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Poor David Duke. The former Ku Klux Klan leader had taken plenty of heat in his 1991 campaign for governor of Louisiana--but he got special grief from Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko and his friend Mortie, a drinking buddy from the old neighborhood.

Irked that a TV interviewer had treated Duke too fairly, Royko reached into his grab bag of fictional Chicago characters, imagining what Mortie might say to the candidate:

“So, you used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, huh, kid? And wear swastikas and you said that Jews should be dumped in the ash bin of history? Well, I’m Jewish and I fought in the Marines in World War II, and I noticed you skipped Vietnam, and I can still do a hundred fast push-ups. So when the show’s over, why don’t we meet in a dark alley somewhere and I’ll give you a reverse face-lift, you two-bit fascist.”

It was vintage Royko, a blast of anger from the blue-collar streets he knew so well, and Chicago will miss him: His gritty, belligerent voice was stilled Tuesday, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist died at 64 after undergoing surgery for a brain aneurysm.

Speaking for millions, author Studs Terkel said: “Mike was Chicago. He did it all, and someday in the future, when people are trying to understand the city and the meaning of political power, they will have to turn to Mike. He knew the turf better than anybody.”

Beyond the tributes to Royko, however, a different obituary might be in order.

Although columnists continue to flourish at newspapers across the country, Royko typified a generation of journalists who captured the unique personalities of the cities they covered. In recent years, the newspaper world has also lost Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle and Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times. Another giant, Jimmy Breslin, remains active as an author but no longer writes the bare-knuckled column that defined tabloid New York.

The passing of these writers from the scene leaves a void. Yet it is not because other journalists aren’t laboring, sometimes brilliantly, to carry on their tradition. In a media age saturated with pundits and opinion-makers, there is no shortage of daily commentary.

Royko, Breslin, Caen and Smith excelled because of their ability to convey, even personify, the distinctive character of their hometowns. And their loss dramatizes not a fading of strong column-writing, but a fading of the uniqueness of America’s cities.

Today, the identities of the cities reflected by each of these columnists are vanishing, replaced by a disturbing homogenization of American life. The rat-a-tat downtowns they described live on, but are increasingly dwarfed by the strip malls, fast-food franchises and quaint shopping districts that make cities seem alike from coast to coast.

“These older columnists deserve their own Mt. Rushmore, and I don’t think we’ll see people like them again,” says Jim Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune, who hired Royko away from the rival Sun-Times in 1984. “Nobody wrote Chicago like Royko, nobody reflected the pace of New York better than Breslin, and for a long time Herb Caen was San Francisco.

“But how could one person reflect a city like that today? And where do you find the real heart and soul of these towns? They’ve changed; they’re not the places we remember.”

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For years, Royko was the top dog of Chicago journalism. Speaking for himself and through his fictional characters, he reflected the anxieties and triumphs of people who lived in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, far from the wealthy high-rises bordering Lake Michigan. Even after he moved to suburban Winnetka, he was a voice of blue-collar conscience and common sense.

He also offended ethnic minorities, gays, feminists and others, sometimes sparking demonstrations in front of Tribune Tower. His celebrity was intact, but the ground underneath his feet was shifting, as it has in so many other cities.

“A lot of the changes involving columnists deal with demographics,” says Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “The downtowns they spoke for don’t exist now, since people moved to the suburbs. Different people live there now.”

People who don’t look, talk or necessarily think like Royko, Breslin, Caen or Smith.

“As a result,” Bagdikian continues, “the traditional personality of a city begins to dim. New York isn’t New York like it was 40 years ago. Today, it’s midtown, it’s uptown, it’s Scarsdale and New Jersey.”

*

In Los Angeles, the search for urban personality is even more difficult. When he started his column in 1958, Smith faced a unique challenge: How do you capture the essence of a place that has no center, unlike New York, Chicago and San Francisco? His genius was to comprehend that suburban sprawl is its own poetry, and that the soul of Los Angeles--as Times columnist Robert Jones once noted--lies in its backyards and patios, not in its big public places.

For years, Smith’s wry, skeptical observations about the minutiae of everyday life delighted millions. And at a time when Los Angeles was developing its own persona, his formula worked. Yet in the jarring aftermath of the 1992 riots, the plagues of fire, flood and earthquake, how could any one columnist possibly speak for all of Southern California?

“The older columnists had a chemistry with ‘place’ that’s hard to find now, and this says less about generations than how communities are changing,” says Times columnist Peter H. King. “Try to write about Los Angeles or New York today. Which Los Angeles? Which New York?

“Go to Old Town Pasadena now, and you’ll see the same stores there as on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in Union Square in San Francisco and in midtown Manhattan. It’s become unicity.”

In San Francisco, Caen railed against this process, reminding readers that their city once had special charms and a fragile soul. But demographics betrayed him; as he continued to pour out a stream of nostalgia, the people who read his columns must have been puzzled. Most of them weren’t alive, let alone living in the city, during the glory years Caen described.

“Sometimes, she gets on my nerves,” he wrote about his city. “For a dame who has been around the block more times than I care to think about, she can be dumber than a poker player who draws to four kings and an ace. Maybe that’s because she has forgotten how special she was, and can still be, when the lights are just right and the savage ravages don’t show.”

For Breslin in New York, the working stiffs of Queens and Brooklyn loyally read his columns, which appeared in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday until 1995. Once, when rich white commuters began attacking the “quality” of other subway riders, he erupted:

“We have had enough of these cheap looters who ride in here from Connecticut and Westchester each day, grab money they never would earn in the places where they live, and then, without a trace of class, wring their hands over the condition of the city, its transit system and the people of the city who ride on it.”

The trouble is, those commuters are precisely the readers papers want to attract. And as cities fracture into so many groups, some columnists say the best way to capture an audience is to target one community. Anna Quindlen’s New York Times column, for example, was chiefly addressed to working women in their 30s and 40s, and it spawned imitators nationwide.

Is that, then, the future of column-writing?

“Newspapers in general are in a battle for relevance,” says Squires, “and I think you’ll always have columnists of excellence. But there are many different communities out there, and papers have to decide if they’re going to be real players and weigh in on every issue, or go for the big picture and simply package information. They have to make difficult choices.”

*

For Royko, the choice was clear. He didn’t much care what anyone thought about his opinions, and he reveled in the sparks that flew from his battered typewriter. As with Caen, Breslin and Smith, a special city lived on in his mind, and ultimately it didn’t matter that modern life had blurred--or even erased--the landscape that filled his columns.

Did he care who won the 1985 Super Bowl? Hell no, said the Voice of Chicago.

“Neither Miami nor San Francisco is a real football city,” groused Royko, in a backhanded compliment to the town he loved. “In other words, smokestack cities, cities of tattoos, broken noses, missing teeth, bottle scars, shots, beers and soot-covered snow.”

He’d get an argument from his fellow columnists, but it would be friendly. Royko, Smith and Caen periodically socialized with each other, and one can imagine them up in heaven now: Caen trying to find Royko a decent bar. Smith wincing at the La-La jokes. They’ve got war stories to tell each other, and memories of America’s big cities to keep them busy for a long time.

The rest of us are on our own.

* More information about Mike Royko, including obituaries, 100 of his columns, audio files and a message board, can be found on the Internet at https://www.chicago.tribune.com/news/royko/obit/htm.