(Editor's note: This is the second part of a two-part column commemorating the ninth anniversary of film critic Roger Ebert's death on April 4, 2013.) Roger Ebert was a Chicago man (again, this was before the concept of the "Florida Man"). And like Saul Bellow or Joseph Epstein, the latter in my view being the greatest living writer to hail from that city, Chicago scenes would reliably find their way into Ebert's writings. Just as one wonders if, as the decades tick on, we might look back and say there was a "Chicago School" of writing just as there is one of economics, one cannot help but speculate that Ebert, if he were alive today, would, for instance, share in my appreciation of the gentle sentimentality in the notorious brute Dick Butkus', one of the most recent (and unexpected) immigrants to the world of Twitter, frequent end-of-the-night imploration, in all lower case, of course, to "stay safe chicago." This is all the more impressive given that this urging comes from a man who hasn't lived there for decades. ("You can take the man out of Chicago, but you can't take Chicago out of the man.")
Remembering Roger Ebert, Nine Years On (Part Two)
