David W. - Max - McElwain

This review appeared in today's Des Moines Register
Book review: Iowa journalist McElwain's published collection is a gem
Michael TidemannSpecial to the Register
"Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings 1969-2019," by Iowa journalist Max McElwain.
If you had been a journalist for 50 years, which stories and columns would you select for a collection of 273 pages?
That was the challenge Iowa journalist Max McElwain faced in "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings 1969-2019." McElwain has succeeded admirably in producing this selection.
What first struck me about McElwain’s collection was the sheer audacity, assuredness and intellectual vigor he showed at age 17 in his “Up Against the Wall” selections starting in July 1969 in The Woodbine (Iowa) Twiner where he bookended his long journalism career. The last selection in the book comes from The Twiner-Herald March 28, 2018, issue.
What came between was publication in The Council Bluffs Nonpareil, The Kansas City Evening News, The Kansas City Star (where Ernest Hemingway got his start), The Omaha World-Herald and Rolling Stone, among many other papers in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri.
McElwain belongs to the fraternity of us having “ink in our veins.” No doubt his blood runs as black as tomorrow’s headlines.
McElwain’s stories and essays run the gamut from sports to columns. I was especially taken by his unpublished essay about his mother, “The school-teaching princess.”
In every high school in America, there are those students who never find a niche past their lockers. They are the ones who aren’t pretty or loud enough to be cheerleaders, not strong enough to be athletes, not popular enough to lead a club. My mother always found room for them – in a glee club, on a piano bench, in her music room. She got into trouble when students of hers checked out of study halls so they might spend time in the music room. Shy but pretty country girls, who had no place in school before, found themselves singing in my mother’s chorus, and they felt like somebody.
Years later, I would sit in the Corn Palace in Woodbine and girls I didn’t know would walk up to me and say, “You don’t know how much your mother did for me.”
McElwain was not afraid to challenge sacred cows. In “The Only Fun in Farmland,” published in Sport Magazine in 1985, he contrasted the farm crisis with the unfading support of the Iowa Hawkeyes football beam.
Now on these pale Saturday afternoons, as lives outside the stadium shatter, and land values and market prices tumble and debts pile up, the only numbers that matter are meaningless numbers on a scoreboard.
McElwain’s collection goes beyond one man’s journalism career. It’s a slice of American pie that we can all bite into and tell ourselves, "Wasn’t it lovely?"
Michael Tidemann writes from Estherville, Iowa. His author page is amazon.com/author/michaeltidemann.
'Sharing a Napkin'
Max McElwain
Eagle Book Bindery Publishing Company
ISBN 978-1-934333-75-4
$18

Michael Tidemann Follow Michael Tidemann and explore their bibliography from Amazon.com's Michael Tidemann Author Page.

The only thing that rivaled our Chinese students' academic obsession was basketball. If there were rare early-morning classroom absences, male or female, there was likely a live televised NBA game broadcast halfway around the globe. When former Omaha North basketball great Mike McGee brought his Beijing team to our small university town in the mountains, the occasion marked the first professional basketball ever in rural Hunan Province. Read more about the game in "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019," found in print copy at https://bit.ly/3dGROi2 or as an eBook at tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4.

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The small world of "Nebraska"
Unpublished
November 2013

Criticizing Alexander Payne’s "Nebraska" is not a popular stance. I’m a huge Payne fan—seen everything he’s done and loved it all except for this film. But the parochial swipe at our small-town life leaves no room for anyone or anything more special than the ordinary Grants.

On a chilly Friday afternoon early last month, the man whose survival rallied the community of Wayne following October’s devastating tornado stepped out of a car on the Wayne State College campus. With cane in one hand, he smiled and tipped his hat as onlookers let loose balloons into the wind, the same wind that hurtled a metal dumpster into him across town three months earlier.
A fire truck and parade accompanied the car bringing John Dunning home from rehabilitation in Lincoln, passing by a cheering crowd on Wayne’s main street before making the stop on campus.
Among the thousands of possible victims, the most powerful October tornado in recent American history settled on the college’s chief information officer, who would have been thoroughly preoccupied otherwise that evening had he not been whacked by a dumpster flying 150 or so miles per hour.
Dunning, a marvelous actor in local community theatre productions, had found the role of his life. Having survived the only critical injury in this $50 million tornado, he provides hope and strength as the public face of a disaster that could have been much, much worse.
“This parade is the kind of thing that was missing in 'Nebraska,'” one of the onlookers said, as balloons were released to the wind.

