Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
What’s Currie doing there? “That’s a complicated question,” he told me during a trip home for Christmas. “There’s a certain amount of pride and ego involved in it.” Currie is 59, and the Free Press is his dashing response to a familiar quandary journalists face: that of getting older and steadily less suited for a profession that favors youth. Currie did tours with City News and the U.S. Army, then spent 14 solid years as a Tribune reporter. In 1982 he left the Tribune to work for Mayor Jane Byrne as deputy press secretary, and his life has been in flux ever since.
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Mr. Green is the wallet stuffing that even reporters who read Milton aspire to. Currie spent a year with Byrne, and then, he says, “she got de-elected, much to my surprise.” He caught on with a PR firm, did a stint as an editor at NBC, and flacked for Sheriff James O’Grady, who faced corruption charges in 1989 and was defeated for reelection a year later. “I’m ashamed that I tried to quit when the going got tough there–probably to save my reputation,” recalls Currie, who admired O’Grady and believes he was brought down by subordinates. O’Grady talked him out of quitting. In the wake of that debacle, Currie allows, he “didn’t approach jobs in the media in Chicago with much confidence. Especially after an esteemed writer approached me in Riccardo’s and accused me of being a crook and a disgrace.” For a time he helped a friend edit a paper out in Wheaton. He also freelanced. “I flailed around for years and years,” he says, “trying to meet Mr. Green.”
The Free Press showed interest, and Currie “begged, borrowed, and finagled my way over” for an interview. A few weeks later the paper offered him the job. “And then the long slog to get a work permit began.” During this limbo Currie drove a limousine at night for income, blowing into a bagpipe chanter as the limo idled at O’Hare.
“This is probably the most unspoiled part of Europe,” Currie says. “But now it’s clear to me that I’m sitting in the middle of a remote wilderness that’s not remote at all. It’s a village in a global village. There are no malls up there, but kids will be kids and will congregate. And now that the European Community is in there”–importing the fruits and vegetables the crofters long did without–“they all hang out in front of the supermarket, and they have cellular phones, and a large percentage have computers and are wired into the Internet.”
Currie told me, “They’re up there duking it out for the people against the landowners and the politicians who’d encroach on these very stringent laws about tenantship. They’re standing at the ramparts, and they don’t make any pretense about it. I kind of wish they’d keep the editorials on the editorial page–but you know what? The paper’s not big enough. They have so many rows to hoe they use the whole paper.” The Free Press, he’s decided, is what “our friend John Milton was referring to when he talked about a free press in a democratic society. I said, ‘I’ll go out and report this story. Just aim me where you want to aim me. I’ll go out and get the facts, and we can look at the facts any way you want to look at the facts.’ They’re not blatant about it. They just want to protect the interests of the community.”
Maxim’s, which in its day offered the toniest dining experience in Chicago, lies discreetly at the foot of a Near North apartment house on Goethe, virtually invisible from the street. So the Sun-Times found itself at a disadvantage last week when it came to illustrating Fran Spielman’s report that the children of Maxim’s late owners had turned the establishment over to the city for use as a lecture hall and for consular receptions. But the paper found a way. It ran a file photo of the unrelated Maxim’s Restaurant at Clark and Madison. The suspicions of whoever wrote the caption calling Maxim’s “the epitome of elegance and fine dining” might have been raised by the short-order eatery’s garish awning and the big “HFC Loans” sign over the door.
