WINDY CITY PERSPECTIVE

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune conducted an international architectural competition for the design of its new headquarters. The World’s Greatest Newspaper, as it proclaimed itself, could have erected a landmark modernistic tower envisioned by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer or an impractical giant lectern styled by Adolf Loos but instead went with a neo-Gothic bullet by Howells and Hood.

By the mid-‘80s, when I was employed by the paper’s syndication service, the grimy gray building was surrounded by many much newer buildings that resembled the glassy proposal the publisher had rejected. Maybe that says everything, in the end.

By then, though, the newsroom had definitely changed. Gone were the typewriters, long replaced by computer terminals and keyboards. Tours were guided through glass-shrouded catwalks overhead, where they could look down on journalists at work. I remember being fascinated to recognize there were four semi-circular copy-desks below me, each one ringed by copy-editors and a single “slotman” at the center, just as it had been when I started. I’d heard, too, that none of those seats were ever vacant long; this was a paper edited ‘round the clock for its many editions. But then I noticed that the editors on one of the rims were doing nothing except writing and editing photo captions. Nothing else for the entire shift. I’m sorry, but I’m used to far more variety when I’m editing. How did they ever stay awake?

Since we were really there to see two of our cartoonists, we headed for a set of elevators serving floors six through 32. And we were headed to the top, Jeff MacNelly’s suite, which sat just under the floor of microwave gear.

With his panoramic windows between flying buttresses looking out over Lake Michigan (you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began that day), I wondered how he ever got any work done on his editorial cartoons or his Shoe comic strip.

One floor down, which Dick Locher commanded, was quite different. With its tiny diamond-shaped windows, the suite wrapped around the elevator and service shafts felt more like sitting inside a gargoyle.

At that point, one of my colleagues noticed a framed Pulitzer Prize on the wall. “That’s all it is? A piece of paper?”

Locher, who drew the Dick Tracy strip in addition to his editorial cartoons, had won two.

On the couch, MacNelly, who’d just won his third Pulitzer, grinned. “Yup, that’s about it. A piece of paper.”