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Mary And Joe, Chicago Style
May 04, 1997|By Mike Royko. A CHRISTMAS STORY. CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, DEC. 19, 1967.
Royko on this column: I remember one column I started in 1963 and didn't finish for about four years. It was going to be a Christmas column. Each year, I'd take it out, look at it and throw it back in the drawer. In 1966, I finally decided to use it. I'd rewritten it about 10 times. Still didn't like it.
That column wound up being used in school plays, church plays, sermons. It was known as my Mary and Joe column. It became so popular that I think I reran it every Christmas Eve for 25 years. I still don't like the column.
Mary and Joe were flat broke when they got off the bus in Chicago. They didn't know anybody and she was expecting a baby.
They went to a cheap hotel. But the clerk jerked his thumb at the door when they couldn't show a day's rent in advance.
They walked the streets until they saw a police station. The desk sergeant said they couldn't sleep in a cell, but he told them how to get to a welfare office.
A man there said they couldn't get regular assistance because they hadn't been Illinois residents long enough. But he gave them the address of the emergency welfare office on the West Side.
It was a two-mile walk up Madison Street. Someone gave them a card with a number on it and they sat down on a bench, stared at the peeling green paint and waited for their number to be called.
Two hours later, a caseworker motioned them forward, took out blank forms and asked questions: Any relatives? Any means of getting money? Any assets?
Joe said he owned a donkey. The caseworker told him not to get smart or he'd be thrown out. Joe said he was sorry.
The caseworker finished the forms and said they were entitled to emergency CTA fare to County Hospital because of Mary's condition. And he told Joe to go to an Urban Progress Center for occupational guidance.
Joe thanked him and they took a bus to the hospital. A guard told them to wait on a bench. They waited two hours, and then Mary got pains and they took her away. Someone told Joe to come back tomorrow.
He went outside and asked a stranger on the street for directions to an Urban Progress Center. The stranger hit Joe on the head and took his overcoat. Joe was still lying there when a paddy wagon came along so they pinched him for being drunk on the street.
Mary had a baby boy during the night. She didn't know it, but three foreign-looking men in strange, colorful robes came to the hospital asking about her and the baby. A guard took them for hippies and called the police. They found odd spices on the men so the narcotics detail took them downtown for further questioning.
The next day Mary awoke in a crowded ward. She asked for Joe. Instead, a representative of the Planned Parenthood Committee came by to give her a lecture on birth control.
Next, a social worker came for her case history. She asked Mary who the father was. Mary answered and the social worker ran for the nurse. The nurse questioned her and Mary answered. The nurse stared at her and ran for the doctor. The doctor wrote "Postpartum delusion" on her chart.
An ambulance took Mary to the Cook County Mental Health Clinic the next morning. A psychiatrist asked her questions and pursed his lips at the answers.
A hearing was held and a magistrate committed her to the Chicago State Hospital.
Joe got out of the House of Corrections a couple of days later and went to the County Hospital for Mary. They told him she was at Chicago State and the baby had been placed in a foster home by the state Department of Children and Family Services.
When Joe got to Chicago State, a doctor told him what Mary had said about the baby's birth. Joe said Mary was telling the truth. They put Joe in a ward at the other end of the hospital.
Meanwhile, the three strangely dressed foreign-looking men were released after the narcotics detail could find no laws prohibiting the possession of myrrh and frankincense. They returned to the hospital and were taken for civil rights demonstrators. They were held in the County Jail on $100,000 bond.
By luck, Joe and Mary met on the hospital grounds. They decided to tell the doctors what they wanted to hear. The next day they were declared sane and were released.
When they applied for custody of Mary's baby, however, they were told it was necessary for them to first establish a proper residence, earn a proper income and create a suitable environment.
They applied at the Urban Progress Center for training under the Manpower Development Program. Joe said he was good at working with wood. He was assigned to a computer data-processing class. Mary said she'd gladly do domestic work. She was assigned to a course in key-punch operating. Both got $20-a-week stipends.
Several months later they finished the training. Joe got a job in a gas station and Mary went to work as a waitress.
