So Much for Retirement
This forlorn situation was one of the reasons sports editor John Cherwa lost his job a year ago. His number two, Dan McGrath, moved into the top spot and offered a column to S.L. Price of Sports Illustrated. Price turned him down. Then he turned to Mike Wise of the New York Times. “I asked him, ‘What would it take to make it happen?’” says McGrath. “He said, ‘You know, I really like my life. I’m not ready to make another move.’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Well, the deal was, at that time it was very difficult to get good copy editors, and at the Star and other papers of that size you had to do a little bit of everything. So I was able to hire him [in 1975] as a copy editor on the midnight shift.” Sons had told Downey he wouldn’t be allowed to write, but Downey did so well on midnights that eventually Sons came up with a weekly column on TV sports.
By this time Jim Hoge, the editor of the Sun-Times, was running the Daily News too. He’d been given Marshall Field’s afternoon paper by the desperate publisher to see if he could figure out a way to keep it alive. “Hoge was trying to build the Daily News as the paper of choice among the intelligentsia of Chicago, not the blue-collar types,” Sons says. “So Downey wrote a column about NASCAR racing on TV, and he used the phrase ‘Dolly Parton headlights.’
“He walked into Detroit, and he captured the town,” says Jay Mariotti, who was a Detroit News sportswriter back then. “He was a blast, the life of the party.”
He wrote the news column three years. “I’d promised myself I’d get out before my 50th birthday,” he says. “Then the Tribune Company bought the Times. I said to myself, if these people are the greatest people I ever met I might stay on longer. But the Tribune Company’s editors were pretty aloof to me. I was so enthusiastic about working for Dean Baquet, a former Tribune editor who was going to be the Times managing editor. But his office was ten steps from mine, and he never spoke to me the entire time we were at the paper together. I felt my being there wasn’t a high priority, so I actually pushed my retirement up a few months.”
So he said yes to McGrath. “They caught me in a good mood. I wouldn’t have come for less money. There was a greed factor involved.” His wife “can’t wait,” he says. “When we were in New York for the wedding we were reminded of how much fun city life can be.”
