Published in Chicago's Northwest Side Press on June 25, 2025

by RUSS STEWART

"It ain't over 'til it's over," baseball sage Yogi Berra opined. For Mike Kaage, owner/operator of the Edison Park Kaage newsstand, it will be over on June 29.

That's the day he shutters the newspaper stand at Northwest Highway/Oliphant after 82 years. He's not selling it because nobody wants to buy a business that sells what nobody buys anymore — like newspapers.

Kaage said his late father Irv Kaage told him the stand, which is located on city parkway land and requires an annual permit like awnings and sidewalk cafe tables, was opened in 1919 after the end of WWI.

The elder Kaage purchased the newsstand in 1943 for $100.

In the post-WWII days and through the 1950s and 1960s, newspapers were the fount of news. There were four dailies, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times published in the morning with yesterday's news and the Chicago Daily News and Chicago American (later renamed Chicago Today in the 1970s) published in the afternoon with overnight and AM news and a rehash of yesterday's news.

Kaage's newsstand was once open until 9 p.m., sold well more than a thousand copies a day (plus magazines) and was a very profitable enterprise. Television was very much in its infancy. None of that 24/7 cable news.

The major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) had their daily national/world news at 5:30 p.m. and the local channels (9, 7, 5, 2) had their news at 10 p.m. I'm dating myself here obviously, but people primarily got their news by reading it on a piece of paper.

Not anymore, said Kaage, age 68, who began working in the family business at age 5, in 1961, picking up newspapers for the stand.

"It's just about extinct," he said of the newspaper sale business. He is right. Nobody wants to read today's news tomorrow or even tonight. They demand instant gratification/notification right now, which they can get from their iPhone or other devices or on social media.

I'm an old guy so watching FOX NEWS 24/7 is fine with me, but non-oldsters don't have that luxury and get their news in sporadic sound bites or Google headlines, or maybe from some 3-hour podcast run by a comedian/MMA announcer. Nobody young watches TV anymore and, said Kaage, and nobody under age 40 buys newspapers anymore.

Retiring from his newsstand was mostly an economic decision, and to spend time with his grandkids, said Kaage.

Throughout the past 40 years, en route to my Park Ridge law office, I would swing by Kaage's to buy a Chicago Sun-Times (for 35 cents until the early-2000s) and on Wednesday the Northwest Side PRESS (then and now 50 cents). But all changed around 2000, Kaage said. People began getting their news digitally. He was once selling 600 to 700 Tribunes and Times per day; now school graduate who was the paper's circulation manager. He bought the paper along with his wife Bette after Steinman died and son Brian Nadig became the co-publisher and feature writer of what seems like virtually everything today.

The editor gets some ink space once in a while when he's not busy putting this whole damn newspaper together twice a week.

I did not attend a journalism school, such as Medill at Northwestern. I started writing political articles when I was at DePaul (and, interestingly, my editor at the DePaulia during 1971-72 was the current celebrity bankruptcy guru Peter Francis Geraci. He's all over TV and he's older than me (and I'm 75).

After I graduated in June 1972 with a useless degree in economics I stumbled into a job as press secretary for Alderman John Hoellen (47th), the Republican candidate for Congress in the Northwest Side 11th District, being vacated by Roman Pucinski, who was running for U.S. senator.

I figured I was on my way to Washington. Hoellen's opponent was West Side congressman Frank Annunzio (D), who moved into the district. But Hoellen lost to Annunzio 54-46 percent in the year of Nixon's landslide. I moved on to manage a bunch of losing campaigns in the 1970s, ran for state senator myself but fortunately got my law degree.

But the Hoellen campaign gave me a journalistic lay of the land on the Northwest Sideband and I began submitting freelance political articles in June 1973 — and just never stopped. I was never an employee of Nadig. I was just a "contributor." There was immediate pushback from the local Democratic Establishment: He's a Republican, they whined. But the Nadigs stood behind me, even when they didn't agree with my opinion, and for that I am forever grateful.

While the paper used to be 30 broadsheet pages crammed with display ads and want ads, it has a strong social media presence and will survive.

THIS COLUMN: There are a whole lot of readers of this column who fervently wish I would just croak, retire or get devoured by some predator in my backyard. I intend to be around for at least another year, and this month marks the commencement of my 53rd year of writing this stuff. I should quit, but why quit now, when the Left and the Right top themselves daily in terms of ridiculousness.

According to my calculation, at 1,550 words per column times 50 columns per year over 52 years computes to 2,600 columns and close to 4,110,000 words. That's the equivalent of about 4 books. I have never tried to conceal my biases. I am not a Leftist. But I am not and never will be a propagandist like many of my colleagues.

This column is opinionated but that opinion is based on facts, and I plan to continue that tradition. I can already hear the disappointed groans.