They saved their money and hired a lawyer. Another custody hearing was held and several days later the baby was ordered returned to them.
Reunited finally, they got back to their two-room flat and met the landlord on the steps. He told them Urban Renewal had ordered the building torn down. The City Relocation Bureau would get them another place.
They packed, dressed the baby and hurried to the Greyhound bus station.
Joe asked the ticket man when the next bus was leaving.
"Where to?" the ticket man asked.
"Anywhere," Joe said, "as long as it is right now."
He gave Joe three tickets and in five minutes they were on a bus heading for southern Illinois--the area known as "Little Egypt."
Just as the bus pulled out, the three strangely dressed men ran into the station. But they were too late. The bus was gone.
So they started hiking down U.S. 66. But at last report they were pinched on suspicion of being foreigners in illegal possession of gold.
So long, Chicago
This collection of Mike Royko's writing is headlined "So long, Chicago" because that was the headline on the last edition of Royko's beloved Chicago Daily News. The Daily News--the people who worked there and those who played for its renowned 16-inch softball team that Royko managed and pitched for--was his extended family. When the paper ceased publication on March 4, 1978, it was one of the saddest days in Royko's 40-plus years as a newsman and left a void he was never able to fill.
Probably my favorite Christmas column ever. My mind goes back to one of the writers that most influenced my thinking in my formative years, Mike Royko. I read this column to my mom when I got home from school, to my dad later in the day. Merry Christmas!
Mary And Joe, Chicago Style - Chicago Tribune
Harshest critic:
Mary And Joe, Chicago Style
May 04, 1997|By Mike Royko. A CHRISTMAS STORY. CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, DEC. 19, 1967.
Royko on this column: I remember one column I started in 1963 and didn't finish for about four years. It was going to be a Christmas column. Each year, I'd take it out, look at it and throw it back in the drawer. In 1966, I finally decided to use it. I'd rewritten it about 10 times. Still didn't like it.
That column wound up being used in school plays, church plays, sermons. It was known as my Mary and Joe column. It became so popular that I think I reran it every Christmas Eve for 25 years. I still don't like the column.
Mary and Joe were flat broke when they got off the bus in Chicago. They didn't know anybody and she was expecting a baby.
They went to a cheap hotel. But the clerk jerked his thumb at the door when they couldn't show a day's rent in advance.
They walked the streets until they saw a police station. The desk sergeant said they couldn't sleep in a cell, but he told them how to get to a welfare office.
A man there said they couldn't get regular assistance because they hadn't been Illinois residents long enough. But he gave them the address of the emergency welfare office on the West Side.
It was a two-mile walk up Madison Street. Someone gave them a card with a number on it and they sat down on a bench, stared at the peeling green paint and waited for their number to be called.
Two hours later, a caseworker motioned them forward, took out blank forms and asked questions: Any relatives? Any means of getting money? Any assets?
Joe said he owned a donkey. The caseworker told him not to get smart or he'd be thrown out. Joe said he was sorry.
The caseworker finished the forms and said they were entitled to emergency CTA fare to County Hospital because of Mary's condition. And he told Joe to go to an Urban Progress Center for occupational guidance.
Joe thanked him and they took a bus to the hospital. A guard told them to wait on a bench. They waited two hours, and then Mary got pains and they took her away. Someone told Joe to come back tomorrow.
He went outside and asked a stranger on the street for directions to an Urban Progress Center. The stranger hit Joe on the head and took his overcoat. Joe was still lying there when a paddy wagon came along so they pinched him for being drunk on the street.
Mary had a baby boy during the night. She didn't know it, but three foreign-looking men in strange, colorful robes came to the hospital asking about her and the baby. A guard took them for hippies and called the police. They found odd spices on the men so the narcotics detail took them downtown for further questioning.
The next day Mary awoke in a crowded ward. She asked for Joe. Instead, a representative of the Planned Parenthood Committee came by to give her a lecture on birth control.
