By Michael Miner

“Nobody was hurt,” White says with satisfaction. “Nobody was killed. And it’s because of the fire department, the police department, and the people themselves–people helping people. We see the explosion and people screaming–that’s the instant people see. But I see the wholeness of the situation, what is and what could have been. I see what could have been one of the worst stories of the year in Chicago.”

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White knew the major streets would be backed up and blocked off. “I used side streets,” he said. “Because of the way I went I was able to drive within a block and a half.”

“No,” White replied. “Nobody asks me that.”

White teaches at Columbia College. He puts his students through something he calls a “quick-draw drill.” Two students stand back to back, and when White says “Go” they walk away from each other, waiting for him to shout “Draw.” Then they spin and shoot each other. “One is always quicker,” said White, who can tell by the sound of their shutters. “But if you’re quicker and you fire the shutter and it’s out of focus, it’s not good. Practice makes perfect. And I don’t tell them to do anything I don’t do myself.”

The journalism represented in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comedy is so shameless it’s wonderful, its bravado so intense that there’s no Chicago journalist worth taking seriously who doesn’t feel a twinge of it in his bones. “Front Page” is shorthand for romance, and when the late A.A. Dornfeld–the night city editor of City News Bureau, whose force of personality, though not his principles, matched Walter Burns’s–published a history of CNB in 1983, he called it Behind the Front Page. Given Dornfeld’s example, there’s no reason to blame the Tribune for making “Front Page” its trope du jour a couple of weeks ago, when CNB, with roots back to 1880 and a claim on plenty of romance of its own, announced it was shutting down.

There’s always been advertising inside the newspaper, but hasn’t a line been crossed when the newspaper’s delivered inside the advertising? Well, maybe not. When the plastic bags that protect the home edition from snow and dew promote Marshall Field’s, nobody thinks twice about it. Maybe we should, but we don’t.