It is unlikely that most of the dozens of journalists who walked away with Peter Lisagor Awards at Friday night’s ceremonies at the Union League Club could tell you much, if anything, about Lisagor, who was the late Chicago Daily News Washington bureau chief and a fine guy.
Awards are usually named for the dead — Nobel and Pulitzer or, more locally, Joseph Jefferson or Sarah Siddons — and those names, the details of those lives, get buried in history’s dust.
Chicago magazine (owned by Tribune Publishing) reporters David Bernstein and Noah Isackson won a Lisagor for their ongoing investigative series, “The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates.” Earlier that week their series won from the Chicago Bar Association a Herman Kogan award, named for my father, who was a lifelong newspaperman, radio host and author of many books.
Bernstein and Isackson will complete a trifecta of sorts Thursday when they receive the 2015 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, presented by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Asked if he knew who that award was named for, Bernstein gave a refreshingly honest answer: “I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I was a grad student at Medill, I’d never heard of Martin before Noah and I applied for the award. Even then, I didn’t pay much attention to the name. After hearing that we’d won the award, I naturally told my parents. About a week later, when I was at their house, they gave me a new biography about Martin. Learning more about him, I’m struck by the depth and breadth of his reporting and, more broadly, his approach to journalism: one that’s both courageous and empathetic.”
The new biography is “John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog,” written by Ray E. Boomhower and published by Indiana University Press. It is a fine book, detailed and thorough. It should be mandatory reading in journalism schools across the land.
Martin was born in 1915 in Hamilton, a small city in southern Ohio, and though he wrote that “most of my childhood memories are dark,” he found light in words, eventually going to work in 1937 as a reporter for the Indianapolis Times.
He went to war and came to Chicago to begin what would be as successful a freelance career as one could ever imagine, writing for such magazines as Harper’s, The Atlantic and the Saturday Evening Post during what is considered the golden age of magazines.
Martin once said, “When I hit my stride, I was writing a million words a year.”
Those words were about many things. “The Blast in Centralia No. 5” in Harper’s is one of the most famous nonfiction magazine stories ever written, a meticulously detailed account of a downstate Illinois mine explosion that killed 111 people and the reasons why none of them should have died. At 18,000-some words, it was the longest story the magazine has ever published.
He wrote a sharp profile of the Tribune’s Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick and any number of chilling true-crime tales. He wrote “The Strangest Place in Chicago,” about a wild and almost unimaginably crowded Chicago apartment building called The Mecca: “Inside, a powerful odor assails the visitor at once, musty, heavy, a smell compounded of urine and stale cooking and of age, not necessarily an unpleasant odor but a close powerful one, which, like that of marijuana, once smelled is never forgotten.”
He wrote 15 books. He worked for Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson. He was appointed ambassador to the Dominican Republic by President John F. Kennedy. He later worked as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and George McGovern. He lived most of his life here, four decades in Highland Park, where he and his wife, Fran, raised their three children, Cindy, Dan and Fred.
None of them worked as journalists, but I asked Dan to offer his take on the biography of his father. He wrote: “It’s an excellent portrayal of the distinct careers that my father was able to put together: top freelance writer, political speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic candidates of a generation, and as an Ambassador to a developing country struggling toward democracy. That underscores his uncommon ability to understand and sympathize with working people and those who have been left out of society.
“He brings all of this to life, blending expertly all of the aspects of an extraordinary life. Boomhower has captured the essence of an unabashed, lifelong liberal Democrat. … And he also captured him as a writer who never allowed his voice to intervene or interfere with the narrative and instead let the people in the stories speak for themselves, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.”
John Bartlow Martin spent his last decade teaching at Medill. The award in his name began the year after his death but was suspended for some five years until being reborn last year.
So this year Bernstein and Isackson will be presented with the award Thursday at the Chicago History Museum. Dan Martin and his sister, Cindy, will be there, and Dan will be with his wife, Veronica, and their daughter, Sabrina. She is a freshman at Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., where the family lives.
She has, she says, only one goal in life. She wants to be a reporter in Chicago.
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
