By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Roger Ebert is to the movies what baseball is to America
Neil Steinberg‘s Auberon Waugh-ish medley of a column at the Chicago Sun-Times usually leans to the ish, but here’s a crisp personal anecdote about working with Roger Ebert: “When I joined this newspaper, 20 years ago, there were more reporters than places to put them. I would wander from desk to desk, dragging along my stack of files, setting up camp wherever there was a free computer, at the desk of someone who had… sometimes, merely stepped away. 
No refuge was more welcoming than Roger Ebert’s office—crowded with memorabilia, movie posters and little wind-up toys, already famous from the opening montage of his TV show. He was almost always somewhere else: at a screening room, at Cannes, or his beloved London. You can’t imagine the joy of… banging out my workmanlike news articles among the mementoes of the great Pulitzer Prize winner, wordsmith, social force. The pride of belonging to an organization that employs an Ebert, who underwent emergency surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital over the weekend… What I felt hearing the news was deep concern and cold dread. Roger is to the movies, and to this newspaper, what baseball is to America—the enduring certainty, the agreed-upon universal, the cherished standard of excellence. Next month will be the 40th anniversary of the August day when Ebert loaded his old Dodge and drove up Route 45 from Urbana to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and join the Sun-Times, and while I’ve never really thought much about the anniversary, or looked forward to it before today, I’m thinking about it and looking forward to it now with an unexpected intensity.” [Photo: Ray Pride.]
