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RoboCop (1987)

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Thumbnails 2/13/2014

An oral history of RoboCop; Sid Ceasar passes away; Shia LaBeouf has a new artistic endeavor; Social media sites as the front pages of the Internet; Roeper on Leno.

Features

Anne Keegan was a newspaper reporter

And a friend. And a great human being. And the best dancer I ever rock-and-rolled with. When I think back on those years, she embodied what the newspaper business was all about. And in Leonard Aronson, a producer and writer who made this tribute, she found her soulmate. That era is fading away. But I was so lucky to have known it, and to call them friends.

Memories in The Reader by Michael Miner, who covers Chicago journalism.

The Tribune obituary by Rick Kogan.

Roger Ebert

A bar on North Avenue

O'Rourke's was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago's Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out in back. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Jay Kovar and Jeanette Sullivan behind the bar