By Michael Miner
The Reader’s Ted Kleine tells a funny little Lee Anglin tale. Early last year Kleine wrote us a cover story on the Tenth Ward aldermanic race down on the southeast side, Anglin’s home base, and it seems Anglin asked to reprint it in his Calumet Journal for $100.
What was that all about? I asked both of them the other day.
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Anglin backs down from nothing, including sure disaster. In 1997 he began thinking about buying the Herald News Group, a string of community papers in northwest Indiana that was hemorrhaging money. “I had an attorney, two consultants, and a CPA tell me I was crazy to do it,” he says. He did it anyway, promising to pay more than a million dollars. “It was a challenge. I knew going in if I lost, I’d lose big and it would hurt me personally. But if I won, I’d win big and people would love me.”
Anglin escaped harm in this mystifying confrontation, which neither he nor anyone else seems to know what to make of. Rampant skepticism appears founded on twin premises: that when an assailant of Sallas’s reputation wishes to shoot you, you get shot and that where Anglin’s concerned, nothing is as it seems. Sallas was arrested and jailed–but a couple of days later so was Anglin.
Having thus impeached any courtroom identification he might later make, Anglin then named Grbic as the attacker in his newspapers. Grbic was acquitted and sued for defamation.
Anglin is as reluctant to describe himself as a journalist as most people are who’ve seen him operate. “A journalist to me is a Mike Royko, a Carol Marin,” he says modestly. “I think anybody could write what I write.” Yet as publisher and as columnist he’s perpetuated significant newspapering traditions. For example, his running as a Republican for the General Assembly in 1994 and as a Democrat for committeeman in 1996 is no more eccentric than Conrad Black’s campaigning for Britain’s House of Lords. His peculiar notions of editorial independence–the banner headline in the July 14, 1997, issue of his South Chicago Herald read “This Weeks Editorial Page is Sponsored By: William Chevrolet/GEO”–place him in the vanguard with papers such as the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Sun-Times, which have been fearlessly redefining the wall between church and state. His adventures with spelling and grammar recall the ingenious coinages of Colonel McCormick at the Chicago Tribune. Entrepreneurial forays he and his wife made into the bars and doughnut shops show that he, like the Tribune Company, has an eye for synergy.
