The Man Who Reformed the Post Office

Late last week we visited the Lakeview and Lincoln Park post offices, two of the most notorious branches in Chicago. Every window was open, framing a smiling face. Everything looked spanking clean, and there were no lines at all.

“Top management–you can quote me on this–has suggested in years past, as recently as last year, that I was out to destroy the paper,” said Nicodemus. “And that’s their words. Management also chronically tries to suggest that the guild leaders, whoever they may be, do not have the support of the staff. They always find that to be incorrect.”

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

There’s a pattern to guild negotiations, a pattern everyone at the paper is sick of. Management offers next to nothing, a strike is authorized, at the 11th hour management offers just enough to prevent one, and both sides adjourn sulking to snipe at each other for the next three years. Last month Nicodemus scoured the stock prospectus put out by the Sun-Times’s new owners, the American Publishing Company, and came across a mysterious reference to two 1990 loans “to an officer of the Company totaling $100,000. These loans and the related accrued interest were forgiven on December 31, 1991.”

Does management really think Nicodemus is prepared to destroy the paper? we asked him. “I would presume he was talking about me. I don’t recall ever saying that,” Britton said. And what of the memo? Britton said Nicodemus lifted the $100,000 loan out of context, and went on, “You’re asking, was that a provocative act? You know the answer to that.”

“That from people who work on a newspaper that has had five owners in the last 11 years; has frantically changed editors and publishers more frequently than a nanny changes diapers; has chopped the payroll by dangling buyouts at much of its established talent; has seen its circulation shrink by a disastrous 25 percent; and has not won even one Pulitzer Prize for writing or reporting in almost two decades. Talk about losing streaks.”

“I appreciate that,” the old man would have answered. “Oh, I might have had an enemy list, I’ll grant you that. But that’s only because I had enemies! Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them! Every last one out to get me.”

But it wasn’t just this sentimental bond that held the pair together. No, it was the memory of Lyndon Johnson.