Sometime during the evening of Thursday, May 1, I received a text message from former Reader publisher Tracy Baim telling me that Michael Miner passed away. She said, “Not for public yet but family of Miner told me I could tell Reader people. More soon.” I immediately went to our office’s Slack online messaging board and posted, asking people to keep the information between us as long as we could.
Within hours after the break of day on Friday, I received a few phone calls from writers at other publications seeking information for their obituaries. It wasn’t surprising to me that word got around so fast. Miner was legendary, not only to those who worked with him at the Reader but also to former colleagues at the Sun-Times, where he worked in the 1970s, as well as the journalism community at large.
Miner, a former Reader editor and columnist, was truly a journeyman of Chicago journalism and has the distinction of having some influence on every version of the Reader thus far. From his first contribution as a freelancer (an article titled “The Insanity Stops,” documenting Chicagoans at night, was published on pages four and five of our very first issue on October 1, 1971) to his last (revisiting writer John Conroy’s “House of Screams” series on police torture for our 50th anniversary issue on October 28, 2021), Miner’s curiosity and sage observations on writing and life helped define the soul of this publication.
Miner’s family planned a memorial gathering on May 19 at the Newberry Library. At the gathering, Conroy, one of the speakers, talked about meeting Miner first in 1975 for lunch “at a restaurant near Grand and State” arranged through a mutual friend. “[Our friend] was introducing two men who, despite our chosen professions, were fundamentally shy,” Conroy said as he described Miner’s tendency to take long pauses during conversation but follow up with another thought or offering, perhaps even on another occasion.
“As nearly every writer in this room knows,” Conroy continued, “after one of those long silences, Mike had a way of conveying some gift.” Former Reader theater editor Albert Williams agreed with this sentiment and told me in a phone conversation that Miner’s longtime media column for this paper, Hot Type, was a perfect embodiment of his ability to take a long view on a topic. “He was objective and distanced, but not distant,” Williams said. “His work is an example of an endangered Chicago journalism tradition: the space to ruminate. Journalism as literature.”
I reached out to former Reader writers and current staffers for more memories and reflections on working with Miner, and here are three that resonated. —Salem Collo-Julin
A poem by former Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova
I learned that Mike Miner died on May Day,
And sat at work looking at his obit
With a photo of him in a fisherman’s hat,
And recalled how he reached out from retirement
on the Reader‘s Slack
To praise a piece of mine
But also to advise me
That I should never describe someone as “bald”
Because it is as hurtful to the subject as it is meaningless to the reader.
And I remembered about how he insisted
On carrying an old Pack ’n Play to the trunk of my car
Almost three years ago,
Hoisting the box with some train over his tall, thin frame,
But he was a gentleman
And wouldn’t let a pregnant lady do it.
I thought about how he showed up
To the last of the First Tuesdays live shows,
Always curious and complimentary,
A keen observer,
A teller of very interesting stories,
A person more interested in others than himself.
A remembrance from Lisa Newman, a Reader contributor in the 1980s
Thirty-nine years ago, my byline ran on a path-breaking story about the dysfunction of the Chicago Fire Department (CFD) and its paramedic system. I wanted to cherish that hard-earned byline, but in the end that byline also belonged to my editor, Michael Miner, who in his gentle way, refused to add his name to it.
The story, “Emergency,” published May 9, 1986, culminated in weeks and weeks of exhaustive rewriting and additional research I did in Mike’s cramped Reader office, at times him taking over the keyboard and turning my jumble of words into magic.
When an editor sits you down and helps turn a disorganized mess into a brilliant story that not only makes sense—but sings—it should make you a better writer. At the time it seemed like I was getting a first-class private graduate journalism seminar; ironically this was just months before I left Chicago to earn my master’s degree at the Columbia graduate school of journalism.
This is going to be a long story, and if you are not in the mood or in a hurry, I suggest you skip ahead to the part that mentions 1982, and a firefighter saving the life of Mike’s then ten-month-old daughter Joanna. I am sorry to say that story also includes the discovery that Joanna was rescued from a fire that some disturbed individual set ablaze after murdering the Miners’s 47-year-old widowed babysitter.
I walked into Mike’s office in the winter of 1986, unaware of this personal history. Someone had kindly steered me to the Reader and directly to the one editor who might be willing to put a lot of work into a very important piece involving the abuse of CFD’s emergency medical services (EMS) system, which in the mid 1980s was at a breaking point. Firefighters, normally the heroes of any story, were being called to the scene of car crashes and other critical accidents because the EMS system was overloaded. Chicago officials had failed to update training—out of laziness, union opposition or all of that—and failed to innovate as other cities had done (with success) by cross-training firefighters as emergency medical technicians, or EMTs.
