By Tori Marlan
“They’re very prolific,” says Ed Koziarski, editorial-page editor of the Daily Southtown. “A lot of days their letters are here before I am.”
“I was sitting outside a coffee shop in my neighborhood reading something,” he recalls, “and this guy came out there–a schoolteacher in Chicago–and he pointed at me and said, ‘Murderer. Murderer. Murderer.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘What you wrote about abortion.’”
Still, Byrne can get to him. And once, he says proudly, he managed to get to Byrne. “I was up in arms over this term partial-birth abortion,” he recalls. “I received information from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and there is no such term. It isn’t taught in medical school, it isn’t in the medical lexicon, and you can’t find it in any medical textbook. So anyway I took on Byrne because he kept writing it and writing it and writing it, and I said, ‘You must be the laughingstock of the medical world because you keep using this term and the doctors don’t consider it a legitimate term.’” Corcoran says Byrne scrawled a huffy message on the letter and faxed it back to him. Byrne says he doesn’t remember the incident, but he remembers Corcoran. “I’m glad to give him a purpose in life,” he says.
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Corcoran doesn’t restrict his letter writing to things that irritate him. He likes to write about sports, enjoys jaunty wordplay, and delights in finding the absurd in current events. “After reading…about the litany of sex scandals that have rocked our military,” he wrote to the Tribune, “I would suggest the Defense Department consider commissioning a new decoration: the Fig Leaf Cluster.”
But Corcoran eventually tired of the game and moved his wife and twin sons back to Chicago, where he started his own firm. It wasn’t until many years later, when he started writing his columns, that he took politics seriously. But his true political awakening coincided with the rise of the religious right, the “hate mongering” of the 1992 elections, and the near-death of one of his sons, who’d had a mysterious seizure and fallen into a coma that would last nearly a year. “In that time I suddenly saw a lot,” he says. “I saw different things–a lot of people in unfortunate circumstances–and I realized there was a need for government to help people when those people can’t help themselves. I really started to change my whole outlook on life.” He also started to pay more attention to the Republican agenda. “I started to listen and look at what these people were saying and I started to read more and I really saw I was on the wrong side of the fence,” he says.