Much of the crankiness surrounding Alexander Payne’s "Nebraska" appears because the film hits too close to home.
Discovering that some of the characters you’re watching on screen—not Bruce Dern or Will Forte, but locals in the background—sit and eat popcorn in the next row can be unsettling. Following the credits, which northeast Nebraskans uncharacteristically view because they or someone they know are likely mentioned, you leave the theatre with the odd sensation you’re still watching the movie. Because you are.
Nebraska richly deserves however many Oscars it wins. Only someone unfamiliar with the state could sincerely maintain there are not characters like those in the film, not acknowledge that Payne’s film provides at least a narrow glimpse of life in a small Nebraska town.
But therein lies the issue. That “slice of life” may prove to be too narrow a piece.
We’re surrounded by folks like Woody Grant and his family. Since the film’s November opening, favorable online discussion gushes about its realism while noting the occasional misstep. “Loved the bar scenes, but when we go into a bar, everyone looks up. We’re gawkers!” a Facebook post declared.
In Cornhusker land, men don’t sit on their hands during football games, not even NFL ones, and talk about old cars.
And while June Squibb as Kate Grant raised the most hackles in the string of sold-out showings in Norfolk and Wayne, elderly, rural Midwestern women of her generation typically don’t use profanity or talk about s*x as she does. Of course, she is a fictional character. Perhaps Payne or screenplay writer Bob Nelson has an aunt or knows someone like her. After all, Payne, a Creighton Prep graduate who hails from an upper-middle- class Dundee neighborhood, and some of the writers, production crew and cast members have been quick to point out, patronizingly, that they or family members “grew up” in small towns in Nebraska or other states, intending to provide credibility.
They might as well say, “Some of my best friends live in small towns.”
So "Nebraska" rings mostly true, as far as it goes. But where is the custodian who did doctoral work at the University of Chicago, the postal worker with a home library larger than professors’, the cowboy poet, the preacher’s wife with a string of critically successful romance novels? The women talking about last summer’s Monet exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum as they wait in line for “Nebraska” at Wayne’s Majestic Theatre? The John Dunnings?
Yes, Wayne is a college town. But otherwise, it’s similar to Pierce, Plainview, Stanton and other communities close by that serve as Payne’s decimated, dismal, fictional setting, Hawthorne.
There are no are remnants in Hawthorne of the 20th century’s most effective educational system—rural Midwestern schools—no evidence of old teachers nor their progeny in town.
Instead, we get the criminally goofy nephews, Bart and Cole, as well as other Grant family and friends in Hawthorne, where apparently everyone is either out to get Woody’s nonexistent sweepstakes winnings or share in his celebrity. Or both.
If the Keystone XL pipeline were passing through Payne’s Hawthorne—and it may be, soon--his Nebraskans would take the money. Unlike more than 100 Nebraskans who have declined, some as much as $75,000, to permit oil piped under their land.
The most interesting and likable character in "Nebraska," Forte’s David Grant, sells stereos. Nothing wrong with that, but there are young people going to school to learn wind energy, others starting up IT companies in the region.
"Nebraska" is devoid of diversity, whereas the racial composition of these towns in the film has been transformed in the past quarter century.
Payne’s view is particularized and constricted. As an artist, he has no responsibility beyond the telling of father and son’s road trip. But the background gets shown, and "Nebraska" was filmed in black and white in November, creating a maximally bleak environment.
The power of film is such that millions of Oscar viewers worldwide, on March 2, will come to believe that "Nebraska" shows Nebraska. Many suspicions that ours is a dreary, narrow culture will be wrongly confirmed.
We don’t live in a world so small as depicted. If there is a narrowness assigned here, it lies in the film.

