I was having kind of a bad week anyway.

Then Mike Royko died.

I'm not even going to try to replace his column in this newspaper.

Royko was one of those "love him or hate him" columnists. There was very little middle ground.

I loved his column.

I wrote Royko a letter one time. My wife and I were going to be in Chicago for our anniversary so I invited Royko and the Blonde to dinner with us.

Even though I wrote months in advance, he didn't reply.

I wasn't surprised because he probably got thousands of letters each week. I'm sure somebody screened his mail so he may not have even seen my letter. And if he did, he probably thought I was some kind of psycho or something.

In the letter, I told him journalism needed more guys like him.

I got into journalism in 1980. Since then, I have observed this odious, insidious desire for political correctness creep into my trade.

Before 1980, journalism was much less politically correct. Heck, journalists didn't even know what politically correct was - it didn't exist.

Back in those days, everybody - and I mean everybody - in the newsroom smoked cigarettes. There were ashtrays full of butts on every desk.

You know the stereotype - the guy hunched over his manual typewriter with a cig hanging out of his mouth. No time to flip the ash off, he leaves it burn down until the ash finally tumbles into the keyboard.

How did he work all those long hours into the night churning out the next day's news? He had a little help from Jack Daniels, whom he kept tucked away in his desk drawer.

I never met Royko, but I imagine that's the way it was for him in Chicago during his early days.

I tried to meet Royko. On another trip to Chicago, I dragged my wife into the Billy Goat Tavern on Lower Wacker Drive. It's within spitting distance of the Tribune Building in Chicago.

Royko wrote about going there. He liked it there because it was real. He talked about the bars on the upper drive being stuffy with lots of brass and yuppies. But the seedy lower drive, ah, that's where the real people went.

That's where Royko belonged. He was real.

Inside the bar, I asked the bartender if Royko ever came in anymore. "He come een once a while ... coupla time a week," he said with a thick Greek accent.

The owner of the bar, Sam Sianis, wept openly at Royko's death. "He was a man of the people," Sianis told the Associated Press. "He knew about everything."

A sage old newspaperman (his name escapes me but I remember the quote) said the role of a newspaper is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

That is what Royko did. He was the voice of the common man. He took on the public officials of Chicago in the early part of his career. His continual skewering of the Daley administration for what he viewed as corruption and racism earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

Later, he took on political correctness. He took on gays, ethnic groups and interest groups who whined about their lot in life. He was roundly criticized. Different groups petitioned the Chicago Tribune for Royko's firing.

There are a few things I think a good columnist should do.

• Make people mad.

• Make people laugh.

• Unearth things the authorities don't want the public to know.

• Touch readers in their daily lives.

• Break the shackles of mindless objectivity.

• Set the agenda.

• Connect with the community.

Royko was a master of all those things.

"He's an icon to many of us, and his loss is something that hit us pretty hard," Howard Tyner, editor of the Chicago Tribune, told the AP.

"Mike was a unique character who grew up in a certain time in Chicago history," Tyner said. "Journalism has changed a bit since then. Sensitivities have changed."

Royko was from a different time, all right.

A time when an outing was a fun, group activity having absolutely nothing to do with anything to do with Ellen Degeneres.

A time when teachers worried about who was chewing gum and butting in line - not who was pregnant, on drugs or carrying a gun.

And oh yes, sensitivities have changed. Everybody's sensitive these days.

Some people say Royko went too far with some of his columns. Some people think the role of a newspaper is simply to be a community cheerleader. Some people say Royko was too sarcastic, too cutting.

That's crap.

I admired Royko. We need more journalists like him. [[In-content Ad]]