Travel Blog

In the early 90s, an English friend of mine moved to Chicago, a city he immediately fell in love with. He ate ribs, visited museums, played softball in the shadow of skyscrapers. His only complaint was about the weather. "Everybody warned me about Chicago winters," he said, "but nobody told me about Chicago summers."

A few years later he moved to Los Angeles, and had the kind of revelation you would expect for someone who goes from living in a city at the edge of a lake to one at the edge of an ocean. And it wasn't just the weather that he found more appealing. The LA Times, he remarked, was a world-class newspaper with a global perspective. This was a few years before it was purchased by the Chicago Tribune.

The travel editor of a paper in Florida already owned by the Tribune, I knew what he meant. The Tribune had six people working in its travel department, and yet it covered the world from the perspective of a Bears fan. It didn't help that one was a former sports writer who could go to Tahiti and find a comparison to Michigan Avenue. It seemed an oddly parochial approach for a city as big, as ethnically rich, and as supposedly sophisticated as Chicago (not to mention a newspaper that once boasted that it was the world's greatest).

The Olympics would have brought the world to Chicago and, in an interesting twist, sports writers would have had to become more international. It would have been a lovely thing for Chicagoans, especially those who still read the local paper.