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Robert Bernard Greene Jr. (born March 10, 1947) is an American journalist and author. He worked for 24 years for the Chicago Tribune newspaper, where he was a columnist. Greene has written books on subjects including Michael Jordan, Alice Cooper, and U.S. presidents. His book Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan became a bestseller.
According to the September 27, 2021 Wall Street Journal, "columnist Bob Greene, syndicated then in more than 100 newspapers, started the successful WAM movement—We Ain’t Metric—in 1978."
In January 1980, Greene assisted Los Angeles Police in apprehending a man who had allegedly written letters to Greene as well as to police threatening to go on a killing spree. At that time Greene's column appeared in approximately 120 newspapers, including one in the Los Angeles community of Huntington Park where the letter writer lived. In the first week of January, Greene traveled to Los Angeles at the request of police. Through the use of his column, Greene gave out a phone number to his hotel room that the letter writer, who identified himself in letters as "Moulded to Murder", was to use to contact Greene. Police were able to trace the call and arrest the man at a payphone. Greene chronicled these events in his daily column as they occurred.
In 1989, he asked Vietnam veterans if they had really been spat upon when they returned from overseas. The response was so overwhelming, he published a book— Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam— full of the letters he received.
During the 1990s, Greene spent time covering Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, forming an unlikely friendship that Greene documented in two best-selling books. The movie Funny About Love (1990) was based on a Greene column. In 1993, his novel All Summer Long was published by Doubleday, and his columns are collected in several books.
Though Greene was popular with readers, critics accused him of excessive sentimentality, heavy writing and repetitive coverage of the same subject, most notably the Baby Richard child custody saga. A therapist for the birth parents in the custody case, Karen Moriarty, claimed in the book Baby Richard: A Four-Year-Old Child Comes Home that Greene never spoke to the parents, although he covered the subject with 100 columns in which he strongly took the side of the adoptive parents. Greene claimed that the biological parents, the Kirchners, did not respond to his requests for interviews.
The Chicago Reader ran a derisive column, "BobWatch: We Read Him So You Don't Have To," penned pseudonymously by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. Greene's experiences as a roadie for Alice Cooper were parodied by comics writer Steve Gerber in the background of the villain Dr. Bong (real name: Lester Verde) in the 1970s Marvel Comics comic Howard the Duck. Critical coverage of Greene, which offered extensive coverage of his predilection for rewriting pop-culture press releases, was also featured in Spy magazine in a December 1988 article by Magda Krance, "You Wouldn't Want to Be Bob Greene". Krance characterized his output as "the journalistic equivalent of Tuna Helper".
The woman with whom Greene had a relationship was 17, legal age in Illinois, and had graduated from high school in the months between their first meeting and his invitation to take her out to dinner. Their sole hotel tryst was described in the Chicago Tribune as a "sexual encounter that stopped short of intercourse," and Greene told Esquire that he demurred at going further, telling her, "You should wait to do this with someone you love."
Four months after Greene's resignation from the Chicago Tribune, his wife Susan died of heart failure following a month-long respiratory illness.
Bestselling author Greene... looks back on his youth in Bexley, Ohio (pop. 13,000), where he and his four pals grew up together, calling themselves ABCDJ (for Allen, Bob, Chuck, Dan and Jack)... Greene met Jack in kindergarten, and they remained best friends for life. Remembering people and places they shared, the two revisit old haunts, discovering that their beloved Toddle House, where they once went for late-night chocolate pie, is now a Pizza Plus. Greene's repetitive, rambling free associations recall everything from his Halloween costume and old songs to ice cream parlors, state fairs and clothing fads. Unfortunately, the author's dusty attic of lost Americana is cluttered with clichés, nostalgia and overly sentimental yearnings.
His next book, When We Get to Surf City: A Journey through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams, was released on May 13, 2008. It is a chronicle of a 15-year period when he intermittently toured with surf-rock musicians Jan and Dean, singing backup and playing guitar.
His most recent book, Late Edition: A Love Story was released on July 7, 2009. In it, he wistfully chronicles his days as a copyboy and other apprentice positions at the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the Columbus Dispatch.
In 1995, Greene was named Illinois Journalist of the Year. In the same year he was awarded the Peter Lisagor for Public Service Journalism for his reporting on courts failing children in need.
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