Snow Meltdown in Seattle!

Residents of Seattle appear to be up in arms about the current snowstorm and the city's wayward attempts at snow removal.

"Seattleites have been marvelous to each other over the past nine days, but the pokiness of our public services must be addressed. Given our image-conscious public officials, the town would do well to keep in mind a famous description of bureaucrats from the great Chicago columnist Mike Royko:

They create a dizzying paperwork world of regulations, ordinances, rules, codes, forms and applications. And they expertly maneuver these elements so that they are always right, even when they are obviously wrong. And they are never wrong, even when the clearly are."

Mike was tossed into the storm by columnist Joel Connelly of the Seattle P-I in his article entitled "City has to stop dragging feet in the snow"...

Photos of the snowstorm...

Christmas outage affected 18,000 PSE customers on Eastside...

Snow melts into flooding worries...

All I want ... for Christmas!

Dennis McCarthy, columnist with the LA Daily News put together a Christmas wish list...

In addition to being able to "talk newspapers with Mike Royko", Mr. McCarthy ends:

"I want old people who can no longer remember the best days of their lives to wake up Christmas morning remembering every one of them.

I want Barack Obama to be a great president, and all our troops to come home to a ticker-tape parade because they deserve it.

I want kids to put down their guns and pick up schoolbooks. I want murders to stop and drugs to dry up and blow away.

I want our country to get off its knees and be respected again. I want the world to be a better, safer place for everyone's children.

That's all I want for Christmas, kids. Not much."

Imagine... Merry Christmas!

Buddy Charles - "Black and Blue"

"Black and Blue" was Mike's song. He made that request to Buddy Charles many a time during the tough period after his first wife Carol passed. Mike wrote: "During my bleakest years, before I met and married the blond, I spent many a night listening to Buddy. He made them less bleak." ("If Only the Acorn Could Play It Again", August 28, 1990)

I requested that song a couple of months ago at Chambers restaurant when I saw Buddy Charles play. It was a small crowd and the deference that was paid to Buddy in the old days was gone. People talked, people drank, glasses and silverware clanked - "the rule" that Mike Royko wrote about was no longer followed, but Buddy simply played on... unfazed.

I returned to Chambers a few weeks ago with a couple of sound engineers. I introduced myself as being the crazy guy who is trying to resurrect some of Mike's columns and bring them to film - we asked to make a test recording of Buddy playing; we were primarily interested in recording the piano at this time because it is a tough instrument to record well. He smiled warmly, agreed to that and any future recordings and immediately remembered the song I had requested a month or so before.

Buddy Charles passed on a couple of days ago - Rick Kogan, among others, has penned a tribute.


A few videos of Buddy Charles playing at Chambers restaurant are available online at YouTube.

If anyone would like a digital version of "Black and Blue", as recorded live in October of 2008 at Chambers, please send an email to info@royko.tv and we'll make it happen.

"Cold empty bed/springs hard as lead/pains in my head/feel like ol' Ned/hey, what did I do to feel so black and blue."

US Senate Seat for Illinois Listed on eBay!

There have been numerous articles contemplating Mike's stance on Governor Blagojevich's current pay-to-play fiasco.

From Santa Barbara to the Heartland to all the way across the big pond, columnists lick their chops over Mike's would-be diatribe:

We Need Royko - How Chicago's sage columnist would have handled 'Rod the Clod'

Boy, if Mike Royko were alive, Rod and Patricia Blagojevich would be in real trouble.


THE SAD part of Chicago's latest corruption scandal is that the city's greatest columnist is no longer around to interpret it to the outside world. Mike Royko would surely have enjoyed explaining the charges laid against the Illinois governor, the breadth of which even the federal prosecutor describes as "staggering", writes Frank McNally...


And I’m sure the late columnist Mike Royko would have made mincemeat out of this craven clown years ago...

Corruption? Moi?


It's all a game to some politicians...

I imagined the late great Mike Royko, a Chicago newspaper columnist who reveled in exposing down-and-dirty Chicago machine politics, trying to get on the El from the hereafter to cover this one...


THE PULITZER Prize-winning Chicago columnist, Mike Royko, said that Illinois produced two types of politicians: the actively corrupt, who viewed political office as a means to personal enrichment and solicited bribes whenever they could; and the passively corrupt, who turned a blind eye and traded acquiescence for influence. In Royko's opinion, formed over four decades as an extremely well-connected reporter, it was impossible to accrue power any other way...