The small world of Nebraska
Unpublished
November 2013

Criticizing Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is not a popular stance. I’m a huge Payne fan—seen everything he’s done and loved it all except for this film. But the parochial swipe at our small-town life leaves no room for anyone or anything more special than the ordinary Grants.

On a chilly Friday afternoon early last month, the man whose survival rallied the community of Wayne following October’s devastating tornado stepped out of a car on the Wayne State College campus. With cane in one hand, he smiled and tipped his hat as onlookers let loose balloons into the wind, the same wind that hurtled a metal dumpster into him across town three months earlier.
A fire truck and parade accompanied the car bringing John Dunning home from rehabilitation in Lincoln, passing by a cheering crowd on Wayne’s main street before making the stop on campus.
Among the thousands of possible victims, the most powerful October tornado in recent American history settled on the college’s chief information officer, who would have been thoroughly preoccupied otherwise that evening had he not been whacked by a dumpster flying 150 or so miles per hour.
Dunning, a marvelous actor in local community theatre productions, had found the role of his life. Having survived the only critical injury in this $50 million tornado, he provides hope and strength as the public face of a disaster that could have been much, much worse.
“This parade is the kind of thing that was missing in Nebraska,” one of the onlookers said, as balloons were released to the wind.

Much of the crankiness surrounding Alexander Payne’s Nebraska appears because the film hits too close to home.
Discovering that some of the characters you’re watching on screen—not Bruce Dern or Will Forte, but locals in the background—sit and eat popcorn in the next row can be unsettling. Following the credits, which northeast Nebraskans uncharacteristically view because they or someone they know are likely mentioned, you leave the theatre with the odd sensation you’re still watching the movie. Because you are.
Nebraska richly deserves however many Oscars it wins. Only someone unfamiliar with the state could sincerely maintain there are not characters like those in the film, not acknowledge that Payne’s film provides at least a narrow glimpse of life in a small Nebraska town.
But therein lies the issue. That “slice of life” may prove to be too narrow a piece.
We’re surrounded by folks like Woody Grant and his family. Since the film’s November opening, favorable online discussion gushes about its realism while noting the occasional misstep. “Loved the bar scenes, but when we go into a bar, everyone looks up. We’re gawkers!” a Facebook post declared.
In Cornhusker land, men don’t sit on their hands during football games, not even NFL ones, and talk about old cars.
And while June Squibb as Kate Grant raised the most hackles in the string of sold-out showings in Norfolk and Wayne, elderly, rural Midwestern women of her generation typically don’t use profanity or talk about s*x as she does. Of course, she is a fictional character. Perhaps Payne or screenplay writer Bob Nelson has an aunt or knows someone like her. After all, Payne, a Creighton Prep graduate who hails from an upper-middle- class Dundee neighborhood, and some of the writers, production crew and cast members have been quick to point out, patronizingly, that they or family members “grew up” in small towns in Nebraska or other states, intending to provide credibility.
They might as well say, “Some of my best friends live in small towns.”
So Nebraska rings mostly true, as far as it goes. But where is the custodian who did doctoral work at the University of Chicago, the postal worker with a home library larger than professors’, the cowboy poet, the preacher’s wife with a string of critically successful romance novels? The women talking about last summer’s Monet exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum as they wait in line for “Nebraska” at Wayne’s Majestic Theatre? The John Dunnings?
Yes, Wayne is a college town. But otherwise, it’s similar to Pierce, Plainview, Stanton and other communities close by that serve as Payne’s decimated, dismal, fictional setting, Hawthorne.
There are no are remnants in Hawthorne of the 20th century’s most effective educational system—rural Midwestern schools—no evidence of old teachers nor their progeny in town.
Instead, we get the criminally goofy nephews, Bart and Cole, as well as other Grant family and friends in Hawthorne, where apparently everyone is either out to get Woody’s nonexistent sweepstakes winnings or share in his celebrity. Or both.
If the Keystone XL pipeline were passing through Payne’s Hawthorne—and it may be, soon--his Nebraskans would take the money. Unlike more than 100 Nebraskans who have declined, some as much as $75,000, to permit oil piped under their land.
The most interesting and likable character in Nebraska, Forte’s David Grant, sells stereos. Nothing wrong with that, but there are young people going to school to learn wind energy, others starting up IT companies in the region.
Nebraska is devoid of diversity, whereas the racial composition of these towns in the film has been transformed in the past quarter century.
Payne’s view is particularized and constricted. As an artist, he has no responsibility beyond the telling of father and son’s road trip. But the background gets shown, and Nebraska was filmed in black and white in November, creating a maximally bleak environment.
The power of film is such that millions of Oscar viewers worldwide, on March 2, will come to believe that Nebraska shows Nebraska. Many suspicions that ours is a dreary, narrow culture will be wrongly confirmed.
We don’t live in a world so small as depicted. If there is a narrowness assigned here, it lies in the film.

