"Royko in Love" - Necessary or Not?

By Karl Klockars in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 13, 2010 7:00PM

He was a Pulitzer Prize winner, documenter of our city for decades, creator of Slats Grobnik and other slice-of-life characters that helped summarize the Chicago experience, the man who followed "Boss" Daley the First better than anyone else and who provided perspective for a nation. His obituary called him "quite simply the best." We had many years and thousands of columns from Mike Royko. Do we really need his love letters?

The new book "Royko in Love," edited together by son David, culls together years of letters written by the young airman to the girl back home. It's a story of a gruff pitbull of a guy who gets the neighborhood beauty he fell in love with as a child. It's a classic tale of love and eventual loss. It's also one that we can know plenty about, should we choose to do the legwork. This could be why rehashing the couples private moments feels, on the face of it, a little unecessarily intrusive.

It's obvious that the city still has a deep-seated love for the columnist who passed away about 13 years ago. In 2008 we saw a flurry of stories about a student film based on three of his columns, and we poked through some of his papers left to the Newberry Library a while back ourselves. Chicago Magazine told us the original tale of the letters a year ago, and we know more about the story from the number of Royko biographies and collection of columns on the market. We should be used to people mining the depths of recorded data to produce posthumous material. Tupac. Elvis. Now, Royko.

For our money, anything anyone needed to know about Royko's love for his wife was summed up in a single column. It was printed October 5th, 1979, after Carol's death of a brain hemmorhage. Although we've read it dozens of times, it's so personal and so emotionally raw that it still strikes a chord every time we scan it.

We met when she was six and I was nine. Same neighborhood street. Same grammar school. So if you ever have a nine-year-old son who says he is in love, don't laugh at him. It can happen...

I could go on, but it's too personal. And I'm afraid that it hurts. Simply put, she was the best person I ever knew. And while the phrase "his better half" is a cliche, with us it was the truth. Anyways, I'll be back. And soon, I hope, because I miss you too, my friends.

In the meantime, do me and her a favor. If there's someone you love but haven't said so in a while, say it now. Always, always say it now.

Beyond that, other writing feels extraneous.