The Chicago Tribune
When our nation's first female secretary of state met with The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board in the 1990s, her regal presence and world-class expertise quickly relaxed into a memorable chat--and a surprising question:
"Does anybody still go to Riccardo's?" Madeleine Albright asked.
Riccardo's? Some of the assembled board members wondered how she knew about "Rick's."
Before it closed in 1995, the former speakeasy-turned-Italian restaurant and bar on Rush Street behind the Wrigley Building was a cherished after-work hangout for Chicago's ink-stained community in those pre-Internet days. It was not the sort of place one normally associates with presidential Cabinet members--and certainly not one as brilliant as Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright, who died Wednesday at the age of 84.
But it took no more than five seconds to remember that she, too, had been part of our media community and, by marriage, part of the Tribune family.
Her ex-husband was Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the great-great grandson of Joseph Medill, owner and publisher of The Chicago Tribune and mayor of Chicago right after the Great Fire of 1871.
The couple lived in Chicago in the early 1960s when her then-husband worked at The Sun-Times and Albright worked at the nearby offices of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She always wanted to be a journalist, she told The Tribune's Heidi Stevens in a 2018 interview for the Union League Club of Chicago's Authors Group. She was the news editor of her college newspaper and worked at a small newspaper in Missouri after graduation.
But when she applied to work at The Sun-Times, she recalled in interviews, she was turned down because of their anti-nepotism policy. Worse, an editor told her that it wouldn't help her husband's career for her to get a job at one of the other three downtown dailies, including this one.
Instead, she was hired as a researcher at Encyclopaedia Britannica, then next door to Tribune Tower and across the street from Riccardo's.
No, Albright never made it in the Chicago newspaper business, but, as U.S. secretary of state and author of at least nine books, among other globally crucial achievements, she made plenty of news of her own.