Thanks to Sarah Lentz and The Wayne Herald for this glowing review of "Sharing a Napkin."

"McElwain has somewhat of a restless spirit and through "Sharing a Napkin" readers get to join him on a lifetime of adventures from working in small-town Iowa to a daily Kansas City newspaper, travels abroad and more. Throughout the published and unpublished work, McElwain also includes author's notes for the readers, giving more insight into what they're about to read. Whether it's explaining the background of a sports column or giving an update on the complex relationship he had with his father, these notes often highlight McElwain's humor and humanity."

Available at Eagle Books (https://bit.ly/3dGROi2) or as Kindle eBook (https://tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4)

Former Wayne resident 'Sharing a Napkin' with new anthology of a career in journalism | My Wayne News Former Wayne resident 'Sharing a Napkin' with new anthology of a career in journalism Fri, 07/24/2020 - 12:00am Sarah Lentz It's a near universal thought when packing during a move - "why do I have so much stuff? Why have I kept this all these years?" For some people, it inspires them to downsize, d...

At work at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton 1985. Behind the door lies the office of president and former U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer. Outside that summer, anti-apartheid rallies broke out daily on campus, the Live Aid benefit concert was staged in July in nearby Philadelphia, and student Brooke Shields (and her mother) were spotted regularly. Among my tasks at CFAT--during a year when sports scandals roiled campuses--was investigating the relationship between college athletics and academia. Athletic scandals continued into the new century, and you can read about them in "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019" in print form (Eagle Books https://bit.ly/3dGROi2) or as a Kindle eBook (https://tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4).

Christmas morning in Woodbine, late 1970s, with brother Dennis. Read more about the McElwains in the chapter "La Familia" in "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019." Available at Eagle Books (https://bit.ly/3dGROi2) or as Kindle eBook (https://tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4)

Ready to face the day, age two. Started smoking early. Read "A smoker's notes: Nervous sparring with a dark habit" and other unpublished essays, as well as fifty years of journalism, in "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019." Available at Eagle Books (https://bit.ly/3dGROi2) or as Kindle eBook (https://tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4).

"Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019," chronicles the colorful, decades-long career of newspaperman, sports reporter, writer, and editor David Max McElwain. Offering first-person insight into the vanishing profession of print journalist, "Sharing a Napkin" goes beyond what's on the printed page and offers readers the story behind the story -- like the time in June 1990 when McElwain accidentally sat in a chair reserved for sports legend Bo Jackson.

Pick up your copy of "Sharing a Napkin" today from Eagle Books: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

Did you know that in addition to his newest book, "Sharing a Napkin," Max is also the author of "The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six Player Girls Basketball?

Get your copy today! https://amzn.to/3h0ZOg3

What songs does Bob Dylan sing at a live concert in Shanghai when the Chinese government requests pre-approval of his song list? Read “Sharing A Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019” to find out.

This selection of essays chronicles the colorful, decades-long career of newspaperman, sports reporter, writer, and editor David Max McElwain, who takes readers beyond the page to offer them the story behind the story. Get your copy today!

Paperback via Eagle Books: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

Kindle edition via Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O9YXgu

"Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019," chronicles the colorful, decades-long career of newspaperman, sports reporter, writer, and editor David Max McElwain. Offering first-person insight into the vanishing profession of print journalist, "Sharing a Napkin" goes beyond what's on the printed page and offers readers the story behind the story -- like this time in June 1990 when McElwain unexpectedly ran into sports legend Bo Jackson.