Next, a social worker came for her case history. She asked Mary who the father was. Mary answered and the social worker ran for the nurse. The nurse questioned her and Mary answered. The nurse stared at her and ran for the doctor. The doctor wrote "Postpartum delusion" on her chart.
An ambulance took Mary to the Cook County Mental Health Clinic the next morning. A psychiatrist asked her questions and pursed his lips at the answers.
A hearing was held and a magistrate committed her to the Chicago State Hospital.
Joe got out of the House of Corrections a couple of days later and went to the County Hospital for Mary. They told him she was at Chicago State and the baby had been placed in a foster home by the state Department of Children and Family Services.
When Joe got to Chicago State, a doctor told him what Mary had said about the baby's birth. Joe said Mary was telling the truth. They put Joe in a ward at the other end of the hospital.
Meanwhile, the three strangely dressed foreign-looking men were released after the narcotics detail could find no laws prohibiting the possession of myrrh and frankincense. They returned to the hospital and were taken for civil rights demonstrators. They were held in the County Jail on $100,000 bond.
By luck, Joe and Mary met on the hospital grounds. They decided to tell the doctors what they wanted to hear. The next day they were declared sane and were released.
When they applied for custody of Mary's baby, however, they were told it was necessary for them to first establish a proper residence, earn a proper income and create a suitable environment.
They applied at the Urban Progress Center for training under the Manpower Development Program. Joe said he was good at working with wood. He was assigned to a computer data-processing class. Mary said she'd gladly do domestic work. She was assigned to a course in key-punch operating. Both got $20-a-week stipends.
Several months later they finished the training. Joe got a job in a gas station and Mary went to work as a waitress.
They saved their money and hired a lawyer. Another custody hearing was held and several days later the baby was ordered returned to them.
Reunited finally, they got back to their two-room flat and met the landlord on the steps. He told them Urban Renewal had ordered the building torn down. The City Relocation Bureau would get them another place.
They packed, dressed the baby and hurried to the Greyhound bus station.
Joe asked the ticket man when the next bus was leaving.
"Where to?" the ticket man asked.
"Anywhere," Joe said, "as long as it is right now."
He gave Joe three tickets and in five minutes they were on a bus heading for southern Illinois--the area known as "Little Egypt."
Just as the bus pulled out, the three strangely dressed men ran into the station. But they were too late. The bus was gone.
So they started hiking down U.S. 66. But at last report they were pinched on suspicion of being foreigners in illegal possession of gold.
So long, Chicago
This collection of Mike Royko's writing is headlined "So long, Chicago" because that was the headline on the last edition of Royko's beloved Chicago Daily News. The Daily News--the people who worked there and those who played for its renowned 16-inch softball team that Royko managed and pitched for--was his extended family. When the paper ceased publication on March 4, 1978, it was one of the saddest days in Royko's 40-plus years as a newsman and left a void he was never able to fill.
This article was originally published in GQ in March 1985.
They were drinking their dinner in a joint outside Chicago. It was just Mike Royko and his pal, Big Shack, and whatever their bleary musings happened to be that night three years ago. They probably never even gave a thought to the fact that they were in Niles, Illinois, which qualifies as a suburb and therefore should have been treated by Royko as if it were jock itch. But Niles is where a lot of the Milwaukee Avenue Poles he grew up with fled when they started finding themselves living next door to neighbors named Willie and Jose. So this was shot-and-a-beer territory after all. The only thing it lacked was a DO NOT DISTURB sign.
“Hey, you’re Mike Royko!”
It happens to him all the time even though newspaper guys are supposed to be bylines, not recognizable faces with bald heads, crooked smiles and ski-jump noses. How Royko, who is a baggy-pants character no matter what he wears, cracked the celebrity lineup is no mystery, though. Nor is it a tribute to the tiny picture of him that has decorated his column in each of the three Chicago papers he has worked for. The secret is words. The words that in 1971 paid off with a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper commentary and a best-selling book called Boss, in which he dissected Mayor Richard J. Daley. The words that now appear, via syndication, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, and 223 other papers. The words that always have originated in his hometown, Chicago, five times a week, year after year after year.
