By Michael Miner
Lee Bey: “In real life, black people fall in love–though you’d never know that from watching movies. All black folks don’t kill each other with assault rifles, either.”
Oclander not only understands the role, he’s meditated on it. When he was 13 he moved with his family from Argentina to New York. When he was a high school student in Indiana he read Harry Golden Sr.’s Only in America–a collection of columns from Golden’s monthly Carolina Israelite–and got so excited about journalism that he headed straight to the local paper and nailed a job as a copyboy. Golden (father of the Sun-Times’s late City Hall reporter) and I.F. Stone became two of his heroes. “What I learned from Stone was to read every damn document completely.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Now 54, Oclander has lived in Chicago the last eight years. Two years ago he left La Raza to join the Sun-Times, and in March he wrote the sort of column that makes a reputation–in appreciation, the paper ran it on a Thursday. He wrote mournfully that the day he took the Sun-Times job he walked along the river thinking “about all the great writers who have etched into memory the stories of the Grabowskis who put on three T-shirts, two flannel shirts, a sweater and a parka, gritted their teeth, bit out an obscenity and slid sideways down the Dan Ryan in the dead of February to work in the old stockyards. None did it better than Mike Royko….More than anything, I loved his sensitivity for people–especially Chicagoans and especially immigrants.”
Wu had her own experience with Royko. Last May he teased her for letting a letter signed by “Olga Fokyercelf” slip into Swap Shop. The column was merciless but funny–Royko in his day has gone after bigger fish. The Wall Street Journal then tore into Royko with a piece headlined “Has a Curmudgeon Turned Into a Bully? Some Now Think So…Picking on a Food Writer.” The Journal piece had Wu “flabbergasted” by Royko’s column.
Lee Bey, who’s 30, has lived in Chicago all his life. He went to high school at Chicago Vocational and then to Columbia College, joined the Sun-Times in ’92, and shifted from police reporter to a now-defunct outfit called the “impact team.” He recalls that “we were supposed to get hard-hitting stories in the Sunday paper.” The Sunday paper has had more than its share of problems, and the impact team didn’t cure any of them.
Does a newspaper have to answer for every last claim made in its pages? The news it asserts to be fact it must stand behind, admitting mistakes as it makes them. But what about the advertising?
