Chicago once was and still remained when I got there a raucous newspaper town. In 1910, at age 16, Ben Hecht fled the University of Wisconsin and came to Chicago with $50 in his pocket. A relative recognized him on the street and found him a job at the Chicago Journal. There his task each workday was to steal photographs of people who died violent deaths, it being unseemly to publish graphic photos of the dead and mutilated. Benny Hecht was good at sneaking into bedrooms and opening cabinets while relatives sobbed nearby. Once he came back with a 4-by-6 foot oil painting of the deceased (it was returned). The head copy boy at the Journal then was a youngster named Harry Romanoff, age 19, who yearned to be a reporter.
Fast-forward to 1966, and I’m a newly minted reporter at the Sun-Times. Across Michigan Avenue at Chicago’s American still labored roly-poly Harry Romanoff, then the night city editor. A legendary figure in newspaper circles, he remained capable of old tricks. When Richard Speck that summer was identified as the murderer of eight Filipino nurses, Romanoff swung into action. According to Walter Jacobson, Harry phoned a cop involved in the probe, identified himself as a deputy Cook County coroner, asked for detailed descriptions of the deadly wounds—and got them. Then, posing as Speck’s attorney, he called the accused man’s mother and got exclusive details on the Speck’s troubled boyhood and early adulthood. This was classic Chicago journalism, immortalized by none other than Hecht (and co-conspirator Charles MacArthur) in the 1928 play “The Front Page,” made into a Billy Wilder-directed movie in 1974 starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. And lest I forget, upon his death in December 1970, Harry Romanoff rated a splendid sendoff in the New York Times.
In “A Child of the Century,” published in 1954, Hecht writes of the newspaper world he inhabited: “There was the reporter who had written a book called ‘The Lights and Shadows in a Chorus Girl’s Life,’ the reporter who had been to London and smelled of high-priced cologne, the reporter who had tried for several years to be a priest, the reporter who had mysterious connections with a West Side pawnshop and was an authority on the underworld, the reporter whose father was a general in the U.S. Army and who phoned in his story of a court trial with the opening words, ‘The State’s Attorney won a Fabian victory today.’ There was the reporter who was taking a correspondence course in embalming (hoping thus to rise in the world), the reporter who stood in the local-room window during a thunderstorm and defied God, if there was a God, to strike him (and the city editor) with lightning, the reporter who drew geometrical figures on paper illustrating some peculiar Hindu concept of the sexuality of the universe, the reporter whose wife was always dying, the reporter embittered by gonorrhea, and the reporter who, like Charlemagne in the land of the Saracens, had futtered an entire whore house of twenty-five damsels in one night. . . . Scores of them return vaguely to my mind.”
A glimpse into the times: In August 1914, Hecht stayed up all night drinking beside the gallows with fellow reporters. They awaited the hanging in suburban Wheaton of Henry Spencer, convicted of bludgeoning to death his old maid lover, who in exchange for his caresses and promise of marriage had let him empty her bank account. The knot was inexpertly tied, and as Spencer choked to death at the end of a rope, the city desk wired him to keep the story short; World War I had begun moments before.
The cast of characters I encountered was different, of course, but no less interesting or varied—see Inhabitants of the Zoo. One of them in particular brings back images of “The Front Page” days, because for three years I sat in the desk in front of his and listened to him do his thing. I’m talking about Art Petacque.
Before I knew Art Petacque (pea-TACK), I knew of Art Petacque. Absorbing the Sun-Times in the University of Kansas reading room, I saw his fingerprints on almost every story about violent, sensational murders. And his specialty was what I came to call the fourth-day lead. The first day’s story was the crime, the second day’s the initial trail of suspicion, the third day’s the widening investigation. But at that point, absent an arrest or other startling new development, most crime stories started heading toward the ditch. What else was there to say? Ask Art Petacque, who by then was only warming up. Calling cops or prosecutors or family members or whoever, he would come up with an angle that made the fourth day lead and kept the story alive and on the front page. Never ask yourself too long whether this was truth or bullshit, because it was usually a mix of both, which is the essence of Chicago crime reporting. Then Art would gather his notes and other background material and pull up a chair beside Hugh Hough, the newspaper’s lead rewrite man, and start talking.
You see, Art didn’t write his own stories, or at least very seldom did (I vaguely recall a few exceptions). After Petacque’s death in 2001, my former colleague Jon Anderson wrote The Chicago Reader: “He was illiterate. And like many adults who cannot read or write, he developed his own coping mechanisms.”
Jon was mistaken. Art could read as well as anyone. He just couldn’t write an arresting newspaper story, or write it fast enough to satisfy his editors. So for decades he worked mainly with his friend Hough, whose specialty on rewrite was to take the notes of other reporters (usually over the phone) and turn them in minutes into tantalizing stories ready to be set in type. I’ve known countless others like Art who could talk the story but froze up and couldn’t put it on paper. But of such people, only Art had a collaborator as fast and cool and poetic as Hugh Hough.
They became such an inseparable team that when they were announced as winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1974, Art climbed atop a desk in the city room and said, “I wish Hugh were here to tell you how I feel.” (Hough had the day off and was playing a spectacular round of golf when summoned by a caddy to call the city desk. He replied, “I’m breaking 80. This had better be good.”)
In his obituary, Sun-Times reporter Neil Steinberg described Petacque quite accurately: “He was a colorful presence from a vanished age, with wild, unkempt eyebrows and a soggy cigar, drawing scraps of paper and matchbooks out of his pockets, reading notes on the doings of mobsters and madams.” Continued Steinberg: “Art Petacque was a police captain when he needed to be a police captain, and a doctor when he needed to be a doctor. He could be a burglar, too, if necessary, slipping into a basement window to snatch a photo for a story.”
The Art Petacque I got to know was a sweetheart of a guy, cracking jokes in his loud, hoarse voice one minute and getting his wife’s grocery list over the phone the next. He had a direct line to Chicago’s police superintendent, whoever that might be at the time; I know because I listened to Art’s side of their conversations. I never heard him impersonate a police captain to gain information, but I did hear him once turn into the coroner.
He took retirement in 1991 after an editor in chief decided Art and his reporting methods were an embarrassment to the newspaper. Well, let me tell you this: I still read the Chicago Sun-Times. Art Petacque could walk in there tomorrow and fit right in, and I mean no disrespect.
Can you tell me briefly about Dynamite Sokol?