Book Reviews By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS

A.A. Dornfeld. Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago. (introduction by Mike Royko) Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1983. 331 pp. $17.95

I FIRST heard of Chicago's City News Bureau nearly 30 years ago one evening when I was hanging around our neighborhood YMCA. Our high school basketball team had scored a rare rout over another city team that afternoon, and a number of us were at the Y, playing games and savoring the afternoon's victory. In the middle of a ping-pong game, I was called out of the room to take a phone call, something that had never happened to me before. "City News Bureau," the voice said, sounding urgent. I figured I'd been found out for violating a curfew or hanging out at the corner too much or buying cigarettes as a minor.

"Yeah?" I said, cautiously.

"We've got this problem with your game against Westcott today," the voice said.

That's it, I thought. Our center and I finally got caught for playing in the church league! Who could have turned us in?

"What about it?" I said, maybe a bit too defensively.

"See, the line score on the game adds up to 97 points for you guys," the voice said. "But when we add up the individual scoring, it only comes to 95. What do you think we should do?" He sounded desperate.

My relief made me generous. "Oh, go ahead and take a basket off my totals," I said. I was the captain, after all, and had read a lot of John R. Tunis books which taught me that captains were supposed to behave like that.

Only later did I think about what that call meant. It meant that the guy who called had made three phone calls to straighten out the score of a lopsided basketball game, one of 20 or 30 played that day in the city. He had called our coach who told him to call my home; he had called my mother who told him I was at the Y; he had called the Y to track me down to rectify a box score that would appear in the fine print of the daily paper and be of interest to maybe 20 people in the city of 3.5 million. At age 17, I began to learn what "careful" and "accurate" meant.

That care and accuracy are the cornerstones of the CNB legend and part of the reason that the bureau has survived since 1881 as the "oldest continuously running news agency in the world." It has served nearly every one of the many Chicago papers as well as radio and TV stations which have existed over the past century, providing them with social news, police reports, courtroom coverage and high school box scores. It has been called "the journalists' boot camp" by Time magazine, and it has spawned writers and reporters like Kurt Vonnegut, Seymour Hersch, Herman Kogan and Mike Royko. A.A. Dornfeld, the author of Behind the Front Page, worked at City News for over 40 years, and he is part of the legend, as Royko points out in his glowing introduction.

Dornfeld, in fact, epitomized the bureau's obsession with accuracy. Royko calls "Dornie" a "drill sergeant" whose maxims drove reporters to drastic measures. "If your mother says she loves you, check it out," is one of Dornfeld's lessons which Royko quotes. "Don't tell me what you think — tell me what you know" is another. "Look it up" is the keynote at City News — to make sure of middle initials and the spellings of unpronouncable ethnic names and whether a particular thoroughfare is a road or a boulevard or a street or an avenue.

But as much as Dornfeld's book pays homage to the "Look it up," "Check it out" spirit, it is also a reminder of the limitations of writing only what you know. Bureau reporters had to justify their existence by beating their rivals from the dailies to every story they could. If they couldn't, after all, there'd be no reason for CNB to operate. As a number of Dornfeld's anecdotes and testimonials inadvertently suggest, however, CNB reporters could lose track of basic human decencies when a scoop was at stake, and they could become single-minded to a fault.

Dornfeld quotes at great length from one such testimonial, a CNB reporter's account of covering the Our Lady of the Angels School fire on December 1, 1958, in which 92 children were killed. The reporter tells of how he and other reporters rang doorbells along West Chicago Avenue, trying to get interviews with people who knew the dead children, and of how he had to call his boss "to report on the lack of respect by the friends and relatives" who naturally found the reporters obnoxious at a time like that.

The same reporter covered the Summerdale police scandal in which a number of policemen, including the reporter's uncle, were found to be involved in a burglary ring. Unfortunately, what the reporter saw in the two events was not 92 children dead, a police department disgraced and a relative humiliated. What he saw was a journalistic learning experience: "Looking back it was worth it . . . every minute of it." That, I submit, is disinterestedness carried to an extreme, and too many of Dornfeld's many quoted sources pay tribute to that same deadly monomania. Dornfeld himself calls the Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903 in which scores were killed "one of City News's greatest scoops."

The book proceeds chronologically, depending heavily on lengthy excerpts from memoirs and reminiscences, which leaves Dornfeld little to do but supply some narrative connectives between the anecdotes. This gives the book the quality of a barroom conversation, interesting and sometimes fun, but often clumsy and repetitious. Dornfeld operates more like the editor he is than like a writer, in other words, and a better and more interesting account of the bureau could perhaps be written by someone like Royko who can relate the story more coherently and originally and give Dornfeld his proper place in the bureau's history.

And there is, ironically, another kind of problem with the book. A surprising number of careless errors crop up throughout the volume, including, for example, a distracting inconsistency in the use of commas and periods with quotation marks. Sometimes they appear inside the quotation marks, sometimes outside, in no apparent pattern. There are enough inelegant phrases and shifts of tense to make you wonder whether anyone edited these pages at all. If Dornfeld is the stickler that Royko says he is, he must be cringing at all this sloppiness, and it's surely not the kind of work that should appear in a book about a news agency that will make three phone calls to get a high school box score straight.

Behind the Front Page provides a chatty anecdotal history of a venerable and important Chicago institution. The book will keep alive a few names that might otherwise be forgotten, but I hope it's not the last word on the bureau. The CNB deserves more careful treatment and something more thoughtful, too, to secure its rightful place in Chicago's rich journalistic history.

Richard J. Shereikis is professor of literature at Sangamon State University and an associate editor at Illinois Issues.

April 1984/Illinois Issues/29