Don’t think for a minute that Robert Seltzner was some hack that Eddie Vrdolyak kept around to hold his coat. Seltzner is a tough guy too, and he was a big shot down on the East Side of Chicago when Vrdolyak was a nobody lawyer hustling personal-injury cases.
The East Side of Chicago has never been much for explaining itself to the city. Psychologically, it’s as remote from the Loop as Ulster is from London. Seltzner put out a paper for a mill town occupied by feuding ethnic tribes that were united by a bunker mentality: everyone lived in terror of the blockbusters ravaging white neighborhoods due west. “We had not many gentle people down there,” says James Linen, an easterner who was a couple years out of Yale when he bought the Daily Calumet in 1966, He described the kind of politician his paper liked to support:
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“Someone who had a strong personality and ambition and talent and an independent source of income.” Someone, in short, who could go north to City Hall and not be walked on or bought off.
How cozy did he and Vrdolyak get? “I was with him four or five times a week,” says Seltzner. “Many times we ate together.” According to the Chicago Lawyer article, by David Protess, “Over nine years, from 1966 through 1975, Seltzner claimed . . . to have published some 3,000 articles about Vrdolyak in the Daily Calumet–all favorable. In some issues, several Vrdolyak stories appeared.”
“There’s a little too much of a holier-than-thou attitude among reporters,” Seltzner tells us. “Anyone who tells me people in the press are lily white–that’s baloney. Publishers especially. I’m a publisher too. Publishers are in business for one purpose and one purpose only. To make money. And they do it in various ways. Not always according to the canons of journalism. I make no excuses.”
Why did Vrdolyak want you there? we asked Seltzner.
“I had multiple levels of interest in those days and I’ll just stay with that.”
