I once worked for a newspaper that covered a place where nothing ever happened. Or so I thought. The paper was called the Suburban Trib. It was born in 1967 and died in 1985 when its parent, the Chicago Tribune, shut it down and posted guards at the doors.
We covered the suburbs. We were young and eager and bored beyond all imagining. Most of us did not own homes or have children or in any way feel connected to the lives of the people whose towns and villages we covered. We wanted to be in the city. Things happened in the city. People in the city shot each other and robbed banks and did all the many things that made news. But we saw no news where we worked. There were board of education meetings and town council meetings, and in between there were plenary sessions. We were newspaper romantics remanded to the hinterlands, to offices in Hinsdale and Glenwood and to Des Plaines, where the bureau sat in a windowless basement made almost bearable by the cloud-pattern wallpaper. We ate lunch at the Ground Round. We wanted The Front Page. We got The Stepford Wives.
The "Little Trib" was a zoned, three-day-a-week insert, folded into the "Big Trib." Even as I write this, more than twenty years later, the bile still rises at the words Little and Big. We felt "little," a sensation reinforced by the folks downtown at "the Tower" who ruled that reporters and editors of the Little Trib need not apply for work at the Big Trib because they would never get it. We were to stay in the suburbs and would need special permission just to use the Big Trib’s morgue. And just to rub it in, if news somehow did break in our towns, the Big Trib would send its own reporters to cover it. Move over, junior.
When youth and ambition are stalled and thwarted one of two things can happen: you quit and go to law school, or you get aggressive. Some did quit. Most got aggressive. No news? We’ll find news. No future? We’ll report and write like mad. And if some of our bosses accused us of writing "for our clip books" – trust me, we all heard it – no matter. We were going to go places, and along the way, more out of personal need than any discernable esprit de corps, we created a remarkable newspaper.
When you worked for the Suburban Trib you did not come in and wait for an assignment, because there were no assignments. You got in your car and went reporting. If you felt less than eager to head out to Naperville or Glen Ellyn or Deerfield and chat up the village manager, you had only to look to your right or left and see what your eager young colleagues were doing. They were working the phone, looking for the stories that would one day get them out, to a real newsroom, with cubicles and old reporters who took you to lunch and talked about covering, say, Al Capone. The woman I was hired to replace told me years later that on her first day at work a spectacularly indictable elected official mentioned some problems he was having with a regulatory agency. The story of this man’s transgressions, she told herself, would be her one-way ticket to someplace else. And indeed it was.
So we looked and found nuggets in the most unlikely places: a fist fight at a Cicero wedding that our columnist, Bill Geist – whom The New York Times hired when the Tribune wouldn’t – turned into a riff on the society pages; how DuPage County, the state’s wealthiest, had pockets of hidden poverty that my colleague, Sam Freedman, also later of the Times, uncovered; how my friend Tom McNamee, who is now a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, assembled an anthropological kinship chart to show how most everyone on the public payroll in Chicago Heights was related to everyone else. We were also lucky in that our editor, Charles Hayes, was a man of vision and imagination who made it clear that it was imperative to get ahead of the story, and who created an atmosphere in which we came to see how unpredictable and alive the suburbs were if you looked in the right places. Still, only later could we see how much was going on, and how much of it was interesting, funny, and sad – and how it existed as news because we were so desperate to find it and write it.
The Suburban Trib died a hard and sudden death years ago. Many of us who spent what then seemed like too much time there recall it more fondly than we might have ever imagined. Over Memorial Day weekend we gathered for our first and, I suspect, only reunion. Well over a hundred of us showed up – a handsome turnout made better still by our gathering, at last, downtown. The wise organizers had set up a Web site so that we could write down our memories. There was much reminiscing about parties – the best of which, most everyone agreed, was the time we rented an El train and rode, ever drunker, around the city we so longed to cover, and which many of us later did.
We talked about stories, too. And again most of us agreed that the most enduring story happened on Memorial Day weekend 1979, when an American Airlines DC-10 crashed on take-off from O’Hare, killing everyone on board. The plane had crashed only a few miles from our bureau in Des Plaines. The editor on duty, a pleasant man steeped in the Little Trib culture, had never supervised a breaking news story because, it now appeared, he had never seen one. He went to the map, trying to determine into whose beat the jet had crashed. You are thinking, Into whose beat? Send everyone!
But not so fast. The Big Trib did not even want our legwork. They’d send their own people. And so a few of us, sensing our editor’s uncertainty, grabbed the story. We raced to the scene, knowing that, because this was a Friday, we would need a story that would still feel fresh Monday. We divvied up tasks and talked to the assembling gawkers. That night we wrote about the people who had flocked to gape at the awful scene, what they had witnessed and why they had come. And when we were done, we prayed that the Tribune would, somehow, miss what we had no choice but to find.
It did. The Big Trib’s people had come to the crash site driven by a less complex need: they needed only to get the story.
We of the Little Trib needed to get out.
