In an essay written late in his life, the movie critic Roger Ebert called working for the Sun-Times “the best damn job in the whole damn world.” A lot of us would agree. The staff that city editor Jim Hoge put together was a remarkable collection. But who were these people? We had centi-millionaires and perpetual debtors, old men and young women, blacks and whites, snazzy veterans like Harry Golden Jr. and neophytes right out of college like me (and Ebert, for that matter). This is my introduction to a cross-section of that group—impressions of some people I liked and remember fondly.
John Adam Moreau was one of the first people I met at the paper. In appearance, he reminded me of a preppy University of Virginia Law School graduate, right down to the bow tie he sometimes wore to work. In fact, he got his PhD in history there. A newspaper brat like me (he began writing for his dad in New Jersey at age 14), John Adam worked for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk for a spell. Returning from a job interview at the Minneapolis Tribune, he phoned the Sun-Times from Midway Airport to inquire about a job, then taxied downtown. Emmett Dedmon, the managing editor, hired him on the spot. That was September, 1965, nine months before I got there.
Behind his urbane exterior labored one savvy reporter. In the weeks before and during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, while I kept the city safe in an Illinois National Guard uniform, Moreau scored one scoop after another. One exclusive story arose from what I can only call divine inspiration. The headquarters hotel of the convention was the Conrad Hilton, a 3,000-room affair on Michigan Avenue that once had its own movie theater and bowling alley. Prowling around in its basement, John Adam found where the waiters’ uniforms were kept and appropriated one.
Now outfitted as a Hilton employee, he was ready to walk into the meeting of the Texas delegation, where delegates were cooking up a draft-LBJ movement. Oh, but first he needed a small serving tray for the sake of appearance. So he popped into the first open reception room to find one. As luck would have it, he chose the Chicago Sun-Times reception, where Hoge and Dedmon watched him take dirty glasses off a serving tray and prepare to leave with it. Dedmon, who had a volcanic temper, erupted in outrage. What the hell are you doing? he shouted, perhaps not recognizing his own employee. John Adam says Hoge shot him a look that said: Stay cool, I’ll calm the boss. With Dedmon shouting expletives at his back, Moreau entered the Texans’ meeting with his tray. Hiding behind a partition, he scribbled notes as the draft-Lyndon movement tried to sputter to life and thereby got his exclusive. He claims to have returned the uniform.
Jon Anderson and Abra Prentice were the Beautiful People. Jon, a Canadian, possessed wicked good looks, a people personality, and a wonderful writing style. He had worked as a Time and Life correspondent in Montreal, New York, and Chicago before Hoge snared him. One thing you need to know about Abra is that her middle name was Rockefeller, being the great-granddaughter of patriarch John D. Gorgeous? Oh my. And with those looks came a resourceful mind. Jon and Abra met in the newsroom at the coffee stand and married in 1968.
It’s said that during his trial for murdering eight Filipino nurses in 1966, Richard Speck could not take his eyes off Abra, who was covering the event for her newspaper. But then, neither could most of us in the city room.
I wish this love story had a happier ending. Jon and Abra left the paper to 1970 to co-write a society column called “Jon & Abra” for the Chicago Daily News, sister paper of the Sun-Times. Then they founded and underwrote Chicagoan, a “city magazine” that didn’t survive. Neither did their marriage. Jon spent the rest of his career at the Chicago Tribune, where he authored a popular column on the doings of people high and low. He died in 2014 at age 77, still uncommonly handsome and well mannered. The obituary written of him in the Trib makes me miss him all over again. Abra remarried and became a society figure and philanthropist, but not of the sort you may be thinking. She once posed nude (but in good taste, she said) for her Christmas card.
We thought of Bill Braden as our newsroom intellectual. In his spare time during his 38 years with the paper, Bill wrote three non-fiction books. One of them, The Age of Aquarius, prompted reviewer John Leonard in the New York Times to compare Bill to such social critics as Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan. In the newspaper, he liked to tackle stories that are hard to get your arms around, like the struggle of South Side neighborhoods to survive as nearby factory and steel mill jobs vanished.
For all of that, Braden was a happy-go-lucky fellow with a desk next to a long row of coat lockers. He would go through as many as five packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. When the newspaper banned smoking in the newsroom, long after I departed, Bill could be found writing his stories in the smokers’ lounge, where the New York Times reported he formed a social group with other outcasts. Bill retired in 1994 and left us in 2008 at age 77.
