Mark Brown on Mark Brown
Brown considered himself an investigative reporter, but three years ago the Sun-Times had called off its hounds and shipped him to the sports department. “Some people thought I was being wasted back there, but I thought it was a good change-up for me at that point.” A column sounded like an even better change, and Brown told Cooke and Cruickshank he was interested. “It came together pretty quickly,” he says. “I never wrote a sample.”
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He has some ideas about why columnists go bad. “It occurs to me that if you don’t get out and talk to people, that can screw you up. If you don’t have people around to keep you honest and stimulate your thinking, that can mess you up. If you let the power of it go to your head, you get in trouble that way. If you lose your sense of humor–boy, that’s the thing! You start to get tired, you lose your sense of humor, and you get boring in a real hurry.
I tell Brown that the danger I would put near the top of the list is readers who love your stuff. A columnist who starts reacting to what fans say they like becomes their creation, not his own.
Is that still true?
He wants to be clear about this. “I’m not totally socially inept,” he says. “Just noticeably.”
But Cooke believes what I believe, which is that over the long haul Brown is easier company. “He handles the top topics–municipal corruption, all that typical Chicago columnist fare–but he’s also able to write amusingly about his dog eating his stereo, and to write about a little girl who dies of leukemia,” says Cooke. “He has a tremendous range. Not everybody can go from the hard, gritty Chicago political stuff to some of the more warm and fuzzy stories. And he can.”
