A WEEKLY COLUMN. A DAILY COLUMN.
The Daily Newspaper Columnist.
Funny, engaging, and irreverent.
Needed badly.
How did they do it? Herb Caen. Jimmy Breslin. Art Buchwald. Mike Royko. Many others. Cranked out a column every day Monday through Friday and sometimes on the weekends.
Yes, they received payment.
Doesn't change the equation of subject matter translated to entertaining prose.
Royko was my favorite. A Midwesterner who wrote for a Chicago daily. In hindsight (Good God, not 2020), Mike Royko emulated Johnny Carson. His politics never entered the column.
If they did they were surrounded by wit, and grit.
He wrote one column that will forever stay with me. During the period when the United States' dominance in the automotive field had been hacked by the Japanese, Royko distilled the issue down to arrogance. Ford, Chrysler, and GM no longer treated their customers well. Mike pointed to the brakes in his Ford Mustang wearing out and needing to be replaced too frequently.
He contacted the motor company several times and received nothing but contempt.
He bought his first Toyota and drove Japanese cars until he died. The sign-off at the end of this column?
"I'll buy a Ford again, I promise . . . just as soon as they fix the brakes in my Mustang."
No disparagement of evil White Monopoly men running Ford.
No groveling to the government of Detroit or Michigan to "fix the problem."
No grandstanding.
Nope. Fix the brakes and we're even.
The world needs more Mike Roykos.
Writers of the "printed" word who remove the animus and bias from their page. Scribes who can get through several paragraphs without allowing their narcissism and contempt to drive the exposition.
And humans who can lift themselves above the noise floor when no one else can.
If 2020 has done anything positive, it has put me in the position of declaring going forward there will be more Mike Royko in my writing, and a lot less of what everyone else is doing.
Cheers.
Comments