At the end of this month, the news service that spawned those stories and countless others -- not to mention the axiom, ''If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out" -- is set to shut down.
The Chicago Tribune, which owns the City News Service, decided to eliminate it and its 19 jobs to cut costs and to stop serving up news to the newspaper's online and broadcast competitors. City News will be replaced with a 24-hour news desk to serve the Tribune's websites only.
There is talk about efforts to save the news service, the successor to the legendary cooperative news service called the City News Bureau of Chicago. But if the decision to shut it down stands, it will mark the end of a journalism institution that since its founding in 1890 has provided breaking news via streetcar messengers, pneumatic tubes, Teletype machines, and finally, computers.
Chances are you have never heard of City News. But it is a good bet someone at your local newspaper or TV or radio station has. The country is littered with journalists, writers, and others who once were City News cub reporters. Newspaper columnist Mike Royko worked there. So did investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
Playwright Charles MacArthur worked there, and with Ben Hecht turned his experiences into ''The Front Page." Actor Melvyn Douglas worked there. ''Cheers" actor George Wendt wanted to, but a City News staffer found out he couldn't type and advised him to forget about filling out a job application.
Kurt Vonnegut learned his trade by calling in dispatches to City News, such as the one he phoned in after seeing the body of a man who had been squashed by an elevator.
''It taught me how to tell a story," said the author, who worked at City News in the late 1940s, pulling down $28 a week.
Vonnegut recalls being told by a staffer to get more information from a just-widowed woman -- a story he recalled in his book ''Slaughterhouse-Five."
''Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department," Vonnegut wrote the staffer told him. ''Say you have some bad news. Give her the news, and see what she says."
Which is what Vonnegut did.
