How Roger Ebert got his start

In the chaos of the Chicago Sun-Times city room, says the famous film critic, I met my heroes and found my fate

FOR A KID from downstate, Chicago was the great city over the horizon. We read Chicago's newspapers and listened to its powerful AM radio stations. Long after midnight I listened to Jack Eigen on WMAQ, broadcasting live from the Chez Paree, chatting with Martin and Lewis or Rosemary Clooney. Thomas Wolfe had taught me that my destiny waited in New York, but Chicago was obviously the first step on my path.

I walked up Wabash Avenue to the Sun-Times/Daily News Building, which looked like a snub-nosed ship on the banks of the Chicago River. A boat was moored at its dock, and a crane was offloading huge rolls of newsprint. Editors Jim Hoge and Ken Towers took me out the back way to lunch at Riccardo's and offered me a job. I would work under Dick Takeuchi, the editor of the paper's Sunday magazine. He was a cigar smoker, calm, confiding, tactfully showing a green kid the ropes. He gave me a desk close to his, in the back row of the city room. At lunch I began joining Takeuchi and Jack McPhaul, the magazine's copy editor, who wrote Deadlines and Monkeyshines, the best account of the Front Page era, when the Chicago dailies went at each other with hammer and tongs and hit men. He was my living connection to that era.

When Friday of my first week came around, I joined a general emigration to Riccardo's, where reporters from all four Chicago papers gathered to gobble free hors d'oeuvres. I felt a glow of camaraderie. I knew I lacked authenticity in this company. I was young and unseasoned, but I discovered there was nothing like drinking with the crowd to make you a member. I copied the idealism and cynicism of the reporters I met at Riccardo's and around the corner at the downscale but equally famous Billy Goat's. I spoke like they did, laughed at the same things, felt that I belonged.

At about 6 p.m. on New Year's Day of 1967, only two lights on the fourth floor were burning — mine and Mike Royko's. It was too early for the graveyard shift to come in. Royko walked over to the Sun-Times to see who else was working. A historic snowstorm was beginning. He asked me how I was getting home. I said I'd take the train. He said he had his old man's Checker car and would drop me at the L station. He had to make a stop at a 24-hour drugstore right where the L crossed North Avenue.

Royko at 35 was already the city's most famous newspaperman, known for complex emotions evoked with unadorned prose in short paragraphs. Growing up as the son of a saloon keeper, he knew how the city worked from the precinct level up, and had first attracted attention while covering city hall. He was 10 years older than me and had started at the old City News Bureau, the cooperative supported by all the dailies that provided front-line coverage of the police and fire departments. Underpaid and overworked kids worked under the hand of its editor, Arnold Dornfeld, who sat beneath a sign reading: IF YOUR MOTHER SAYS SHE LOVES YOU, CHECK IT OUT. When I met Royko, he'd been writing his Daily News column for two years. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and spoke in a gravelly poker player's voice. He drank too much, which to me was an accomplishment.

That snowy night the all-night drugstore was crowded. "Come on, kid," he said.

"Let's have a drink at the eye-opener place." He told me what an eye-opener was. "This place opens early. The working guys around here, they stop in for a quick shot on their way to the L." It was a bar under the tracks so tiny that the bartender could serve everyone without leaving his stool. "Two blackberry brandies and short beers," Royko said. He told me, "Blackberry brandy is good for hangovers. You never get charged for a beer chaser." I sipped the brandy, and a warm glow filled my stomach. It may have been the first straight shot of anything I'd ever tasted. I'd been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in the eye-opener place. I was a newspaperman. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.

"Jeez, they're scoring like crazy!" I said, after the third goal in less than a minute.

"Where you from, kid?"

"Urbana," I said.

"Ever seen a hockey game?"

"No."

"That's what I thought, you a--hole. Those are the game highlights."

I began to be welcome in Royko's cubicle. It amused him to explain the obvious to the downstate kid. He wrote on an old manual typewriter — not his own, just one from the office pool. His office was filled with newspapers, books, letters, coffee cups, ashtrays, and ties that he had taken off and thrown in the corner. He sat in a swivel chair with his back to the river, and there was a straight-backed chair for his visitors. He had a lot of visitors. Mike could have written his column at any time from anywhere and his editors would have been happy to have it, but he spent eight hours a day, sometimes longer, at the paper. He was the soul of the Daily News and the honorary soul, by osmosis, of the Sun-Times. No journalist in Chicago was more admired.