Rick Kogan

The Bright One has a piece on Rick Kogan, Tribune columnist and author. It's ostensibly a review of his two new books, Sidewalks: Portraits of Chicago and A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, A Curse, and the American Dream -- both of which I was thrilled to get autographed copies of for Christmas -- but in reality it's a very nice profile of Kogan.

This passage -- when he talks about his dad, longtime Chicago newspaperman Herman Kogan -- is particularly pleasing:

"I think maybe the seminal moment of my life was sitting on the back porch of our house in Old Town when I told Herman I wasn't attending classes," he recalls. "He listened and said, 'Well, what do you want to do?'"

"Given this little opening, I told him 'I really want to drive a cab so I can meet people and hear stories.' And he said OK. If he hadn't, there's no telling where I would have wound up.

"So I drove a cab for a while and wrote lousy short stories. I worked as a lifeguard. Then I saved up enough money to go to Europe for about a year. I lived in a little town called Estepona in Spain. I got a place for $40 a month -- and wrote lousy, lousy short stories."

A dad who willingly lets his son drop out of college in order to drive a cab? Now that's some courageous and open-minded parenting. I can't speak for the quality of Kogan's fiction -- and based on his assessment, I doubt if any of it will ever see the light of day -- I've enjoyed his journalism for many years. Good guy.