“I’ve read you all my life.”
Royko’s admirer was male, white, crowding 40, with a pretty wife who quickly made it known that she was a more voracious reader than her husband. Soon the three of them were so wrapped up in one another that they failed to notice Big Shack, all 220 pounds of him, lumber off to the can. But Big Shack is important to this story, first, because he is the source of it, and second, because he returned just in time to save Royko.
“The guy was choking Mike,” Big Shack says. “I guess his wife had gotten a little too friendly, and Mike, well, you know Mike. So there I was, peeling the guy’s fingers off Mike’s throat one at a time.”
Big Shack can laugh about it now.
“What can I tell you? In ten minutes Mike went from hero to bad guy.”
It wasn’t his maiden voyage.
***
He jumped to the Chicago Tribune last year, and there was such a stir in town that you would have thought Carl Sandburg had come back to life, strumming his guitar the way he used to in the city room of the old Daily News.
Royko wasn’t a Tribune guy. Since the first day he called himself a columnist he had been making fun of the dowager that once billed itself as “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” He liked to count the harrumphs of its pompous editors and wonder if there was a heaven for its late publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who was, in the backhanded estimation of one critic, “the finest mind of the twelfth century.” The Trib was where they put a full-color editorial cartoon on the front page as late as 1970 and where Genghis Khan could have hired on as a political pundit if he had been around to apply for the job.
Even when the paper finally conceded that arch-conservatism wasn’t necessarily the truth nor cluttered pages the light, it remained a bastion of smugness and complacency. “l‘II never work there,” Mike Royko said. Again and again and again. But Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron who made his fortune in tabloids, forced him to go back on his word.
Murdoch forked over $100 million for the Chicago Sun-Times last year and, in the words of an editorial writer who fled, “sodomized it.” Royko, for six years the paper’s linchpin and lifeblood, was gone before he had to say ouch, though it took a court ruling to release him from a $300,000-a-year contract forged with the Sun-Times’ previous ownership. No sooner was he safely at the Trib, however, than his name was taken in vain by those he left behind.
They didn’t want to hear Studs Terkel, Mike’s friend and the nation’s foremost oral historian, tell them that “the Tribune was the lesser of two evils.” They watched Royko plead his case against the intruder he called “the Alien” on every TV newscast in town; they heard him warn Phil Donahue’s dewy-eyed female audience that “no self-respecting fish” would be wrapped in a Murdoch rag; and, though the name-calling was priceless, they felt cheapened as a result.
“Mike was getting out while the rest of us were stuck,” says a reporter who worked with Royko at both the Sun-Times and Daily News. “All he cared about was himself. Everybody else could go shit in their hats. I’ll tell you one thing: He used to be my hero, but he isn’t anymore.”
Royko says he doesn’t care. He might even be telling the truth. He mutters that he would have gone on strike with the Newspaper Guild at the Sun-Times long before Murdoch bought it, but the Guild members, for their part, would never have sacrificed one day’s pay to get him a fatter contract. “Ah, what the hell,” he says at last, and orders another Lite beer—“Nah, make it a Beck’s this time”—and lights another Pall Mall.
***
It was a different business when he started. Probably a better one, too. Never mind that the Tribune props him up like a Ming vase now. If he were 22 instead of 52 and he walked in the door with the credentials he had at the beginning, the fat cats there would send him packing. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happened back then. And there were repeat performances at the Sun-Times and Hearst’s American. But the Daily News, where numerous Pulitzer Prizes decorated the newsroom and foreign correspondents weren’t begrudged their trench coats, hired Royko anyway in 1959. Nobody seemed to care that he was a high-school dropout who only later got a diploma and acquired his world view as an usher at the Chicago Theater and a stockboy at Marshall Field’s department store. He could do a job; that was all that mattered. He had been a reporter on a chain of weeklies in the city and had served honorably at the City News Bureau, long the proving grounds for Chicago newspapermen, and he was ready.
“What the fuck did anybody at those other places know?” Royko says. “I doubt if they’d ever read The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo.”
Royko had.
...
