The Deal from Hell (6 page)

The
Tribune
's cavernous newsroom wasn't exactly a warm place. Jaded, seasoned journalists looked me over the first day, sizing me up as if I were a gunfighter new to the corral. The
Tribune
—which had intelligently managed to maintain its share in the market—published numerous editions around the clock, so someone was always “on deadline,” the euphemism for “leave me the fuck alone.” The language was coarse; the mood skeptical.

George de Lama, one of the paper's first Latino reporters, who would later become managing editor, recalled his first turn at the
Tribune
's version of the dogwatch, the night city desk assignment usually handed to new reporters. He had hardly settled in when he got a call from City News, the storied local news service where famed writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Mike Royko got their starts. The City
News reporter asked de Lama what he knew about a barroom brawl between the
Tribune
's metro editor and Sean Toolen, a cantankerous reporter who spoke with an Irish brogue and got nasty when he drank. “I immediately called the cop shop to talk to Henry Wood [the
Tribune
's longtime police reporter]. I told Henry that City News called and said they had taken the metro editor to the 18th district [police station] and Toolen to Northwestern [Hospital] and could he make some calls to find out what was going on. Wood said, ‘Who in the fuck died and left you in charge? Fuck you. You call the AP,' and he hung up,” recalled de Lama.

Tribune
veterans prided themselves on the sink-or-swim ethic that permeated the Tower; adapting to a big, tough newsroom was an initiation rite. Thanks to my roots in north St. Louis, I didn't find the atmosphere so intimidating. Although I didn't know it at the time, my first real job as a vendor selling concessions at Busch Stadium in St. Louis prepared me for the rough-and-tumble atmosphere that awaited me as a journalist.

As a kid of thirteen, I had hopped off a streetcar near Grand and Sullivan avenues in St. Louis to apply for a job at the ballpark. A long line of strapping African American men with families to support stretched down Sullivan Avenue. At four foot ten and about ninety pounds, I naïvely joined the throng, thinking I would simply wait my turn. When the door to the applications office opened, an orderly line devolved into a mob, shoving, kicking, punching, and jostling to get through the green door, a process that required getting past a small, wiry Italian guy named Tony who regulated the traffic by swinging a sawed-off baseball bat when he'd reached his quota. Those who didn't make it inside drifted back into line to await the next opportunity.

After my third attempt to pass Tony's threshold, I was farther back in the line than when I had started. I stalked off, walking down Grand Avenue with tears in my eyes, angry and humiliated that I had not fared better. Halfway down the block, I saw another door with an
opaque window and a sign that read, “Missouri Sports Service, Charles Bailey.” I knew that Bailey was the big boss of vendors, so I began pounding on the door's window. Soon, a tall man with thinning, silvery blond hair, wearing a blue suit and tie, yanked open the door and barked, “What do you want?” My Irish temper flaring, I shot back, “I want a job. I stood in that line over on Sullivan, but every time the door opened, a fight broke out and I couldn't get in. I want a job.”

“How old are you,” Bailey barked. “ I'm sixteen,” I lied. I was still thirteen and probably looked ten, but I had a fake ID. “Why should I hire you?” an exasperated Bailey retorted, never even looking at the fake birth certificate in my hand. I'll never know why I answered the way I did. I didn't know what to say, so I blurted out, “Because I turned the lights on in this place one time.”

I don't think Bailey really knew what to think of this stupid, silly, scruffy kid standing before him, but my response piqued his interest, so he invited me into his office. I proceeded to tell him the story of how my dad, an electrician, had taken me to an afternoon Cardinals game on one of our rare outings. Late in the game, we paid a visit to a fellow electrician who worked at the electrical substation in the park, which had erected lights to illuminate the field in 1940. I gave Bailey all the details, telling him how the electrician in overalls, a T-shirt, and a Stetson hat took me into the substation as the afternoon sun faded. He put my small hand on a huge fork-shaped switch and said, “Flip it.” As I pushed upward, power surged through the switch, sparks showered the floor, and banks of powerful lights over Busch Stadium surged to life. Fans roared in approval as robustly as they cheered a home run by Stan the Man Musial, a Cardinal home run hero. For some reason, I believed my turn at the switch entitled me to a job years later, and, as I told my story, Bailey smiled and soon led me down a long dark tunnel to the small room behind the green door. He told Tony with the bat and Leonard McNiff, the foreman of the vendor corps, to give me a uniform and a job. “He turned the lights on here,” Bailey said.

McNiff introduced me to Slick, who ran the commissary. Slick gave me a stack of books about the Cardinals and told me I would earn a
nickel for every one I sold. It was a double-header; I walked up and down the steps of the ballpark for eight hours. I made 15 cents. But I returned the next day, which, I suspect, was the real test, and sold picture packets of the Red Birds. I made $5.06, but I had learned two powerful lessons that I would apply for years in my career as a journalist: There's always more than one way through the green door, and never doubt the power of a good story. With the ballpark in my DNA, no newsroom would ever give me a rough start.

