ONE MORE TIME: The Best of Mike Royko.

• Author: Doppelt, Jack C.
• Position: Review

ONE MORE TIME: The Best of Mike Royko By Mike Royko Univ. of Chicago Press, $22

Mike Royko was the voice of the common man for half a century

Between Al Capone and Michael Jordan, there was Mike Royko. Each personified an era, each carried the identity of the same town on his broad shoulders, and each did it with one name tied behind his back.

Capone was Chicago from Prohibition through his death in 1947 and well into the television age. Any Chicagoan who went abroad during that time would be greeted by the name Capone dropped into the conversation along with an animated tommy gun imitation.

Since 1984 it's been Michael's town anywhere on the planet.

For the twenty-year stretch from the late '60s to the late '80s, Chicago was Royko for people who didn't hail from there and for those who did. That is not to say that Chicago was without other identities during that period. Think Chicago and images fill the screen: the 1968 Democratic National Convention when the political divide opened onto the streets; the Harold Washington years when the racial divide opened onto the floor of the city council; the Chicago Cubs setting the city up for a fall; and Mayor Richard J. Daley setting the city up for an heir.

Royko wrote about them all and eclipsed them as the epitome of Sinatra's kind of town. Only the political insider or the true aficionado of urban politics recalls Daley, possibly the most powerful mayor of the 20th century, without benefit of Boss, Royko's 1971 book about "hizzoner" the mayor. Jimmy Breslin called it "the best book ever written about an American city by the best journalist of his time" By the late '80s, Royko's columns were appearing in more than 600 newspapers. It was hard to find a kitchen anywhere that didn't have a Royko column taped to the fridge. After Royko died of a brain aneurysm in April 1997, fellow Chicago Tribune columnist Bernie Lincicombe wrote, "Mike Royko was not the last of a breed, Mike Royko was the entire species."

The species is America's Dutch uncle, both because as a colloquialism it means the person who points out your flaws and excesses, and because Royko revelled in the ethnic stereotype. He lived by that shiv, as he would have put it, and he fell by that shiv.

In One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, the first posthumous collection of his columns, we see Royko as the guy who won't leave the 'hood after everyone else has. He is Doc in West Side Story, the elder conscience who tells the Jets when they...