David Axelrod was grateful. His Secret Service guy, I’m not so sure about.
It was Saturday night in Greektown, and about a hundred more-or-less-literally-ink-stained wretches were shaking their heads and shaking each other’s hands at the Parthenon restaurant. It was a reunion of Chicago Tribune newsroom employees from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies. You could read that as either their current ages or their decades of employment and, for the most part, be pretty close to right.
In my online invite from Sel Yackley (corrected 10/17; sorry, Sel), the event had been billed as having a 1975 cutoff for participation, but who would begrudge a presidential adviser a few lousy months? Though Axelrod couldn’t stay for dinner . . . his Secret Service guy was waiting offstage to whisk him away for another commitment . . . David summoned up his first days at the Tower and first stories in the paper. It was June 14, 1976, and he was wearing his best suit. It wouldn’t stay clean for long.
He was on his way to Lemont with the casually attired Jeff Lyon to write sidebars on the previous night’s killer tornado. The town was a mess, but not the prose on page 2 of the next day’s paper, a shared Lyon/Axelrod byline (with another Axelrod piece nearby):
“Possessions–bowling shoes, toilets, lasagna packets, princess phones, dishwashers, cheese graters, Christmas tree lights, and wagon wheels–lay set out as at some grotesque garage sale. But the garages, along with the most of the homes and trees along McCarthy Road from McCarthy Street to Walker Road, were gone.”
After the storm: Click for PDF of photos and text
Then he moved on to the next day and his even riskier next assignment: Finding a Teamster or two willing to talk on the record about their president’s 25% raise to $156,250 a year, which was coupled with a doubling of their dues. Well, he found one, and the story ran on Page One. (That salary would be $593,060 in today’s dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you’re scoring at home.)
A pretty good first couple of days at the office, if you ask me. But Axelrod was not taking the credit. No, he pointed to Jon Van, sitting out in the Parthenon banquet hall. ”And so I started to learn the value of rewrite men.”