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“The Best Damn Job in the Whole Damn World”

By: Loren Wassell | 04/08/2009

The Chicago Sun-Times recently joined the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Reader in bankruptcy.  I’m grateful to the Reader’s “News Bytes” blogger, Michael Miner, for highlighting a post by the Sun-Times’ prize-winning movie critic, Roger Ebert. 

In “The Best Damn Job in the Whole Damn World,” Ebert recalls the golden age of his newspaper career. 

As Miner put it:

Ebert had done a much better job of making a life spent in the Chicago newspaper world sound marvelous than I could hope to.

So it's over, I thought. And here's the proof. Not simply the bars that have closed and the newspapers on the ropes and the technologies that have changed everything, but the fact that something so romantic and evocative can now be written about this heyday. And it wasn't by Ben Hecht. It was written by Roger Ebert, someone I know, and the only reason it doesn't make me wish I'd been alive then is that I was.

The piece will remind reformed reporters everywhere of why we spent our misspent youth in journalism.  Ebert worked with Jack McPhaul, who’s reporting inspired the 1948 movie Call Northside 777.  McPhaul’s book-length memoir of Hecht’s Front Page era, Deadlines and Monkeyshines, inspired at least one young reader to choose that career.  Ebert explains why.

You will find the obligatory reference to the legendary motto of Chicago’s City News Bureau (now out of business), a code followed by good reporters everywhere: 

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

He was also eyewitness to one of the better newsroom one-liners.  The Sun-Times had a long-running partnership of legman Art Petacque, and rewrite partner Hugh Hough.  The mob-wise Petacque gathered information, Hough turned it into copy and they shared the bylines.   

Hough wasn’t in the office when their shared Pulitzer Prize was announced.  Petacque said: 

"I only wish Hugh Hough was here to tell you how happy I feel."

There’re many more stories in Ebert’s full post, along with gems like a photo of two other Chicago legends – Studs Terkel and Mike Royko – as well as videos like Royko holding forth in the underground Billy Goat tavern.  Be advised that the piece documents a smoke-stained, beer-soaked era and contains the adult language and situations one would find there.

We can hope today’s bloggers – and whoever replaces them in the future – will have as much fun as the reporters in Ebert’s elegy. 

But it’s hard to imagine how. 

Posted in Public Relations