his license until 1955, when he’s forty-five.

  She has to drive all the way to the North Side, almost to Evanston. She’s never been this far north. She arrives just after 4 p.m., in time to see the horses go off on the small black and white.

  The man who will become my father is not there. He’s working the late shift and doesn’t arrive until ten. My father, arriving late. My mother, waiting. From the start, their pattern.

  She’s a girl in a blue skirt and a yellow cashmere cardigan. She knows she’s supposed to talk to him. But that’s not something she does. Suddenly a friend pulls her over to Bob Hainey and his group of young newsmen in a corner, all confident.

  “Bob,” her friend says, pushing my mother toward the circle. “You know Barbara Hudak. Radio-TV desk?”

  “I do,” he says.

  Because he does know her. And she knows him. For months, the old men in the newsroom have been telling her, “He’s a guy worth knowing.” And they’ve been telling him, “She’s a girl to get to know.” Now, here they are. They talk. They drink. The circle of friends expands, contracts, expands, and then, finally, contracts to just them. Two new friends.

  She looks at her watch. “I need to go home.”

  “Why? We’re having fun. I just got here.”

  She tells him that tonight, her father starts work at 3 a.m. He’s an engraver at a printing plant in town, she says, crafting the metal plates for Life magazine.

  “If I don’t leave now,” she says, “Life doesn’t happen.”

  #

  He asks her out. Their nights, a rhythm.

  My father works 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., drives his ’57 Plymouth to the South Side to pick her up, then drives to one of his haunts on the North Side. He wears a suit and tie. Ever since he showed up for his first day of college, he’s made it a priority to dress well. “I’ll never forget how I felt,” he tells my grandmother years later, “showing up there in my Nebraska clothes, seeing all those guys with money. I’m in brown and they’re in blue. I got the picture fast.”

  Their first date is at the Bit & Bridle. My father likes it because it once was a roadhouse. Left over from a time when the area north of the city was stables, pastures, and nurseries. Inside, pine-paneled walls the color of honey. Paintings of men in red jackets and black hats, riding horses, tallyhoing over hedges and fields. The waiter shows them to a tight, round table. A small red candle glows between them. The man asks what they want to drink. My father says, “Manhattan.”

  My mother freezes, doesn’t want to embarrass herself.

  “That’s when I looked to the bar and saw a sign,” she tells me later. “It said Champale. I ordered that. I figured it was classy.”

  My mother has instructions from my grandmother: “I don’t want you sitting in the car and necking. Just come in the house and do it, if you have to do it.”

  They stop at the door and he kisses her. The wind blows and rustles the leaves of the silver maple that shades them from the streetlamp’s glare.

  #

  A few weeks later, he asks her to be his date to the Page-One Ball—an awards dinner for Chicago newspapermen. It is June 13—my mother’s birthday.
But she doesn’t tell him.

  After the awards, he drives her home. On Ogden Avenue, cop lights in his rearview. Maybe he’s had too much to drink. Worse, he’s in Cicero, a city unto itself. This is where Capone ruled. My father pulls to the curb. He hands the cop his license, a five-dollar bill paper-clipped to it.

  “This ain’t gonna do, sir.”

  He hands my father his license, the five bucks gone. The cop tells my father to get in the squad car.

  He points to my mother. “You follow.”

  The car’s a stick. She barely knows how to drive one. But she follows them to the station—just in time to see my father taken away to a cell. Another cop drives my mother home. She doesn’t hear from my father until the next afternoon, after he calls Uncle Dick to bail him out. Everything gets fixed when Dick shows up and tells the cops that my father is a reporter, too.

  When my father is led out of his cell, the desk sergeant says, “Why didn’t you say you were one of us? Next time, show us your press pass.”

  The cop puts a hand on my uncle’s shoulder. “He’s lucky he has you.”

  #

  By the late 1950s, four of the five newspapers are clustered in a tight circle around Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, in the shadow of the Wrigley Building. Each newspaper has its preferred bar, each but a few steps out its front door. The Tribune men drink at the Boul Mich. Some nights, my father takes my mother there. Sometimes, my mother meets my father at the Press Club in the Hotel St. Clair, where the reporters for all the papers hang out. Men in dark suits drinking brown iced drinks. She likes it because a man plays the piano, and Joe, the bartender, shines attention on her. “He just thought I was something else,” she tells me. “And he loved Bob, too.” Sometimes my father takes her to the Tip Top Tap, a cozy bar atop the Allerton Hotel, overlooking Michigan Avenue. And sometimes they go to Radio Grill on Hubbard Street, where they’re served by Frank Morgner. As a nine-year-old back in Columbus, Ohio, Morgner was run over by a horse-drawn cart and lost his right leg. A year or two later, he made friends with another boy in town—Foy Large, who’d lost his left leg after he was run over by a train. Eventually, the two boys worked up a tumbling-and-dance act based around a pair of extra-wide trousers so they could stand together on their good legs. They played theaters all over the country and made two world tours, including the London Palladium and the Alhambra in Paris.