Last blog, I dropped a throwaway line about City News Bureau of Chicago “where I learned the craft of journalism and how to impersonate a deputy coroner.” My Web guru, Brian Lieberman, took the bait and asked what that stuff was about. Here’s what I wrote to Brian.

At City News Bureau, which truly was boot camp for cub reporters, you were taught to do whatever it took to get the story. If you had to steal papers off of someone’s desk, or peek through a keyhole, you were not discouraged from doing so. (Remember, we’re in Chicago. Even though it’s 1962 and an era is about to end, anything still goes. This sort of journalism is memorialized, hilariously and with only slight exaggeration, in “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, one of my favorite plays and movies of all time.)

One thing City News kids did every day was “coroner cases,” deaths reported to the Cook County Coroner because they were suspicious or abnormal in some way. Most of these coroner cases were not stories, and we could tell the office they were “cheap” and to “cheap them out.”

(In some cases, a coroner case would be “cheaped out” because the party involved was “blue,” i.e. black, and a story that otherwise would have been news was not because of the ethnicity of the “dead one”. I am not making this up.)

Early on in my City News career, I was on assignment in the Hyde Park police station and a difficult coroner case landed in my lap. I tried the usual ways to get the story and failed. I called the office and tried to cheap it out but they wouldn’t go for it; Get the story, kid, they said. I knew my colleagues sometimes impersonated deputy coroners on the phone, so I decided to try that.

I called the home.

“Hello?”

“This is Deputy Coroner Ellickson.”

“Who is this?”

“Deputy Coroner, uh, Ellickson.”

“Just a minute.” Pause of discussion in background. New voice comes on the phone.

“Who is this?”

“This is, um, er, uh, Deputy Coroner Ellickson.”

“THIS is Deputy Coroner Ellickson!”

It was a Mel Gibson moment. I decided I would be an ethical journalist for the rest of my career. Assuming I had one.

Postscript on coroner cases: Much later in my City News career, I was working the overnight shift at Central Police Headquarters and got another coroner case. I was dead tired. I knew this case had the makings of a story, but a difficult one that would require calling the family, and I just didn’t have the stomach for it at 4 a.m. So I called the desk and tried to cheap it out.

The deskman, Paul Zimbrakos, caught on and meted out a classic City News punishment. Not only did he make me call the family and get the story, he made me call back because I didn’t have the dead one’s hobbies, call back again because I didn’t have his early childhood history, call back again because I didn’t have the color of his eyes, etc. etc. etc. I worked that story until 10 or 11 a.m. the following day. It never went on the wire.

Paul went on to become the final chief of CNB. He was at his desk, still pushing kids around, in early December 2005, the final month of City News’s 106-year existence. I dropped by for the first time since the ’60s to pay my last respects.

Paul was kind of busy working a story about a Southwest Airlines plane skidding off an icy runway at Midway Airport. He was barking orders into a phone, yelling at people to do this and that, and motioning me to a seat all at the same time. He had a computer and a cubicle, and he now looks like Foxy Grandpa. Otherwise, absolutely nothing had changed. “Siddown Frank, I’m a little busy,” he said, like I’d just been there the day before. Eventually he got off the phone and we had a most pleasant chat. On December 31, 2005, the doors of City News Bureau closed forever.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. We’ve just booked an October trip to Borders stores in the Pittsburgh area, Columbus, Dayton and the Cincinnati area. Check http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_appearances.html for the latest.

P.P.S. There are 19 5-star reviews of To Love Mercy now posted on Amazon.com.  The newest are from ArmchairInterviews.com, a Writer’s Digest “Top 100″ website; ReaderViews.com; and R. Alkire. See them all at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974478539/103-8242752-9223855?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books&v=customer-reviews

P.P.P.S. Amazon.com has again cut its price for To Love Mercy, to $9.72. Amazon started out at $10.46 before the book was even published. Then it moved to full list, then to $10.46 again, and still the book wasn’t published. Post-publication, the price fell to $9.72, then went back up to $10.46, and now is back to $9.72 again. No one, my publisher included, can explain Amazon’s pricing behavior. All I can say is, go buy a copy before Amazon changes its mind again. Visit http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=br_ss_hs/103-8242752-9223855?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=to+love+mercy&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go