Rick Kogan’s tribute to Mike Royko in the Sunday Tribune delivered the sad news that “there is no immortality for newspaper writers” and dusted off Ben Hecht’s immortal verse to that effect:
We know each other’s daydreams
And the hopes that come to grief
For we write each other’s obits
And they’re Godalmighty brief.
And second, let’s acknowledge that Hecht’s evocative jingle isn’t true. We journalists do a wonderful job of burying our own. The chance to be sent off in style might be the last newsroom perk left standing. It’s true that the papers don’t get around to everybody, but the primary constraint isn’t the bleak, empty lives led by journalists. It’s what the Sun-Times‘s Maureen O’Donnell says she was once told by another obit writer: “She said if she wrote about every former staffer, the paper would never have obits about anyone else.”
She was also, back in 1967, the first reporter to ride the research submersible Alvin into the Atlantic Ocean’s depths. Hopes that came to grief did not figure in O’Donnell’s account.
