DR Rodzinski: Interesting thoughts expressed about Roger Ebert.
I met Gene Siskel back in the early 1980s when he visited the Defense Information School in Indianapolis to be a guest speaker.
Siskel, when he was in the Army, was a journalist who trained at the Defense Information School in the late 1960s. As a film critic at a major newspaper, he was an excellent example for our students on where their training could lead.
He told us that when he got his first job with the Chicago Tribune, he was assigned a neighborhood beat. That means, for those who don't know, that he covered events within a specific area of Chicago.
He said he was called into his editor's office one day and was asked to fill in for the film critic who had left the Tribune. He said he knew nothing about film criticism, had no training in any aspect of film, and was just a filmgoer like most people. He didn't understand why they picked him, but he went it into thinking it was temporary and he just did his best.
He never did anything else at the Tribune, much to his surprise and delight. The PBS show was basically a cross-town rivlary idea that exploded nationally.