Well, I think that they've got it mostly wrong. The governor's shenanigans have made the news for years now and we have turned a deaf ear, believing that, perhaps, the Illinois Constitution mandates that corruption and Springfield go hand-in-glove. Incredibly, Governor Blagojevich was re-elected in the midst of numerous allegations of wrongdoing, but now, with the Feds following the scent, the politically correct view is to hang Blagojevich out to dry. The herd mentality of the press is simply amazing - it is a wonder that anything original makes it nowadays. Next we'll be hearing "kill the pig, spill his blood"!

Mike Royko would have stated, in unequivocal terms, that the blame lies squarely with the voters of Illinois. The Founding Fathers (and Abe as well) are rolling over in their graves. We have runaway governments in Chicago, Springfield and across this nation.

We in Illinois (and in the United States) have received the government that we deserve.

Mike Royko, anti-Christ?

Well if former Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic fancied himself Jesus Christ and his precinct captains the disciples then Mike Royko, anti-Christ is only fitting!

Read Ray Hanania's article in the Southwest News-Herald...

Where's Ours, Revisited - President-elect Obama

From the transcript of President-elect Obama's third press conference.

"All right. Where's Andy Shaw?. We're going local here. Andy, you back there somewhere? There you are. All right.

Q Let me ask you a question on behalf of local political reporters all over the country. As you know, mayors and county board presidents and governors are facing budgets that are hemorrhaging from this economic downturn, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're faced with layoffs and tax increases they don't want to impose. And they're kind of wondering, to paraphrase the late, great Mike Royko: Where's ours?

What in your plan speaks to the needs of governmental bodies? They're not Main Street, they're not Wall Street, they're not the U.S. Capitol; but they're Randolph and LaSalle, which is City Hall, and they're 2nd and Capitol, where you worked for eight years in Springfield. Hundreds of your friends are wondering what you're going to do, because they're in desperate straits from the standpoint of their budgets.

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: Well, look, this is an important point. And it's one that I addressed during the campaign and is implicit in the economic recovery plan that I talked about yesterday and that I talked about on Saturday in my weekly address.

We are going to have to make sure that we are investing in roads, bridges, other infrastructure investments that lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth. A lot of that goes through our states and our local governments.

And one of the things that we're going to also want to make sure of is that as part of our economic plan, that we are fast-tracking some of these projects. And so the best way for us to do that may be in some cases to see what's -- what projects are already being undertaken by state and local governments, and making sure that they have the funds to continue those projects.

So we're going to be working very closely with governors. We're going to be working very closely with mayors of towns, small and large, across the country. This economic recovery plan will require their input, their participation. And you know, part of our job is to make sure that we are listening to what's happening on the ground, where the rubber hits the road, and not simply designing something out of Washington.

Now, this raises one other important point, though. Part of the charge of Peter and Rob and the rest of our budget team is to make sure that we are proceeding on projects and investments based on national priorities and not based on politics. You mentioned sort of my friends. I want to be clear; friendship doesn't into this. That's part of the old way of doing business.

The new way of doing business is, let's figure out what projects, what investments are going to give the American economy the most bang for the buck; how can we protect taxpayer dollars, so that this money is not wasted; restore a sense of confidence among taxpayers that when we spend our money, it's on things that are actually going to improve their quality of life, create the jobs that are so desperately needed, help to spur on economic growth and business creation in the private sector. That's all part of the new way of doing business."

Read Lynn Sweet's Sun-Times article...

Interview with Rick Kogan

"You don’t read Kogan as much as listen to him, as if in front of a fireplace on the eve of the unknown. His smoker’s voice crackles with wit and warmth, his world filled with nostalgia and wonder, yet it is belied by the cynicism endemic to anyone who makes a career out of distilling the truth from the nonsense. Which is why what he’s telling you is so personal, so intimate."

From an article by Robert Duffer of the Chicago Literary Scene Examiner - onward...

