Meeting Rick Kogan
On historians and history and seizing the present...
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
Once, I got to introduce one of my parents to one of their heroes. Because sometimes meeting your heroes is as easy as buying a ticket.
My mom talks about Rick Kogan the way I talk about John Richards. That’s the thing with radio: it’s so personal. Just their voice in your kitchen or living room or ear buds. It’s easy for their voice and stories and baseball calls and music to live in your head. Garrison Keller was like that too, until he wasn’t.
Rick Kogan is a Chicago institution. Both at the Chicago Tribune and on WGN radio. He’s a second generation newspaperman. His dad co-wrote Lords of the Levee, which is an amazing history of Chicago’s 1st ward politics centered on the colorful Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. His mom also worked for the Tribune. He counted as friends and collaborators the likes of Royko, Ebert, Siskel and Studs. Kogan tells stories of the present, too of course. And he especially likes telling the stories of other story tellers, like the piece he wrote about the Frunchroom, a south-side story-telling series my friend Scott hosts.
In short, Rick Kogan is a storyteller’s storyteller. He’s the last of greats standing and has had what must be the bitter sweet honor of crafting the obits for many of those legends around him. He is better off for having this colorful city to chronicle, and Chicago is better because he tells its tales.
One weekend he was hosting a bus tour of Chicago journalism history and I got tickets for my mom and myself for mother’s day/her birthday. She came out for the weekend. If you have met my mom, you’d know how much she loves history, especially local history. She loves connecting family stories to the events that were happening around them.
The tour was supposed to start in the suburbs somewhere, really early in the morning. People would ride a tour bus downtown, meet up with Kogan after his “Sunday Paper’s“ radio show in WGN’s studio at Tribune Tower and then carry on from there. I asked nicely if we could skip the bus leg since it would mean getting up stupid early just to drive out of town and bus back. Instead we would meet the tour at WGN.
That turned out to be a great bonus, not only for extra sleep, but because we were the only ones at the studio, so we were invited into the booth while Rick finished up his show.
Which was pretty darn cool, if you ask me. Or my mom.
We met and chatted with Rick until the bus with the rest of the tour group arrived and then we all drove around Chicago together. A lot of the tour was history that has been lost to history. Sometimes the buildings… “Here’s where the Chicago Sun-Times was…” Sometimes the publications themselves, “Here’s where the Chicago Daily News was…” and oftentimes the people, “Here’s where we illegally spread some of Studs’ ashes…”
We saw the watering holes. The hang outs. Both the places where people who made news gathered and the places where the legends who chronicled that news congregated. Which is probably the right word when it comes to journalists and places like the Old Town Ale House. Or the Billy Goat Tavern, where we had lunch with the goat himself, Sam Sianis. These are places that are not just bars, but take on a holy significance in the lore of Chicago journalism.
Our tour wound up at the Tribune Tower, where we got a Kogan eye view of the lobby with its bust of Colonel McCormick. Or the office that once was home to Ann Landers. We saw Kogan’s desk. And Greg Kot’s. We got to go on the upper-level porch beneath the flying buttresses of the gothic gem that is Trib Tower.
Not on the tour was the offices of Tribune Media Services which used to oversee all of Tribune’s syndicated offerings like comic strips, columns, newswires among other assets. One of those assets was a very old computer which ran the news ticker in Times Square. And in that office, I worked one summer moderating content on Apples fledgling, still-in-beta, never-really-made it online service, eWorld. I worked evenings after my summer day-job at the Northwestern computer labs. Two or three times a week I’d come downtown and get to work in the tower. I’d walk past the exterior which is studded with bits of other historical buildings procured by Tribune correspondents the world over. I’d walk through the lobby covered in quotes about the importance of truth and reporting. In short, I spent a few months working in the same building where so many of these folks worked. I even “covered” one of the biggest odd news moments of the era, chronicling the OJ Simpson Bronco chase on eWorld in what was possibly the most trafficked bulletin board that service ever saw.
As a young Medill kid, working there was magic. And also surreal as it was just as things were about to pivot. A time when an intern could wind up hosting his boss and her boss and his boss and his boss to show them what the Internet was and how it worked. Because yeah, that happened.
I took my family to that lobby while it was still the Tribune Tower. Because that building too is now in the column of Chicago journalism history, not present. Sold off, and converted to condos.
I wanted them to see it. To read the quotes. To have a little of that magic in them.
And to feel it.
If Kogan teaches you anything, it’s to respect the historians as much as the history. That the story tellers have their own stories. And to seize those stories while you can.
I plan to take a slight detour for the next few posts and introduce a couple of people and events that are important for the stories moving forward. Stay tuned.