Snapshots of American Life in the ‘80s

Cheeseburgers, the Best of Bob Greene by Bob Greene (Atheneum: $13.95)

At an age when many of his contemporaries were hitchhiking to California or arguing to outraged parents that candle making was as noble a calling as medicine or law, Bob Greene was already writing a major newspaper column.

Fifteen years later, he’s a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a monthly contributor to Esquire and a regular on ABC-TV’s “Nightline.” He’s also published eight books, four of them column compilations. “Cheeseburgers” collects six dozen recent pieces, ranging from the Cadillac-casketed funeral of a Chicago “professional gambler” to his 96-year-old grandmother’s Playboy Club membership.

Greene has a gift for finding the fresh angle, the offbeat circumstance, the fascinating story begging to be written. It’s a pity, then, that he’s not a more accomplished prose stylist, or even simply in less of a hurry. He calls these pieces “snapshots of life in America in the ‘80s” and many are just that: fast takes as he darts from one airport to another, racing to the next journalistic fix. (One of the most intriguing, “Strangers on a Plane,” actually occurred in transit.) But like many pictures taken on the run, these snapshots sometimes have a slightly blurred unfocused quality.

A Journalistic Everyman

The Ohio-born-and-reared Greene is a sort of journalistic Everyman, with a strong Midwestern sensibility that goes far beyond his self-admitted reluctance at “Doing the Eastern Shuttle.” Many pieces are drawn from personal experience, and he’s often at a story’s center.

Greene’s limitless curiosity leads him in wonderful directions. He takes the SATs again, noting that: “I believe I was the only student to go to the water fountain and take an Inderal for his blood pressure.” He returns to the baby-shoe-bronzing factory that his father once ran. He watches the original Playboy Mansion lose its sybaritic idiosyncrasies to become a student dorm. He dines with rock star Alice Cooper, now a Chicago suburbanite who accompanies his daughter to Sunday school. He visits the factory where Trojans are made.

Greene is not reluctant to ask the dumb or obvious question, which can work to great advantage. In “Nixon on Nixon,” the book’s longest piece, the former President reveals, among other things, that he’s never watched himself on TV and didn’t even let Bebe Rebozo call him Richard or Dick during his presidency.

Roots of Ambition

In “Cut,” Greene finds possible roots for his own burning ambition in the humiliating experience of being cut from the junior high basketball team, discovering that the experience was shared by other driven and successful men, including Dan Rather. It’s a fascinating concept. At the same time, “Cut” begins: “I remember vividly the last time I cried. I was twelve. . . .” That’s a staggering admission in this age of self-conscious male sensitivity. But as last year’s best-selling “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine: A Father’s Journal of His Daughter’s First Year” amply demonstrated, Greene is not afraid to paint himself in an unflattering light.

Greene is probably at his weakest when expounding on “his generation,” though he’s often been hailed as its spokesman. Perhaps it’s inevitable that a fast-tracker in a well-established journalistic niche should be handed such a mantle. But it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to speak for a generation as complex and fragmented as the one known variously as the Baby Boom, hippies, the Me Generation and yuppies, a term Greene is widely credited with coining and for which he will someday have to answer to a Higher Authority.

Still, Bob Greene is a talented storyteller with an acute eye and ear, and “Cheeseburgers” is a comfortable friendly book, crammed with interesting characters, places and situations.