Posted on 12/24/2011 9:09:08 PM PST by Graybeard58
Editor’s note: The Chicago Daily News first ran this classic column by Mike Royko on Dec. 19, 1967, and then again at Christmastime many years until the paper folded in 1978. We missed reading it. For that matter, we miss Royko, who died in 1997. We thought we’d run the column one more time.
Mary and Joe were flat broke when they got off the bus in Chicago. They didn’t know anybody and she was expecting a baby.
They went to a cheap hotel. But the clerk jerked his thumb at the door when they couldn’t show a day’s rent in advance.
They walked the streets until they saw a police station. The desk sergeant said they couldn’t sleep in a cell, but he told them how to get to the Cook County Department of Public Aid.
A man there said they couldn’t get regular assistance because they hadn’t been Illinois residents long enough. But he gave them the address of the emergency welfare office on the West Side.
It was a two-mile walk up Madison Street to 19 S. Damen. Someone gave them a card with a number on it and they sat down on a bench, stared at the peeling green paint and waited for their number to be called.
Two hours later, a caseworker motioned them forward, took out blank forms, and asked questions: Any relatives? Any means of getting money? Any assets?
Joe said he owned a donkey. The caseworker told him not to get smart or he’d be thrown out. Joe said he was sorry.
The caseworker finished the forms and said they were entitled to emergency CTA bus fare to Cook County Hospital because of Mary’s condition. And he told Joe to go to an Urban Progress Center for occupational guidance.
Joe thanked him and they took a bus to the hospital. A guard told them to wait on a bench. They waited two hours, then Mary got pains and they took her away. Someone told Joe to come back tomorrow.
He went outside and asked a stranger on the street for directions to an Urban Progress Center. The stranger hit Joe on the head and took his overcoat. Joe was still lying there when a paddy wagon came along so they pinched him for being drunk on the street.
Mary had a baby boy during the night. She didn’t know it, but three foreign-looking men in strange, colorful robes came to the hospital asking about her and the baby. A guard took them for hippies and called the police. They found odd spices on the men, so the narcotics detail took them downtown for further questioning.
The next day Mary awoke in a crowded ward. She asked for Joe. Instead, a representative of the Planned Parenthood Committee came by to give her a lecture on birth control.
Next, a social worker came for her case history. She asked Mary who the father was. Mary answered and the social worker ran for the nurse. The nurse questioned her and Mary answered. The nurse stared at her and ran for the doctor. The doctor wrote “Post partum delusion” on her chart.
An ambulance took Mary to the Cook County Mental Health Clinic the next morning. A psychiatrist asked her questions and pursed his lips at the answers.
A hearing was held and a magistrate committed her to Chicago State Mental Hospital on Irving Park Road.
Joe got out of the county jail a couple of days later and went to the county hospital for Mary. They told him she was at Chicago State and the baby had been placed in a foster home by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
When Joe got to Chicago State, a doctor told him what Mary had said about the baby’s birth. Joe said Mary was telling the truth. They put Joe in a ward at the other end of the hospital.
Meanwhile the three strangely dressed foreign-looking men were released after the narcotics detail could find no laws prohibiting the possession of myrrh and frankincense. They returned to the hospital and were taken for civil rights demonstrators. They were held in the county jail on $100,000 bond.
By luck, Joe and Mary met on the hospital grounds. They decided to tell the doctors what they wanted to hear. The next day they were declared sane and were released.
When they applied for custody of Mary’s baby, however, they were told it was necessary for them to first establish a proper residence, earn a proper income, and create a suitable environment.
They applied at the Urban Progress Center for training under the Manpower Development Program. Joe said he was good at working with wood. He was assigned to a computer data processing class. Mary said she’d gladly do domestic work. She was assigned to a course in key-punch operating. Both got $20-a-week stipends.
Several months later they finished the training. Joe got a job at a gas station and Mary went to work as a waitress.
They saved their money and hired a lawyer. Another custody hearing was held, and several days later the baby was ordered returned to them.
Reunited finally, they got back to their two-room flat and met the landlord on the steps. He told them Urban Renewal had ordered the building torn down. The City Relocation Bureau would get them another place.
They packed, dressed the baby, and hurried to the Greyhound Bus station.
Joe asked the ticket man when the next bus was leaving.
“Where to?” the ticket man asked.
“Anywhere,” Joe said, “as long as it is right now.”
