SOURCE: "Mike Royko: Chicago Newspaper Columnist," Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1997, p. A18.

[In the following obituary, Pasternak focuses on Royko's orneriness and some of the backlash it brought him.]

Mike Royko, the ornery chronicler of an often ornery town, died Tuesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications following a brain aneurysm. He was 64.

Royko had suffered a stroke in early April and last week underwent surgery for the aneurysm, a rupture or weakening of a blood vessel.

In nearly 34 years as a columnist at one or another of Chicago's daily newspapers, Royko represented in print the views of the lunch-bucket white ethnic, long after he'd moved his own family to the wealthy northern suburb of Winnetka. He managed to continue offending powerful politicians, police, feminists, gays, blacks, Latinos and a certain veteran local television anchor, to list just a few.

In the process, he won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize...