"The Power of the Keys" by Grant Pick  December 3, 2004 Read the article or download mp3

Rag man, rug salesman, drag queen, neo-Nazi—if you lived in Chicago, Grant Pick wanted to hear your story.

Grant Pick had been writing for the Reader for about a quarter of a century when, at the age of 57, he died of a heart attack walking home from lunch. That was three years ago last week. In many ways, Grant was the writer who best defined this paper. As he liked telling journalism students who read his pieces and asked where the news pegs were, “There is no news peg. The people are the news.”

That’s a story told by his son, John Pick, in the introduction to The People Are the News: Grant Pick’s Chicago Stories, a collection compiled by his family and just published by Northwestern University Press. As John explains, Grant had book ideas constantly percolating in his head, but none was ever quite the right idea. An anthology was the right idea.

Almost everything in the book first appeared in the Reader. I’ve gone through it and adapted, from much longer articles, three stories that I hope do justice to the curious nose that led their author through the streets of Chicago. Regrettably my favorite piece of all, “It’s Insanity!”—a 1998 account of an eviction suit that led to a four-and-a-half-year legal battle and a 42-day trial, involving a Greek immigrant couple, a former boy evangelist turned country singer turned magician, his ex-go-go dancer wife, and a high school dropout turned lawyer—defied condensation.

On Thursday, February 7, at 6 PM, John Pick will lead a discussion of his father’s work in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater. The panelists will be Alex Kotlowitz, Hank Klibanoff, and myself. The public is invited. —Michael Miner

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