Take A Time Machine Back To The 1968 Newspaper Era

(Above) Illinois delegates, including Mayor Richard J. Daley (at left, shouting) and his son, future mayor Richard M. Daley (second from right), at the Democratic National Convention on August 28, 1968, react to a nominating speech by Senator Abraham Ribicoff in which he criticizes the tactics of Chicago police against anti-war protesters. Photo by Warren K. Leffler obtained from Library of Congress. (Click on images to view larger versions.)

A year that has lived in infamy and reshaped the history of the City of Chicago. First of two articles looking back on Chicago newspapers in 1968.

Nearly every surviving 80-year-old veteran Chicago newspaper person, journalist, and police officer was chirping in recent weeks about their 56-year-old memories during and after the riots of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

For this writer, who at age 23 joined the Chicago Daily News on March 25, 1968, as a business news reporter, it truly was a baptism by fire.

After working for 3.5 years on the small-town Columbia Missourian newspaper and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while attending the University of Missouri Journalism School, I assembled an impressive batch of newsclips, which included an interview with Missouri Governor Warren E. Hearns for a series of articles on a statewide capital improvement bond issue.

The Tet Offensive was underway in Vietnam in 1968, and I was draft eligible. However, because I was married with a two-month-old daughter, I was deferred from military service, and was hired at the Chicago Daily News, one of the nation’s most historic newspapers.

Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated

On April 4, 1968 – only one week after I began working as a $156-a-week reporter – Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As a cub reporter, I was supervising real estate section page make-up at 6 p.m. in the third-floor composing room. Suddenly all the printers left my job to produce an “Extra Edition,” a special newspaper on the King assassination. I didn’t finish reading my page proofs until midnight.

(Left) Martin Luther King Jr. meets with President Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House Cabinet Room on March 18, 1966. Photo obtained from LBJ Presidential Library

Meanwhile, the west side of the city – not far from the newspaper’s downtown office – was set on fire by arsonists. Looting prevailed, and Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered police to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters.

At this point, I thought a tour in Vietnam may have been a better deal. Reporter-photographer teams were sent into the turbulent streets to shoot photos and call in from pay phones what they saw. We didn’t know we were recording history.

On June 6, 1968, Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning in Los Angeles. In August, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention, there were more riots, police clubbed newspaper reporters, news photographers and protesters alike. All of these disasters transformed 1968 into a never-forgotten nightmare year.

(Right) Anti-war demonstration in Chicago on August 10, 1968. Photo by David Wilson

The writer’s newspaper

The Chicago Daily News was founded in 1875 and folded in 1978. For 103 years it was known as “the writer’s newspaper” – a “daily novel of life” in the Windy City. It also was famous for its inverted-pyramid news-copy style and short, readable sentences.

Over the years, the paper had many stars, from Ben Hecht, who authored Front Page, the 1920s play and film about competition in the newspaper business, to Foreign Service correspondent George Weller, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for writing about a U.S. Navy pharmacist who performed a life-saving appendectomy on a submarine sailor in enemy waters during South Pacific combat. The story was featured in the 1958 Hollywood movie Run Silent, Run Deep.

Columnist Mike Royko, one of 13 Pulitzer Prize winners at the Daily News, and the author of Boss, a best-selling book on Mayor Richard J. Daley, won the Pulitzer in 1972 for commentary. Royko would regularly engage staffers at the newsroom coffee machine to chat about humorous future column ideas to see if they would laugh.

(Left) Chicago Tribune historical photo of Mike Royko in his office at the Chicago Daily News.

The turbulent 1960s

During the turbulent 1960s – a decade of racial change in Chicago’s neighborhoods – Daily News features writer M.W. (Bill) Newman coined the immortal phrases “panic peddling” and “blockbusting” to describe tactics of unscrupulous real estate agents, which led to the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Legend has it that Bill Newman (right), the brother of TV news commentator Edwin Newman, spontaneously stepped into the job of “Acting City Editor” in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

When the news about Kennedy broke, City Editor Ritz Fisher suffered a heart attack.

In 1968, the fourth-floor newsroom of the afternoon Chicago Daily News was smoke-filled as the 3 p.m. deadline approached. Spittoons filled with cigarette and cigar butts sat on the tile floors. Some 200 reporters and rewrite men pounded on black Royal manual typewriters. The clacking sounded like they were working in a factory jute mill. Bottles of Jack Daniels whiskey could be found in newsroom desk drawers for an after-deadline snort of spiked coffee.

Many of the old-timers – including several World War II combat veterans – typed with two fingers. City Editor Bob Schultz, always smooth under deadline pressure, was a bomber pilot on a B-24, the twin-engine airplane featured in the film about General Jimmy Dolittle, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The old man of rewrite was Bill Mooney, a white-haired, blue-eyed veteran of war and newspapers. Mooney, who served in World War II as a tail gunner on a B-17 bomber, was shot down over Germany and imprisoned in Stalag 17, the infamous camp featured in the Hollywood movie, The Great Escape.

In the 1950s, Mooney went undercover to live on “Skid Row,” a flophouse neighborhood on West Madison Street, for a month and wrote about the bum lifestyle.

When interviewing a shady politician, investigative reporter Phil O’Connor (left) would say, “Better talk! We have enough information in our files to crush you.”

On deadline, writers called out, “Boy!” Copy clerks ran news copy in pages – or “takes” – from the reporter to the copy desks. After editing, the copy flowed on overhead conveyor belts from the copy desks down to Linotype machines in the composing room on the third floor.

Ink-stained printers assembled the lines of “hot type” and placed them into heavy metal forms to make up the news pages that were matted and sent to the high-speed presses. When the giant news presses rumbled into action, the whole building shook, making waves in reporters’ coffee cups.

A four-newspaper town

In 1968, four daily Chicago newspapers – the Daily News, Sun-Times, Tribune, and the American – competed for exclusive stories called “scoops.” Competition and accuracy were the hallmarks of the era. Editors said, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

This writer’s first big scoop came on October 9, 1968, when I was assigned to cover a press conference announcing that the Arlington Park racetrack would be sold to conglomerate Gulf & Western Industries for $25 million. Gulf & Western owned Paramount Pictures.

As always, I arrived at the press conference early, and went to the hotel bar to get a Bloody Mary. Noticing a stack of press kits on the floor behind the bar, I asked the bartender for some hot sauce. When his back was turned, I leaned over, grabbed a press kit, stuffed it in my jacket, and headed for a pay phone.

When the giant news presses rumbled into action, the whole building shook, making waves in reporters’ coffee cups.

I called the City Desk. They switched my call to Bill Mooney, who said, “Whatcha got, kid?” I read the press release to him. Mooney, the rewrite man, wrote a beautiful story which received an eight-column, Page 1 banner headline with the byline, “By Don DeBat.”

Later, I asked Mooney why his byline wasn’t on the story. He said, “Don, nice job! You have a scoop! I’ve had 10,000 bylines.”

Next: More memorable yarns and byline scoops from the pages of the award-winning Chicago Daily News.

Don DeBat is co-author of Escaping Condo Jail, the ultimate survival guide for condominium living. Visit escapingcondojail.com. For more housing news, visit www.dondebat.biz. Don also is writing Chicago’s Game, a book on 16-inch softball.