Perhaps the most distinctive Bob characteristic was repetition. His column might, say, carry a Tokyo dateline, but describe, not anything in Japan, but the hotel room, or the little soaps, or something on the cable TV. He was the master of the unexplained dateline, filing from some city that had little or nothing to do with that day's topic. He hated cities but lived in Chicago, lauded the wide-open roads of the Midwest but did not drive. He liked baseball but not baseball players, Woody Hayes but not football, airports but not travel. When he found a high school string quartet that played diligently at a dinner he attended in South Bend, Ind., he presented the students as one of the rare 'signs of hope' in a nation where otherwise 'a lot of things' are 'destined to go badly, to decline.'īob's world was filled with odd contradictions.

When Bob did find something that met his approval, it was inevitably presented as a freakish anomaly, an unexpected flower growing out of our blasted and ruined landscape. In Bob's world, children were routinely tortured and murdered while the legal system yawned, cherished institutions crumbled, the niceties of life were abandoned, and nobody cared. It was all loss and decay, and a sense of sadness over what was and outrage over what is. That world shattered like a glass Christmas tree ornament hit by a brick last Sunday, after news of his forced resignation was tucked in the lower left-hand corner of the Trib's front page, in a narrow box headlined, cryptically, 'To our readers.' After nearly 25 years in the newspaper, and more than 30 as a Chicago columnist, he was gone, cashiered.īob (calling him 'Greene' somehow feels wrong, like calling Elvis 'Presley') was the bard of Middle America, the defender of abused children, the relentless nostalgist who seldom paused from keening for the lost world of pre-1964 Columbus, Ohio, to notice anything positive in life today. Unlike columnists such as George Will (bow-tied Washington elitist) or Jimmy Breslin (rumpled New York tough guy) or the late Mike Royko (ethnic Chicago wiseass), there is no simple way to describe the deeply weird Midwestern world that Bob Greene built through his column in the Chicago Tribune. There is no shorthand to explain Bob Greene, no code.

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