I found out that the paramedic system was a mess during an all-night hostage crisis to which I was assigned. I was then a cub reporter at City News Bureau of Chicago, working overtime, charged with staying all night with paramedics as the cops negotiated an end to the crisis.
So we sat in an ambulance, me and the paramedics, and talked all night. One paramedic in particular laid it all out: the city’s failure to train enough paramedics, the overuse of ambulances—often answering calls that could’ve involved somebody taking a taxi (not an ambulance) to a hospital, and the fact that firefighters were underutilized. Since new fire codes and the systematic installation of lifesaving (and property saving) smoke detectors in buildings across the city, firefighters were routinely relaxing at the fire station while paramedics were incessantly busy and overworked, to the point of exhaustion.
While other cities across America had begun cross-training firefighters with at least the EMT skills of a lower level paramedic, Chicago officials bristled. It was a level of civic stupidity that in our modern times recalls the idiocy of the Trump administration (as it fires top officials only to realize it must hire them back, but loses track of where they’ve gone).
I had never written a long-form journalism piece. I had many, many interviews and great quotes from firefighters and paramedics. But the main thrust of the story was built out of that all-night conversation with that one paramedic during the hostage crisis. He was my best source.
I walked away from that all-nighter with a thorough understanding of a crisis unfolding. When I brought the information to Mike, he listened intently. He knew we had to get my story into print, but it would be weeks to get it into shape.
In the meantime, the paramedics began to get impatient. They knew my story could force real change. Then, a few of them approached me and said a wayward paramedic had told (former WBBM-TV reporter) Pam Zekman a whiff of the story. He politely asked if it was ok to talk to her.
Damn. Pam was then the best known investigative journalist in Chicago. I was a kid, months away from attending one of the best masters programs for journalism in the country. So I told the paramedics to talk to Pam, who essentially scooped me on my own story.
Foolish, of course. A rookie mistake? Maybe. The story meant so much to me, and I knew that people’s lives depended on it. I didn’t want that kind of pressure.
When Pam came out with her investigation, the Reader had already agreed to run my piece, but now the top editors were about to kill it. Mike sat me down and said, with conviction, that we were going to save it.
Mike instructed me to look into the history of the fire department. I recall, after several snap interviews, rushing back to him and saying, “Damn, did you know the paramedic system had been created to come to the aid of injured firefighters?” It was never intended to be the civic service that the ambulance system had come to be in every city and town in the modern U.S.
At that time, the Reader used to spin off the presses on Thursday nights and you could find the paper on Friday for free in many stores and in kiosks all over the liberal, close to the lake neighborhoods across Chicago. The night my story came out, I took tons of Readers off the presses. Then I went to stores with stacks of free copies and took half the stack and ran them out to my car.
I had eaten dinner in more than a dozen firehouses on the far south and west sides, and I knew those firefighters would never see the story unless I brought it to them. This was the only way to thank the men who had confided in me, never knowing if their quotes would one day get them into trouble, or change the system.
It was a year or two after that story came out (now 37 or 38 years ago) that I went to visit Mike and asked him why he had been almost maniacal about making sure my story made it into print. In almost a whisper, he told me that four years earlier, when he was a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, a neighbor called to say his house was on fire.
As terrifying as that must have been, when he arrived he lived a more terrifying moment seeing a firefighter emerging from his second floor porch with a baby wrapped in his arms. He was unsure if his ten-month-old daughter was alive. Indeed, she was, but Joanna had to be rushed to a nearby hospital.
Some 30 years after the fire, the firefighter who saved her life stood up and was embraced at Joanna’s wedding. He was retired. In a lifelong career as a firefighter and bringing out many people from burning homes, Joanna was the only one he brought out alive—the only one he had saved.
Two and a half years after writing that paramedic opus, I was out of grad school and working as a reporter at the far south side Daily Calumet. I broke a huge story about a cop who ticketed the daughter of LeRoy Martin, then superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. I reported on how the ticketing cop and his partner were illegally punished and then how the daughter’s ticket was mysteriously dismissed in traffic court.
This story was published a year after Greylord, a major traffic court corruption scandal. Numerous reporters eventually jumped on the story, which I had worked on for something like 90 hours the week before publication. My Daily Calumet boss Mike Waters helped me make it better, like the other Mike had done, until a second before the deadline.