Bill’s major failing was a tendency to wander into the weeds when making conversation. One afternoon after the first-edition deadline, political editor and columnist John Dreiske asked Bill to explain The Age of Aquarius to him. As reporter Dick Foster told me later, “Bill started talking about fissures in the technocratic society, influences of the post-constructionist views of the early Sartre, and on and on like that. Very heavy. All the time, Dreiske looked at him with a very sober look on his face, and at the exact right moment, he raised the palm of his hand to his mouth and yawned. And then he said, calmly, ‘Yes, Bill. Go on.’ Deadly.”
Dreiske never suffered fools. His decades covering Illinois politics, which is a foul field of endeavor, left John with a weary, wrinkled countenance across his wide face and ample forehead. Bill Harsh, who replaced me on the labor beat in 1971, recalls watching Dreiske on the floor of the Illinois senate one afternoon after adjournment. He walked by the desk of a black senator, Bernie Neistein, who represented a district in which he never set foot. Neistein had cast a vote that day that was the opposite of what people expected. Now Neistein appeared to be asleep. “Nice vote, Bernie,” Dreiske muttered as he walked by. Without opening his eyes, the politician replied, “The price was right.”
The image of him that sticks in my mind is that of an impatient Buddha, calm on the outside, maybe not so calm inside. Delores Cahill was an intense woman sitting near Dreiske. Until the late 1960s she covered religion. One day Dreiske said something that made her boiling mad. She stood up and started dressing John down in front of everyone. John listened stoically for a while. Then his face brightened and he said, “Ah, Delores, you’re ravishing when you’re mad.” That stopped Delores in mid sentence, and she sat down, still fuming but silenced.
Okay okay, just one more John Dreiske story. Delores left the “god beat” in 1969, succeeded by Roy Larson, an ordained minister who served five United Methodist congregations before coming to the Sun-Times. Roy was an affable fellow who tolerated my cussing and smoking, even when I put out cigarettes on the floor as we chatted. One day Roy was huddled in conversation with Delores at her desk about some church-related topic. Dreiske, who was nearby, leaned over and whispered, “Having a lovers’ quarrel, are we?” Roy was pissed. Upon Dreiske’s death in 1991, at age 84, his obituary in his own newspaper was so short, 170 words, that you have to wonder if his caustic wit left behind too many enemies. Neil Steinberg, the writer of that obit and today a columnist for the paper, can’t recall why Dreiske got such a perfunctory farewell, although “short-shifting our own was certainly a common practice. I remember an editor who didn’t know who Bill Mauldin was and wanted to give him 35 lines.”
Well, I looked up to that guy. John Dreiske was a fixture of the Chicago Times and later the Sun-Times for almost half a century, starting in the 1930s. I loved listening to his slow, steady voice. He was a reminder to me then that not all wisdom resided in young minds.
I have to mention Ralph Ulrich, who ruled the copy desk for 28 years. When the city desk had edited a story for content, it went to the copy desk to be edited for style and grammar and spelling, and for a headline to be composed. Ulrich was built like a football tackle and wore his hair in a crew cut. Fritz Plous describes him this way: “I can still see Ralph, shaped like a fireplug and clenching half a cigar in his teeth, as he got up from his desk and waddled slowly west through the city room, the offender’s copy hanging like a dead rat from his paw, until he arrived at the desk of the terrified reporter to explain exactly how he’d bollixed up the English language—again—and all the reporters would break off their typing and follow Ralph’s progress to see who was going to get it this time. Fortunately, it never was me.” John Adam Moreau says he and Ulrich “loved one another, the reason being I always went to the copy desk and delivered a thank you if my copy had been improved.”
Finally, there was copy boy Milton Munson. A University of Chicago dropout of indeterminate age, he affected a Fu Manchu mustache and wire-rim glasses, fashioned his brown hair into a pony tail and seemed to glide serenely around the city room. A copy boy’s job was first and foremost to scramble to a reporter’s desk at the sound of “Copy!” to deliver the multiple copies of typed pages to the city desk. Then they did everything else, like carry copies of each Sun-Times edition across Michigan Avenue to the Tribune and return with the latest Tribs. Everybody liked Milt. If you needed some recreational marijuana or hashish, Milt was your go-to man. He’d also take your tenner across the street to Billy Goat’s to fetch you some bourbon in a covered paper cup.
In his essay, Roger Ebert reveals Milt’s downfall. “One day an inspector from the Chicago Post Office came to our editor, James Hoge, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Jim called in Milton and asked him for his address. Milton, whose jobs included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’ pamphlet, Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, he was philosophical: ‘Hundreds of kids can thank me that they were conceived.’”
This was the center of my professional life, particularly during my last three years with the paper, when I came in from the Mount Prospect office to work downtown. It was an honor to be around people like these. If I could, I’d have done it for nothing.