Mike Royko; Chicago Newspaper Columnist

Mike Royko, the ornery chronicler of an often ornery town, died Tuesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications following a brain aneurysm. He was 64.

Royko had suffered a stroke in early April and last week underwent surgery for the aneurysm, a rupture or weakening of a blood vessel.

In nearly 34 years as a columnist at one or another of Chicago’s daily newspapers, Royko represented in print the views of the lunch-bucket white ethnic, long after he’d moved his own family to the wealthy northern suburb of Winnetka. He managed to continue offending powerful politicians, police, feminists, gays, blacks, Latinos and a certain veteran local television anchor, to list just a few.

In the process, he won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and national acclaim for “Boss,” his biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who had refined machine politics to an art. Despite Royko’s Chicago identity, his column was nationally syndicated, running in about 500 papers.

The words Royko wrote about Daley the day after the pugnacious mayor died in 1976 could have applied just as well to himself: “He wasn’t graceful, suave, witty or smooth. But, then, this is not Paris or San Francisco. He was raucous, sentimental, hot-tempered, practical, simple, devious. . . . This is, after all, Chicago.”

Daley, of course, had regarded Royko as a nemesis. The columnist regularly lampooned the mayor at a time when the rest of the press was considerably more respectful. Once, Royko recalled, the mayor shook his hand by rote in a receiving line, then realized whose hand he was gripping and let go hastily like he’d been holding “a snake.”

But the columnist was merely following a long Chicago tradition of journalistic like-it-or-not bluntness, from Finley Peter Dunne’s column about the opinionated bartender, Mr. Dooley, to Nelson Algren’s love/hate letter to his town, a book called “City on the Make.”

Like them, Royko wrote words refracted through the lens of the guy just a bar stool away. Sometimes he gave the guy a name, Slats Grobnik. Sometimes he played off an equally fictional psychiatrist, Dr. I.M. Kookie. Most often, though, he dispensed with the alter egos and simply presented himself.

He certainly had solid urban blue-collar credentials, having grown up the son of a Ukrainian immigrant who ran the Blue Sky Lounge on Chicago’s west side. The family lived upstairs. As a teenager, Royko’s chores included tending bar and paying off the police sergeant every Saturday morning.

He joined the Air Force at 19, serving as a radio operator. When he was transferred to Chicago’s O’Hare Field, there were no openings for radio men. He wanted to escape being assigned to MP or KP duty, so he talked his way into editing the base newspaper.

After the military, he worked for a group of neighborhood newspapers in Chicago and then for City News Bureau, a local wire service.

In 1959, he joined the Chicago Daily News as a police reporter, entering a world that hadn’t changed much since Ben Hecht’s “Front Page.” Royko has admitted in interviews that he joined his freewheeling colleagues in gaining information by pretense.

“I posed as a deputy coroner,” he told the Washington Post. “I once posed as a female high school principal, in a falsetto voice over the phone.”

In 1962, he began a weekly government column called “County Beat.” In 1963, the Daily News gave him regular space for his own thoughts on whatever subject he chose.

In 1978, the paper folded.

Royko didn’t have to move far for his next job, at the tabloid Sun-Times in the same building. But in 1984, when Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, he proclaimed that “no self-respecting fish” would be wrapped in something published by the new owner. He landed at the Chicago Tribune.

By this time, he was a Chicago institution, having both called the Boss a racist and been called one by the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.

The columnist also would spin sob stories about underdogs in trouble. But mostly he wrote tough, and acted tough too.

Royko threw fists in a bar brawl or two. He smoked, and snarled at colleagues. He was convicted twice of drunken driving--most recently in 1995, when his guilty plea brought a fine of $1,600, two years’ probation and 80 hours of community service.

Royko drew plenty of blood. Last year alone, he set off uproars in the black and Latino communities here.

He wrote about a woman named Maurica Taylor who was falsely accused of being a father negligent in child support payments; the true suspect was named Maurice Taylor. The column started out sympathetic to the woman, but then Royko announced, “I put the blame on Ms. Taylor’s mother. She is the one who decided to name her child Maurica. Some black names defy explanation.”

He went on to muse that “a personnel officer at a corporation might be inclined--all things being equal--to lean toward hiring an accountant named Arthur Smith rather than one named Wanakumba Smith. It just looks neater on a business card.”

He wrote a rare apology for that one.

Later in the year, he decided to explain to readers that “there is no reason for Mexico to be in such a mess except that it is run by Mexicans.” He issued a challenge: “Just name one thing that Mexico has done this century that has been of any genuine use to the rest of this planet. Besides giving us tequila.”

Mexican Americans called for a boycott of the Tribune and its Spanish-language Exito, a free weekly. More than 1,000 protesters rallied at the Tribune Tower.

The speakers gave as good as they’d gotten. “We are protesting against this little man who is nothing more than a drunk and a degenerate,” said the leader of a Mexican students’ group.

The Tribune defended its columnist, releasing a statement that read in part: “It was well within the confines of irony. Anyone who has read Royko over the past 30 years knows that he is not reluctant to speak sharply and sarcastically.”

Royko is survived by his wife, Judy, three sons, a daughter and four grandchildren. His first wife, Carol Duckman, died in 1979.