In 2006, he gave up his post at the Chicago Tribune then, two years later, found that he had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood cells. A bone in his right leg was about to crack. He was given a short span of life, 18 months or less.
He then went to the Mayo Clinic for a stem cell transplant. The transplant gave him another 10 years. Now he is writing his second book, Marcel Proust & My Cancer & Me: How to Live a Richer, Fuller Life While Battling a Loathsome Disease.
There have been other major turns in his life. He resigned from Time magazine after reporting on the first mass murder in 20th-century America—when a drifter, Richard Speck, killed eight student nurses. A ninth nurse survived by hiding under a bed and then climbing out onto a window ledge.
His report was filled with “scene-setting details” only he caught, the memorabilia each victim treasured. He even noticed a National Guard poster on the wall, promising to “Keep You Safe Tonight.” He was “spooked by it all,” he said. A reader added, “It changed my view of life; I felt scared going out to get the mail.”
He also covered five months of the civil unrest around the Democratic Convention in 1968. But he developed a “major writer’s block.” Gradually, he recovered by writing more literary articles, like his piece on Thoreau or one on his quest to Tangier to interview Paul Bowles, author of “The Sheltering Sky.”
Jon’s most personal wound came when his beloved son, Jonny, died from the bite of a mosquito carrying West Nile virus. He sat by the hospital bedside talking to his unconscious son and holding his hand.
Jon’s father lived to be 100. As is customary, Queen Elizabeth II of England (and of Canada) sent a birthday card of congratulations. It arrived the week of the father’s death.
Born Canadian, Jon is one of several stellar compatriots who have been prominent on television and in journalism in the States. With his drop-dead good looks, his natural elegance and wit, it was not evident that he was a displaced man—an expatriate everywhere.
He felt less of an outsider writing a book, about “uncommon” common men and women in Chicago than he did when writing about the rich and famous. It is a sunny book about people and their life’s obsessions, like that of the man who painted one light pole and then went on to paint every light pole in his neighborhood.
Twenty years ago, Jon met Pamela Sherrod, the love of his life, in my writing workshop at the University of Chicago. He said, “We might have passed each other with a nod at the Tribune for the rest of our lives. But writing and performing together at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap changed that.” She makes films. He is writing his second book—a glorious little book about big things.
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