Pick up your copy of "Sharing a Napkin" today from Eagle Books: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

The Kindle edition of "Sharing a Napkin" is now available! Get your electronic copy today! https://tinyurl.com/y9jt49m4

Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings 1969 - 2019 Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings 1969 - 2019

I am so grateful to my friends, family, and colleagues for their support. For those who have ordered a copy of "Sharing a Napkin," your book has been signed and is on its way!

Haven't ordered your copy yet? Don't worry! "Sharing a Napkin" is available now at Eagle Books. Get your copy today: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

From 1966 until 2017, David W. "Max" McElwain worked at all levels of the newspaper industry, from small-town weeklies to metropolitan dailies and many stops in between. In his role as reporter, editor, and even newspaper delivery man, he wrote for more than a dozen newspapers throughout the Midwest, covering everything from sports to features to breaking news stories. His new book, "Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019," chronicles his colorful career in 100 essays from multiple publications, and offers first-person insight into the vanishing profession of print journalist. Pick up your copy from Eagle Books today: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

My first look at my new book "Sharing a Napkin."

Print copies of "Sharing a Napkin" are now available for purchase at Eagle Books for $18. You can get your copy here: https://bit.ly/3dGROi2

Information for purchasing digital copies of the book will be made available soon. Stay tuned!

I never thought I'd publish a book in the middle of a pandemic. Then again, a collection of mostly journalism articles from the past fifty years isn’t what I intended when I set out to write a book in winter 2018.

Here's now "Sharing a Napkin" came to be:

Steve King had just won yet another term in the U.S. House of Representatives, and I was mystified how my fellow southwest Iowans continued to return to office a white nationalist whose brazen public babbling would soon cost him his committee assignments in the House. King: An Inquiry into Values in the Heart of America’s Cold Civil War would provide insight into how otherwise kind and rational rural Iowans could keep King in office and help elect Donald Trump president.

But Karen and I moved the following spring from Woodbine to Ames, which didn’t get us far enough away from Steve King (the Story County college town lies in Congressional District 4 too). As I toted box after box of newspapers and magazines up the stairs into our apartment, I thought: what had been the use of saving all these clippings if I didn’t do anything with them? Otherwise, they’re nothing but a damn fire hazard. Between my mother and me, we had saved everything I’d written for publication since the late 1960s, when I began writing for The Woodbine Twiner as a high school freshman. Stashed away, too, were unpublished short stories, magazine articles, and college-written essays.

Before the idea of the King book percolated and trickled away, there was the nagging novel that never was written. There was a novella, Songs from Our Summer, grown out of my newspaper days, but never the big Cahuna. Since the teenage years, I fully expected I’d wind up as a novelist. Why wouldn’t I? My first short story was published in the Omaha World-Herald after winning its fiction contest for teens; a few years later, another one wound up with a Hollywood screenwriter who unsuccessfully peddled it to the studios after I traveled to California and joined the screenwriters guild. I was 24 years old. Soon after, as I plugged away at small-town newspapers, there was a national sports writing award for a series on semipro baseball players, then another nomination for best sports book (The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Iowa Six-Player Girls’ Basketball).

Dreams of the writing life were already settled well before I attended the University of Iowa. Besides saving all my clippings, Mom retained a notebook on the kitchen table in which she wrote down usable words—good action verbs, like “trampled” or “stifled”--she read in the newspapers that I might plug into my sports stories. Right next door in Woodbine, neighbor and high school English teacher Kathryn Kellow provided a subscription to New York Magazine for my senior year. She knew I read Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, knew I was aiming higher than covering high school sports for a living. “That’s a nice book, but it’s not the one I’m waiting for,” she said after reading Semi-Pro, my first collection of newspaper stories.

Miss Kellow never got to hold the book she was waiting for. Maybe it’s this one, Sharing a Napkin: Selected Writings, 1969-2019. another journalism collection. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, John Lennon wrote. More than fifty years have passed since I harbored dreams of writing the big book, and that never happened. Instead, I pounded out thousands of newspaper articles and columns, editorials and letters to the editor, in dozens of publications throughout the country. A hundred or so of them appear here in Sharing a Napkin. This represents my life’s work, my big book.