Veteran's Day - Another Take

"At the urging of the social studies department at which time I was chair, we petitioned the state of Illinois to have school on Veterans Day, because it was a holiday and you had to petition to have school," recalled Jirkovsky at the event. "We were one of the first schools to do that in the whole Chicagoland area and other schools now have picked up the idea and copied what we're doing. Having a day off, kids sleep until noon and have no concept of what it was and what it's for."

Jirkovsky, a veteran himself, said that he and his fellow teachers were inspired by a newspaper column by the late Mike Royko.

Read the entire story from the Riverside/Brookfield Landmark...

Ubi Est Mea?

I always knew that it's easier to get a loan from a bank for $800 million than $800, but I didn't realize, until know, that the bar was set so low to get $800 billion from our government.

That a decision precipitated by fear and panic led to putting $800 billion dollars under the sole direction of a couple of individuals, whose roots are established in the financial sector, is preposterous. It is a classic example of the fox guarding the henhouse, but with the added dimension of sticker shock.

Implementation of this plan was heralded as being necessary to both prevent an economic meltdown and protect the interests of the taxpayers. But, it seems "bait and switch" occurs not only with fly-by-night Internet merchants, but at the highest levels of our government. The taxpaying public can now rest assured knowing that a large part of the $800 billion will go into that terrestrial black hole, commonly known as the stock market.

When one considers that the combined wealth of the individuals on the US Forbes 400 list is slightly more than the $800 billion that is being squandered, it brings this fiasco into a different light. Imagine the creativity, hard work, dedication and time required by those individuals and their organizations to create that wealth.

And we will kiss it goodbye in one fell swoop...

It brings back memories of that famous line uttered by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon - 'nuff said.

Bailout Nation...

Veteran's Day - Royko Style

"I wanted to offer up my favorite Veterans Day article from the late, great Mike Royko (1932 - 1997) who penned it in 1993. I don't care if you were a paratrooper, cook, medic, grunt, pilot, or ran the laundry and bath point, you have my thanks for serving our country.

I think Mike's got the right idea about how to celebrate Veterans Day, GI-Style:"

Read the Blackfive article...

Race in the Race

"Twenty-five years ago, fabled columnist Mike Royko calmed his Uncle Chester by assuring him that Harold Washington had no intention of marrying his daughter."

Read the HuffPost column by Jim Ylisela...

Read the Winston-Salem Journal column by Scott Sexton...

Studs Terkel Passes

Here's my Studs Terkel story:

My "Aunt Elfy", a feisty woman in her eighties, lived alone in a non-descript high-rise on Marine Drive during the mid 1990s. She had lived alone for a long time after the death of her husband of several decades. She loved classical music and often listened to Stud's radio show. Aunt Elfy was not in good physical shape, but she managed her own affairs and took the CTA bus here and there for necessary appointments. Friends and family would not dare imply that she could use some assistance and a slip on the ice or an occasional fall only made her more resilient.

I visited her now and then at her small apartment - not often enough. Though she was a fine pianist in her time, age and arthritis had taken their toll. But when the spirit moved her, she tickled the ivories with passion. We argued warmly about classical music and she laughed when I (often) mispronounced the name of a famous composer. She was a prolific baker and I always indulged.

She told me, during numerous chats, of seeing Studs Terkel on the CTA bus and his usual practice of taking a seat next to her. They talked about music, Chicago, Israel and perhaps growing old. She had never met Studs before these shared rides, but she enjoyed his company immensely and a warm smile came to her face when she spoke of their chance encounters.

About a decade ago, I came to her apartment for the final time. A police notice was hanging from the door. Aunt Elfy died quietly, as quietly as she had lived. Her dream, beside being reunited with her husband, was for peace in the Middle East.

Studs Terkel recently passed on, at the ripe age of 96. I have read that Studs had wished to live long enough to see Barack Obama elected President.

Let's hope that their dreams and wishes will unite... Godspeed

Royko at Riverview

Steve Lundeberg, Associate Editor of the Albany Democrat Herald, recounts an early column of Mike's about the parachute ride at Riverview, the great Chitown amusement park of lore. The column is vintage Mike and I'll not blow the zinger.

Rediscovering Royko...

Pictures of the Riverview Pair-o-Chutes ride - fifth image...

More Pair-o-Chutes Pictures...

Royko for President

An interesting couple of articles by journalist Kevin Frisch.

The campaign that never was...

Little-known presidential candidates came up short in 1992...