He gave Joe three tickets and in five minutes they were on a bus heading for Southern Illinois — the area known as “Little Egypt.”
Just as the bus pulled out, the three strangely dressed men ran into the station. But they were too late. It was gone.
So they started hiking down U.S. 66. But at last report they were pinched on suspicion of being foreigners in illegal possession of gold.
Joseph and Mary had the money to pay for a room at the inn. It was sold out.
Personally think that Mike Royko was an American treasure. Miss him very much.
The only time I ever talked to Royco was at the billy goat lounge after the first Chicago ribfest. He didn’t want to try the rib sauce that
me and my buddy had in a five gallon bucket. He probably thought we were too sauced. Which we were.
I’d think the prices were sky high anyhow because of the sellout demand. Joseph and Mary were only insignificant figures in a humongous crowd — insignificant to people, that is (but not to God).
For a government that tried to get along with locals, the process documented in the bible sure strikes me as a ham handed way of doing a census. Instead of sorting the data, they forced the people to sort themselves. Getting the tax itself is not a problem because it’s done up front.
IIRC, Royko was a Clinton guy.
He must have been sick of the stuff after the day’s tastings. Who’d offer it out of a bucket, at least without some ribs for it to go on?
One Royko article was about vegetarian “ribs” that he got talked by some vegans (with their “doe-like eyes”) into trying. He said they were OK.
I still remember Mike Royko, even though I was living in Memphis back in those years.
One my favorites of his was buying and owning a big 4-wheel drive that you could get to work in, even in the worst of ice and snown storms.
Then it hit him, “Why do I want to get to work, when nobody else was there?” He sold the big suburban, and stayed home the next years!
He came from a town full of democrats, but he was his own man. It would be interesting to see his take on Obama. Regarding health care reform Royko once wrote a column addressing a poll in which people said that a salary of about $70,000 a year was about right for doctors. Royko wrote that “Karl Marx is alive and well” in response to this.
That was great! Royko was a favorite of mine. Didn’t always agree with him, but I loved his sarcastic wit and his willingness to say exactly what he thought about something. He kissed no one’s butt, and if you didn’t like what he wrote, you were free to kiss his.
Same here. First thing after buying a Sun-Times was to open it to Royko's column.
Kinda' like seeing, in print and well thought out, what you'd been thinking all along.
Grew up in Cleveland and had a paper route for years as a kid. I always read Royko's column before starting my deliveries. He was a treasure, and I really miss his work.
To all Mike Royko fans, University of Chicago Press published a Royko book back in 1999 (paperback edition 2000), which is a compilation of some of his best work, titled "One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko." Reading it was like seeing an old friend again.
FReegards,
My favorite Royko column:
Mike Royko
School of Hard Knocks June 19, 1979
The boy is only 13, but big for his age: about 6 feet 1 inch and 175 pounds. He’s also matured beyond childish games. His leisure-time activity is stealing.
“Yeah, I’ll be honest about it,” said the boy’s uncle. “The kid’s a thief. He runs with a bad crowd. He’s on the streets all the time and this is a rough neighborhood.
“But even if he’s a thief, and even if he’s in the wrong, is there any excuse for a cop to do this to him?”
By “this,” the uncle was referring to the condition of the boy’s face. Normally, it would be a nice-looking face, despite the fashionable teen-age pout.
But now it could make a person wince. The eyes were blackened. The upper lip was swollen and cut. The rest of his features were puffy and the color of Concord grapes. It was obvious somebody had worked him over.
A cop did this?
“Yeah,” said the uncle, speaking for the nephew, who was not the talkative type. “ A cop.”
In the police station? During questioning?
“Uh, no. It was on the street. He was breaking into a car. Yeah, he admits it. He was busting into it. He does that. He steals from cars.
“And the owner of the car came up on him. And the owner’s brother was there. The brother is a cop and he was off duty.
“So they grabbed him, and he tried to get away, and that’s when they pounded him. They really teed off on him, you know what I mean? Just look at his face.”
The uncle’s voice rose as he became more and more indignant.
“Now is that necessary, to beat him up? Why couldn’t they just arrest him? That’s all they’re supposed to do, right? Beating him up like this, that violates his rights, don’t it?
“So something ought to be done about this. This ought to be publicized so that cop gets what’s coming to him. A guy like that shouldn’t be on the police force. This ought to be written up so people know about it and that cop gets in trouble. This is just brutality.”