Why Sharing a Napkin?

When wife Karen and I—both months into uneasy retirement—read in early November 2017 that The Twiner-Herald, a weekly community newspaper in southwest Iowa, needed a managing editor, we pretty much jumped off the couch and grabbed the job.

Why wouldn’t we? Karen had owned and published The Woodbine Twiner before selling to Media News in the late 1990s, inheriting the paper following the death of husband Gene Bloom a few years earlier. At mid-century, Gene’s dad owned and operated the Herald-Observer in Logan—nine miles south on Highway 30 in Harrison County—while Gene’s uncle ran the Twiner in Woodbine.

I grew up writing sports for the Twiner, taking copy down to the paper three blocks away on my bicycle. Thirty years later, after working across the country at many levels in the industry and teaching college journalism, I returned to Woodbine, where Karen needed a sportswriter, and I needed a date. After one fall covering high school football—I wrote the game story and she took pictures—we were married in 2000.

And almost 20 years after that, here we were again, managing a newspaper merging the titles of the publications in Logan and Woodbine and covering both communities. “That’s like sharing a napkin,” said a Woodbine friend who should know. Bob Smith is a former columnist for the Twiner and member of the Harrison County Board of Supervisors.

While we loved living again in Woodbine, operating a weekly newspaper in the 21stcentury was more than we bargained for. The Twiner-Herald was owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, one of its hundreds of papers, and we soon learned how tightly Warren Buffett held his purse strings. We were in our office on Walker Street for three weeks before Karen, who paginated the paper, was given internet access. I asked for a simple white board on which to organize my story list; weeks later, the Denison publisher who oversaw The Twiner-Herald gave me a grungy, 30-year-old calendar with sharpie stains for me to make do.

These were the least of our problems. Because of the prominence of social media, operating a weekly is now a 24-7 job. While Karen and I were used to covering and photographing events and accidents any time of the day, beating our competing papers with online content was something new--and mandatory. This was made plain to me one afternoon when a truck driver had drowned in a nearby rock quarry. When I finished snapping pics of the truck submerged in water, I noticed a young reporter standing by who was already posting the story and pics for her online paper. It wasn’t until the next day it occurred to me that I should do the same. I was an ink-stained, print-loving old guy living in a digital world. (Read more about our experiences in the book’s final chapter).

In our short five months with The Twiner-Herald, I did investigative series on the opioid crises and the need in Woodbine for a wellness center (it’s under construction and I did my part. Thanks, Woodstein). I loved writing a regular column and reporting on sports. But covering two towns who often got along like quarreling brothers and all their separate school board and city council meetings, sporting and music events, was like . . .sharing a napkin.

What do we do when we share a napkin? (In the time of pandemic, of course, that is something we don’t do anymore).
First of all, there has to be a level of trust behind the transaction for it to succeed. Say a dinner guest at the table--a stranger--is absent a napkin, and she needs one in the worst way. You promptly pick up yours, regardless of the fact you just wiped spaghetti sauce from your mouth, and kindly offer it to her. If your napkin is pasted with sauce because it was dripping profusely, you likely have the sense not to offend your dinner guest by offering it to her. But should there remain but a morsel of sauce on the napkin, you do the mannerly thing and hand it over. You are trusting her to trust you. If she accepts, a potentially messy and awkward situation has been averted. But the napkin she took from you might be fraught with deadly bacteria that will kill her before she eats again. She has trusted a stranger that this won’t be the case.

It’s the same scenario when readers pick up a newspaper. They are trusting there’s no more than a morsel of untruth in the content you’ve provided. But journalism, like sharing a napkin, is a messy business, particularly if you’re sharing the newspaper with another town. You do your best and hope that the reader is happy and informed (and your dinner guest doesn’t see the sauce stain).

When the legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko faced brain cancer, he asked his wife, Judy, to produce a book of his columns in case he didn’t survive surgery. Royko’s book was published after his death in 1997. I’m facing no such deadline (nor suggesting I’m in the great Royko’s league), but here’s what I’ve been doing for the past fifty years.