In the midst of our intense reporting on that ongoing cop-ticket story, Mike wrote in his weekly media column, Hot Type:
Last month Daily Calumet reporter Lisa Newman broke the story of LeRoy Martin’s daughter’s traffic ticket. Two South Chicago Police District patrolmen who’d ticketed the police superintendent’s daughter for making an illegal U-turn were mysteriously shifted to other districts. The ticket was mysteriously dismissed. The Tribune and Sun-Times barely acknowledged the episode. Newman and Phil Kadner rode it for days. Kadner, having a wonderful time, wrote five columns in one week.
In 1993, I left Chicago to join the Clinton administration in Washington, and Mike and I lost touch, at least in a personal way. My dad for a long time carefully cut out Mike’s Reader column and mailed them to me. For years.
When I reminded my dad (now 97 and a half) this week of my working with Mike, of the dedication Mike showed to firefighters and why, my dad recalled the backstory and his eyes welled with tears.
Through the miracle of what we love about Facebook, Mike asked to be my “Facebook friend” around seven years ago, sometime before the start of Covid. He suggested we meet for coffee. He was working on his papers at the Newberry Library, so I suggested we meet at Lou Malnati’s on State Street. He could eat a real pizza, and for me, no longer a cheese eater, a savory tomato pie.
Another time Mike saw my Facebook updates about my dad’s falls and his concerning low heart rate. We talked so Mike could ably explain to me, in the language of a journalist, about heart procedures (which he was acquainted with). He explained things in ways that often failed cardiologists. He was probably the one person I listened to when we decided my dad should go ahead with the cardioversion procedure in 2022.
I learned stuff about Mike [the week after he died] that was not surprising but brought me to tears—none more sweet than the fact that he was a “girl dad”.
“He made all of us feel special,” daughter Molly told Rick Kogan for the Tribune obituary. “He made a point of having special traditions with my sisters and me. . . . One was our annual trip to Marshall Fields to see the holiday windows, visit Santa, pick out a Christmas gift for my mom. We did this into adulthood, until Fields was sold to Macy’s.”
Daughter Laura Miner, who teaches grade school and is a basketball coach, told Rick that Mike was “A true girl dad, who was deep.” She added, “He instilled in us a need to work for justice and a desire to understand truth.”
Joanna, the daughter I knew more about, told Rick that Mike danced with other dads on the sidelines of her soccer games and “. . . he never missed a game. He did the crossword every day, often completing it before anyone else was awake.” Joanna added, “Giving rides was his love language. No matter the time or how inconvenient, you could count on Dad to want to give you a ride. Even though I live off the Blue Line, he always insisted on driving me to the airport and picking me up.”
I think, sometimes as we age, we don’t realize that the people we thought of as teachers (and also friends) are mortal.
I never used that Reader piece as a clip to get a job. I never copied it and sent it to editors to further my freelance cred. Mike’s byline belonged on it. It was as much his work as mine.
Mike, thank you for seeing in my story a way to help fix Chicago’s fire department. I’ll miss you forever.
From Philip Montoro, Reader music editor
I was hired by the Reader in 1996, when I was 25 years old, and to my young eyes Mike Miner was the soul and conscience of the place: smart, insightful, ethical, irreverent, generous, and funny. I never had the good fortune to benefit from Mike’s famously clear-eyed and thorough editing—news people and music people hoed parallel rows—but his steady, thoughtful presence nonetheless created a gravitational center that gave me a way to tell whether my work was worthy of the Reader.
The Reader continued to evolve after Mike retired in 2017, of course, and in his characteristically bemused but bighearted way, he evolved with it. I loved seeing him at the paper’s UnGala in November 2022, and I was glad to read what he posted on Facebook afterward. “I marveled at the collection of people the Reader assembled at the MCA Wednesday night,” he wrote. “Most were far younger than I, and that was a very good thing, as my cohort (I rejoiced in everyone in it I saw) is good now mostly for fobbing off memories as heritage. And the people were far more ethnically diverse than any crowd I can remember from any of OUR Reader parties, and far gayer too. All this merely means the Reader has tacked with the winds, survived the storms, and remains a Reader I recognize and believe in.”
The storms are just getting started, it seems. But before Mike left us, he reminded us of the principles we’ll need to make sure that, as long as the Reader exists, it’ll be a paper we can believe in.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
