Voice Transplant at the Sun-Times
Any newspaper worth its salt carries a resident curmudgeon, a world-weary cynic who inside each bright new bottle can make out the same old rotgut. Ray Coffey will now preach this timeless wisdom four days a week on page three of the Sun-Times.
We hope page three is well served by these changes. The editorial pages should be. Hornung spent his first full day at the Sun-Times last Friday; on Monday he told us, “I feel there isn’t an energy level here that there is at the rest of the paper.” That’s nothing new. Over the decades Sun-Times front pages have sent politicians to prison, but its editorials rarely cost anyone any sleep. The paper’s vitality has always expressed itself in other places.
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“Hopefully,” he told us, “we can be a very coherent and consistent voice on five or six of the most important issues.” He’s already made his list. At the top of it–at least he mentioned this issue first and had more to say about it than any of the others–is taxes.
“I don’t think one’s necessary,” Hornung said. “I think one would be destructive. You can’t do socialism in one city. The way you do it, once you start increasing the state income tax you start designating it for some off-balance-sheet accounting pool to enable municipalities to offer tax relief on a dollar-for-dollar basis.”
Hornung met Britton about ten years ago on a media tour of Germany, when Hornung was at UPI and Britton was an editor of the Los Angeles Times. “He was the only person in a management position,” Hornung recalled, “and I was the only one who didn’t ask him for anything. I spoke German and he kind of liked to be around me. We babbled away about newspapers, literature, journalism.”
“There are only two things I can do about that. One–perform, making the editorial page something they can be proud of. And two–get a little older. Which I’m working on.”
One Monday morning about a month later we were sipping coffee with our wife waiting for the new nanny to come downstairs and take over. Time went by. When we knocked on her attic door the room was empty. She had cleared out the night before while the family was out walking the Halloween trail at North Park Village. A friend of hers informed us she was homesick and had gone back to Ireland, but a few days later she turned up in a Lake Shore Drive high rise watching one child at three times the money.