Although A.J. Liebling probably wouldn't have been satisfied with the situation that prevailed when I hit Chicago, the city still had two newspaper owners and numerous aggressive broadcast outlets engaging in a spirited competition that energized everyone's newsrooms. Reporters squared off against each other, fighting for the best story and going for the jugular, often in good ways, but sometimes in bad. My national editor once went out for dinner around 8 p.m. and came back with a black eye. Competing newspapers and television stations routinely dispatched legmen to grab early editions of the big papers rolling off the presses and rush back to their respective newsrooms where reporters scanned the early-bird papers, picked up phones, called sources, and tried to steal competitors' stories. The rivalry created a great system of checks and balances. If, in making calls, anyone discovered
any
fault in your story, the slip-up would be emphasized and magnified in the competitor's account, making you look stupid in front of careful readers, sources, and colleagues.

To a newspaper reporter new to the city's streets, covering Chicago was like big-game hunting. From its gritty neighborhoods in the shadow of decaying steel mills on the South Side to the city's glittering shops along the Magnificent Mile, Chicago was the quintessential American melting pot. Saloons and churches marked neighborhoods as surely as the graffiti of street gangs. Signs scrawled in Polish, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese hung in windows of urban enclaves home to Serbs, Croats, Latinos, Japanese, Jews, Italian, Irish, or Africans. The newspapers
vied for stories about cops on the take, City Hall and Statehouse corruption, street gangs, pin-striped patronage, mobsters, greed, and sex, the juicier the better. The racial divisions ran deep and raw. Douglas Frantz recalled the ubiquitous tenor of the bias from his days as a
Tribune
reporter covering the St. Patrick's Day parade on the South Side when Bernie Epton, a Jewish politician, was running for mayor against Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor. As Epton passed a group of parade watchers, Frantz said he heard one man yell, “Atta boy, Jew boy, go get that nigger.” Sports divided the city as neatly as an alderman's ward map. Cubs fans lived on the north side; Sox fans on the south. If you lived on the same block as a big shot, your street got plowed in a snowstorm; if not, tough luck.

In better days, Chicago had eleven major daily newspapers, but by the time I came along, the city's journalism included a collection of urban, suburban, and ethnic papers dominated by the
Tribune
, owned by McCormick family members and others who had survived the Colonel, and the
Sun-Times
, the scrappier of the city papers edited by James Hoge and owned by Marshall Field, heir to the department store fortune. Each paper referred to the other as “across the street,” owing to their nearby locations on either side of Michigan Avenue. Hoge delivered to his readers gutsy, quality, tabloid journalism with a sensational flair. Once, the
Sun-Times
bought an old bar, renamed it “The Mirage,” and proceeded to document how many people and city officials they had to bribe to do business in Chicago. In another instance, the city went crazy when the paper splashed a story on page one saying that Chicago's Catholic prelate, Cardinal John Cody, had a
special relationship
with his housekeeper.

The
Tribune
reflected the views of its readership, too—the institutional Chicago of banks and brokers on LaSalle Street, the suburbanites, and the civic-minded leaders and families concerned about the health of the schools, city hall, and the parks. The
Sun-Times
often forced its more staid competitor to grapple with a saucy story. When Hoge published the Cody exposé, the
Tribune
desperately attempted to recover, at one point turning to its shrewd lawyer, Don Reuben, who
also represented the Archdiocese. The paper ended up publishing a tear-jerking interview with the housekeeper that cast doubt on the
Sun-Times
scoop. By and large, the
Tribune
ran much more serious national and international news on its front page, often written by its larger Washington bureau or by its army of reporters who parachuted in to cover the big story. Jones ran exposés, but they tended to be on subjects such as car safety or civic-minded series on abusive tax assessments or corrupt police.

Advertisers turned up their noses at American tabloid papers like the
Sun-Times
, which had an editorial page that Democrats favored and a highly urban readership concentrated on the working-class and poor neighborhoods on the south and west sides, home to many black Chicagoans, a vestige of the city's divisive racial politics. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, star columnist Mike Royko walked “across the street” rather than work for the “alien,” making the paper's problems worse as it vainly struggled to strengthen its finances amid a sea of economic uncertainty and ownership changes. At the
Tribune
, the story was quite different.

From the day I arrived at the paper in 1979, the staff talked of the
Tribune
's founders with a mixture of respect for the paper they had created and relief that they were gone. The new generation of reporters and editors lured to the
Chicago Tribune
during the 1970s by its ambition and aggressive brand of journalism truly didn't appreciate what Joseph Medill, the paper's patriarch, and the Colonel had done for them.

The Medill and McCormick names now grace public spaces and institutions like the journalism school at Northwestern University; Medill is buried at Graceland Cemetery, and the Colonel at Cantigny, in the Chicago area. Both had notorious reputations as publishers and individuals. Medill was known for his firebrand politics; many people thought the Colonel loopy for good reason. In their day, though, both were giants who enabled the
Tribune
to evolve into a media giant.

Medill gave the paper its civic backbone and Republican Party footings by blending his political and editorial interests to benefit the paper. He once set aside his editor's hat to become mayor of Chicago, after
reputedly penning the famous “Chicago Will Rise Again” editorial printed when a raging fire nearly destroyed the city in 1871. An arch foe of slavery, Medill helped found the Republican Party to support the presidential candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, then a young Illinois lawmaker seeking higher office. He advised Lincoln to “go in boldly, strike straight from the shoulder, hit below the belt as well as above and kick like thunder.”