Feb. 29--Friday will mark not only the 179th birthday of the city of Chicago but also the 38th anniversary of the death of the Daily News. It was a hard day, March 4 in 1978, for some in the city and for all of us who worked for the paper. We went off to other newspapers, other professions, new chapters in our lives, as the paper signed off with a memorable headline in its final edition: "So long, Chicago."
Keeping tabs on the Daily News alumni is the not-unpleasant task of former newsmen Henry Kisor and Jack Schnedler. Each month they compile a newsletter that is chatty, informative and entertaining, filled with news of births and deaths, memories of the good old days and news of post-paper accomplishments. The CDN newsletter was started by a lovely woman named Margaret Whitesides, and after her death in 2002 it was cared for by the husband-and-wife team of Bob and Marge Herguth for more than a decade until Schnedler and Kisor took over.
One alumnus has been particularly interesting to track through the years: John Schulian, who came to the Daily News as a sports columnist from The Washington Post in 1977, went on to work at the Sun-Times when the News folded and was as good as it gets.
Here is one memorable opening, from a 1981 column about Skip Dillard and Bernard Randolph, the star-crossed local schoolyard hoops legends: "Even in the loving glow of noonday sunshine, with March pretending it's May and the thermometer skipping toward 60, K Town has trouble wiping the sorrow from its face. On the West Side streets that gave birth to the neighborhood's name, on Kedvale and Keeler and the half-dozen others, there are too many boarded-up windows, too many burned-out houses, too many cars with flat tires or no tires at all. Stray dogs wander listlessly, ragged men kill time with bottles in brown bags, and the only sign of hope is a bouncing basketball."
He was never loath to take on sacred cows, either, once writing this about Michael Jordan: "No one ever played basketball better than he does, and he may even have surpassed Ali in terms of worldwide impact. But Jordan uses his clout to peddle sneakers and star in unwatchable movies with Bugs Bunny, leaving the very distinct impression that he has the social consciousness of a baked potato."
Schulian left the Sun-Times in 1984 after it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch and after he'd had a particularly raucous encounter with one of Murdoch's henchmen. He went to write for the Philadelphia Daily News and then decided, "I was 40 and didn't want to turn 41 in Philadelphia."
And this is where things got really interesting. He wrote a letter to Steven Bochco, then the successful producer of "Hill Street Blues," enclosing a book of his boxing columns. Amazingly Bochco wrote back, and his 1985 letter is now framed on the wall of Schulian's house in Pasadena, Calif.: "Herewith some HILL STREET scripts. I read about half your book so far. It's wonderful. You're a terrific writer, and if you can't make the transition to film writing, I'd be very surprised. Not to mention disappointed. As soon as I get my next project (a series about, God help me, lawyers) perpendicular to the ground, I will send you what we've written and invite you to write a script. (For money, of course.)"
And so began a 20-year career in TV. Schulian moved, wrote a script for Bochco's "L.A. Law" and then wrote for such dramas as "Miami Vice," "Wiseguy" and "Midnight Caller" before grabbing the golden ring by co-creating the international hit "Xena: Warrior Princess."
"Life is good," he says now. "And I owe it all to TV."
TV success has also given him a certain freedom, and he has been using it to edit some sports books, write for magazines and websites and begin a fiction-writing career. He's had a couple of short stories published and now a novel.
"I finished a first draft in 2004 and I have revised and revised and revised again," he says.
"A Better Goodbye" is a terrific book, a detailed and fast-paced trip to the dark sides of Los Angeles. His characters -- Nick Pafko, a boxer who killed a man in the ring; Jenny Yee, a poetry-reading college kid working in the massage trade; a busted-out actor still dreaming big named Scott Crandall; and, most ominously, ex-con Onus DuPree -- exist in the shadows, flawed and desperate, dangerous and dreamy.
Publisher's Weekly had this to say: "This visceral, gritty noir takes place on the seedy fringes of modern Hollywood. ... (T)he dialogue is razor sharp, and the characters well developed -- the good-hearted Nick is easy to root for. A robbery triggers a grisly showdown as this thriller hurtles toward its nail-biting conclusion."
And Schulian's prose has not lost a step: "Kill someone and he never really goes away, not if you have a conscience. Alonzo Burgess had haunted Nick since that night in Oakland, toppled by one last four-punch combination and doomed to hit his head on the bottom rope. The result was the worst kind of whiplash, his brain stem snapping and the lights going out on his life."
Schulian just turned 71 and has long lived in California. It was on the phone from that sunny clime that he talked about what he misses about Chicago -- "the passion of the people" -- and, as names of former colleagues arose, what he misses about newspapers: "They were part of the everyday fabric of life. People read them and read them thoroughly. You'd see people sitting on the 'L,' packs of them, all reading newspapers. They knew who all the writers were and ...." He paused to chuckle. "And they thought we were all a bunch of idiots. I miss that."
"After Hours With Rick Kogan" airs 9 to 11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
rkogan@tribpub.com
