ONE MORE TIME: The Best of Mike Royko.

ONE MORE TIME: The Best of Mike Royko By Mike Royko Univ. of Chicago Press, $22

Mike Royko was the voice of the common man for half a century

Between Al Capone and Michael Jordan, there was Mike Royko. Each personified an era, each carried the identity of the same town on his broad shoulders, and each did it with one name tied behind his back.

Capone was Chicago from Prohibition through his death in 1947 and well into the television age. Any Chicagoan who went abroad during that time would be greeted by the name Capone dropped into the conversation along with an animated tommy gun imitation.

Since 1984 it's been Michael's town anywhere on the planet.

For the twenty-year stretch from the late '60s to the late '80s, Chicago was Royko for people who didn't hail from there and for those who did. That is not to say that Chicago was without other identities during that period. Think Chicago and images fill the screen: the 1968 Democratic National Convention when the political divide opened onto the streets; the Harold Washington years when the racial divide opened onto the floor of the city council; the Chicago Cubs setting the city up for a fall; and Mayor Richard J. Daley setting the city up for an heir.

Royko wrote about them all and eclipsed them as the epitome of Sinatra's kind of town. Only the political insider or the true aficionado of urban politics recalls Daley, possibly the most powerful mayor of the 20th century, without benefit of Boss, Royko's 1971 book about "hizzoner" the mayor. Jimmy Breslin called it "the best book ever written about an American city by the best journalist of his time" By the late '80s, Royko's columns were appearing in more than 600 newspapers. It was hard to find a kitchen anywhere that didn't have a Royko column taped to the fridge. After Royko died of a brain aneurysm in April 1997, fellow Chicago Tribune columnist Bernie Lincicombe wrote, "Mike Royko was not the last of a breed, Mike Royko was the entire species."

The species is America's Dutch uncle, both because as a colloquialism it means the person who points out your flaws and excesses, and because Royko revelled in the ethnic stereotype. He lived by that shiv, as he would have put it, and he fell by that shiv.

In One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, the first posthumous collection of his columns, we see Royko as the guy who won't leave the 'hood after everyone else has. He is Doc in West Side Story, the elder conscience who tells the Jets when they accost Anita after the fateful rumble, "When do you kids stop? You make this world lousy" He is Sal in Spike Lees Do the Right Thing, the Italian whose pizza place burns down in the middle of a race riot during which he comes off looking as much the racist as the healer. The time lapse between the two movies, from 1961 to 1989, is roughly the span of Royko's career, and One More Time views Royko's tenure through a historical prism. The book is divided into four parts, one for each decade. Chicago is not forgotten, but it's not a Chicagoscape the reader gets. There's precious little on Chicago's patronage politics, on ward heelers, or on Mayor Daley, the stuff that put Royko's Chicago on the map.

It is Chicago as metaphor. Chicago was Royko's 'hood and he never left it; not for Washington, New York or, God forbid, the West Coast, even when offers were his for the taking. He was strictly and sanctimoniously outside the beltway. He's the guy who wouldn't tighten his tie, who spilled beer on his pants, and who was a newspaper's fanfare for the common man, though he wouldn't want you to think he knew anything about Aaron Copland.

We could use more Roykos now. His columns are prophetic. In the book's foreword, Studs Terkel, also of Chicago, also of the people, writes that it was "the real" that Royko searched out typically from the perspective of "somebody up against it." Royko saw America become laminated; its politicians phony, its values spiffed up and over-starched, its social discourse spooked by political correctness. It gnawed at him from his first column on.

Washington's preoccupation with impeachment would have delighted Royko the way an exterminator delights in smoking out basement pests. The sight of senators, representatives, pundits, all the President's people, and "the media jackals" spinning their webs of sincerity and immediacy would have had Royko salivating. Just as Royko used Chicago as metaphor for the proudly unpolished of society, he used politics as social barometer. He seldom covered politics and cared even less about policy. He cared about privilege, street-level fairness and hypocrisy. The pleasure in reading Royko is to see how he gets there.

His column on immunity for President Nixon quickly dispensed with the myth that no man is above the law. He quoted Nixon's own words. "Anyone should pay for violating the laws," Nixon had said about amnesty for draft resisters. Royko came out against prosecuting Nixon. "The country knew what it was getting when it made him president. He was elected by the darker side of the American conscience. His job was to put the brakes on the changes of the 1960s." Royko's tagline: "He did his job. Let him quit and go."

When it was time for Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill) to go, in April 1996, by way of prison, Royko said no one should take pleasure in Rosty's fall. Rosty had become a big fish, the perfect trophy for the ambitious in a society in which the rules change. "There is no one in our society more powerful--judge, governor, mayor, legislator, or even president--than a prosecutor. Local or federal."

Royko himself may have gotten too big or too ornery. He took comfort in his ethnic identity, so much comfort that he must have felt immune to shifting sensitivities. He loved to tweak ethnics as if it was all good competitive fun--my softball team against your team. When his columns overstepped, he generally issued gracious, if somewhat tart, apologies that covered his back until 1996.

A few columns that year tarnished him badly, even among his colleagues. There was one in January in which Royko went after a black woman who complained about being confused with a deadbeat dad named Maurice. Her name was Maurica and Royko, spelled Royko, figured he had license to poke fun at black names that "defy explanation." The next month, Royko, in going through the feigned motions of endorsing Patrick Buchanan for President, called Mexico a useless country except for its beaches and tequila, its leaders "corrupt pocket-stuffers," its people ambitionless, and Buchanan a wimp for not being more bold to keep America from being forced to dine on refried beans and naming all our children Jose.

He apologized sincerely for the former, writing that he truly wished he hadn't written it, but he could take only so much contrition. His apology for the latter was vintage Royko, only the vintage had soured. He apologized to illegal aliens, to Mexican drug lords, to Pat Buchanan, for using hyperbole, and he did it with venom. Neither column is in the book, though they are alluded to in Terkel's foreword in which he wrote that the demon in Royko was deflected in later years and "may have winged the sparrow rather than the vulture."

One More Time succeeds at rehabilitating Royko's reputation. Here's a guy who for 34 years turned the klieg lights on racism. On the "yahoos" of Hanover Park, Illinois, who in 1972 tried to keep a white professor out of a subdivision because he had an adopted black daughter. On Chicago's ethnic whites, including his Uncle Chester, whom he told in 1983, "Don't worry, (mayoral candidate) Harold Washington doesn't want to marry your sister." And on the O.J. Simpson trial, when Royko predicted the not guilty verdict because he doubted that in 1995 "there are many adult blacks who haven't had bad experiences with cops" and few who don't know people who've gotten a raw deal in a courtroom or a police station.

When Jackie Robinson died in October 1972, you felt Robinson and Royko as battery mates. Royko's column recalled the day Jackie Robinson played his first game in Wrigley Field in May 1947. There were "the wise men of the neighborhood," talking about what it would do to baseball, the white fans acting as if nothing unusual were happening, the black fans looking dignified in suits and straw hats, and the Cub player swerving to slam his foot on Robinson's as he was thrown out at first base. And there was Royko, a teenager, catching a foul ball hit by Robinson. A black man who was sitting next to Royko offered to pay him ten dollars. Royko took it, and for years, of course, wished he hadn't. Twenty-five years later, he was glad he had.

What changed for Royko in those twenty-five years was the superficial glitz of contemporary society. The ballplayers were in it for the money, the baby boomers were in it for the self-indulgence, and the politicians were in it for the polls. Whatever happened to the people behind the polls--to Royko's people?

JACK C. DOPPELT, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, is co-author of the forthcoming book, Nonvoters: America's No-Shows.