Tomorrow is our birthday!

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February 1, 2008

From the editor:

We're a day early with the news this morning, and that's a good thing for a newspaper. Hollywood once made a TV series starring the Sun-Times in which the paper showed up a day early at one guy's front door.

So here's tomorrow's news: We turn 60 Saturday.

Ever since the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Times combined to publish our first issue, on Feb. 2, 1948, the paper has reflected back to Chicago its beauty and its blemishes, celebrated countless joys, mourned countless woes.

For 60 years, we have been on Chicago's side. The headline on the front page of that first Chicago Daily Sun and Times was indicative of the kind of newspaper we would become: "MAJCZEK TELLS OF $5,000 'GIFT' TO ILL. LEGISLATOR."

It was the latest development in one of the most famous stories in newspaper history, the "Call Northside 777" murder case, in which Joe Majczek, a wrongly convicted man, was freed from a life sentence thanks to an intrepid reporter.

In the 60 years since, stories that poured forth from the Sun-Times have shaped the city, which might have put its main public library in an old Goldblatt's department store had not this paper pointed out that the sagging floors wouldn't hold the weight of the books. Thanks to the Sun-Times, Chicago now has the magnificent Harold Washington Library.

We have sent congressmen to prison; we opened our own bar -- named, with a wink, the Mirage -- to catch crooked city inspectors, and we gave the world Ann Landers, Roger Ebert, Richard Roeper, Jay Mariotti and Rick Telander.

There are too many exposes to list, too many wrongs righted, too much of a storied past -- indicative, we believe, of a bright future -- to include on one day. So, during February, our birthday month, we'll share some of our highlights with a city we never tire of championing.

Thank you for being a Sun-Times reader. And, if you have special memories of the paper, we'd like to hear them. Send e-mail to metro@suntimes.com, with "Sun-Times' 60th birthday" in the subject field. Or send snail mail to: Chicago Sun-Times, 60th Birthday, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago, Ill. 60654.

Michael Cooke