That was one way to look at it, I suppose. And if you strip it down to the basic facts, it does sound unfair: Two grown men, one of them a cop, beating up a thirteen-year-old boy.
And, as a rule, I’m against police brutality and have written about more cases of it than I can remember.
But on the other hand, I’m in favor of appropriate punishment, which is something that is rarely applied.
The fact is, the amount of crime in this country greatly exceeds the supply of punishment. And the imbalance is growing all the time.
Even if the courts wanted to jail every person caught breaking into a car, there aren’t enough cells in this country to accommodate them.
We’re like a city that is hosting a huge convention, but has only a few hotels.
Because of the shortage of jail space, the courts have established certain priorities. Cells are reserved for people who murder, rob, stab, and shoot, although not all of them are accepted.
Then they accept a limited number of people who rape, burglarize, sell dope, mug, maul, and maim, although most of these are turned away.
By the time you drop down to people who pop car trunks, lift wallets, snatch purses, shoplift, and run off with another man’s snow blower, there’s hardly an inch of jail space available.
Thus, the judges have to become actors and pretend they are punishing them. They listen to the testimony, find them guilty, glower, warn them not to do it again, and make a lot of ominous
notations on the court documents. But it’s all an act, because they then put them on probation, which is a greater hardship for the overworked probation officer than it is on the small-time thief.
The shortage of punishment becomes even more acute when dealing with someone like the big thirteen-year-old with the bruised face.
There aren’t enough juvenile homes in America to hold all the teen-aged thieves and vandals. There probably aren’t enough hotels in America to hold them all.
So about the worst that will happen to most of them is that they visit Juvenile Court with their parents. It’s rough on the parents. Mothers become unnerved and cry. Fathers feel ashamed and drink. But the kid usually feels pretty good. He’ll return to the neighborhood with a minor juvenile record, which will give him special status in the eyes of his contemporaries.
Because most people who commit crimes in America go unpunished, there is a big increase in frustration for those who are the victims.
Every morning, thousands of people awake to find that their car window has been smashed and their favorite cassettes are gone. Or their garage door has been popped and their lawn mower is missing. Or they come home from a weekend trip and find that some kids have not only broken into their house and taken their stereo, but thrown a party while doing it.
That’s frustrating. But they’re lucky if nobody is caught, because then they would have to go to the police station, then to court, and see nothing come of it, and that’s even more frustrating.
So the question is, what can be done? And the answer is, not much. It’s probably cheaper in the long run to just write off our losses than to expand the justice and penal system to provide punishment.
And that brings us back to the big thirteen-year-old thief who was punched around by the off-duty cop, and the question of whether he was the victim of police brutality.
My feeling about this case is one of envy. I have to be honest - I wish I had caught him so I could have given him a few punches.
After being on the receiving end of three burglaries, four car break-ins, and a variety of window smashings and paint splatterings, it has become a favorite dream of mine to catch just one of the nasty boogers. I wouldn’t want to cause any permanent damage. No scars or broken bones. I’m no sadist. But it would feel good to punch and kick him a bit. Just a few satisfying shrieks of agony is all I ask.
The car owner and his brother the cop are among the few lucky victims. Now, when they go to Juvenile Court and see the kid sent home, they’ll at least have the sweet memory of his welts and bruises.
And that boy is lucky, too, although he might not realize it. At only thirteen, he now knows that being caught stealing someone else’s hard-earned property might carry with it something more than a tired judge trying to look stern, a mother looking distraught, and an uncle being indignant.
It might also involve a hard smash in the mouth.
That, I think, is educational. And I just wish more of us had the chance to be the teachers.
The VA fixed him up some and sent him home - blind and with no face ("Rory's face was gone. Between his ears, below his eyes, and above his lower lip and tongue, there was a gaping crater three inches deep.")
The guy ended up living in a basement knitting caps for some extra bucks. When he was taken out in public, he put a stocking cap over his face.
When he tried to get some work done on his face, the VA said they didn't do "cosmetic surgery". Royko got wind of this and blew up in print, saying that if the country could afford $5 million to prettify the presidential compound at San Clemente, it could certainly pay whatever it might cost to give Rory Bailey his face back again.
Nixon got into the act and raised hell as well. The VA blamed it on some clerk and took him in again, and fixed him up as best they could.
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