If you are famous in America, you are what your obit says you are. Usually, it’s boiled down to some silly line you uttered in a commercial, your divorces or other legal problems. If you’re lucky, your accomplishments are great enough to make the lead paragraph.

I’m glad I’m not writing Michael Jackson’s obit.

I can’t think of a more conflicting legacy than that of Michael Jackson’s.

I flash back almost immediately to the memory of watching the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family in the late 60s and 70s like most every other white kid in this country, and then being absolutely knocked silly by the talents of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five.

The dancing was unlike anything I ever saw, the music made you want to dance. And it didn’t matter what race you were, it was intoxicating.

I was a senior in high school when Off the Wall came out. Three years later, in 1982, came Thriller. And if you claimed not to play both until the grooves wore thin, you were lying. We crowded around the television to see the premiere of the video on a new network called MTV.

I remember watching Michael moonwalk on the Motown special in ’83 and I may as well have been watching the real moonwalk, surreal as it was.

He was in his prime, sexy, though no girlfriends in sight. Brooke Shields on his arm in one photo, Emmanuel Lewis in another. Then came the pet chimp Bubbles and the plastic surgery. He was sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber?

He was eccentric. He said he was abused as a child. He lived in an amusement park with llamas.

He was married to Lisa Marie. He wasn’t married.

The plastic surgery continued. You wanted him to dance more, but he mostly grabbed his crotch. Other artists came around, many copying his.

There was the child molestation suit, a settlement and then the documentary in which he brazenly talked about sharing his bed with children. He became a father, but didn’t seem interested in his kids having a mother. He named his two sons Prince, nicknamed one Blanket, then dangled the baby off a balcony in a clip that still makes me nervous to watch.

Was he a martyr or a criminal?

I was repulsed by him, didn’t know what to make of him, forgot about the music.

He was indeed a pop icon. And a troubled man.

The obits will say it all.

Sadly.

I just wish I could talk to him one more time.

No, that’s not right.

I wish I could talk to him 100 more times, listen to his stories, hear him sing, ask him for some more advice, soak up more knowledge, laugh at his wonderful self-deprecating humor.

I wish I had known John Callaway when I first broke into the business so I had more years to benefit from our friendship. But I know I couldn’t miss him any more than I do today.

Callaway’s passing Tuesday night is a loss for Chicago, a loss for journalism and a loss for anyone who ever experienced, either in person or via his work, his professionalism and the decency of the man.

There are going to be plenty of obits and tributes in the coming days and I can imagine him shaking his head and deflecting all the wonderful words of praise that will be heaped upon his memory. They will say that he was the best interviewer around and they still won’t do him justice.

I had the honor of being on his panel on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight over the years, and being interviewed by him twice on Friday Night. The first time was a year and a half ago, when he talked to me about the Tribune Magazine piece I had written about my parents’ battle with Alzheimer’s, and just hearing his voice speak the names of my parents in that beautiful baritone of his to open the show was like stepping into another dimension for me.

The final time was last month, when I came on to promote my biography of Lou Piniella. Mostly, however, we talked about my layoff from the Tribune after 19 years just a couple weeks earlier. Like the first interview, it was obviously a very personal and emotional topic for me, and one that I know I couldn’t have spoken about publicly at that point with anyone other than John Callaway.

I felt warm and protected, not because I considered him a friend, but because I knew his preparation was, as always, meticulous. I knew he would lead me in a direction I didn’t even know I was going but would naturally follow because he was so incredibly good at what he did.

There were no great secrets to what made Callaway so good. Certainly no shortcuts. We spent no more than five or six minutes talking about my book but he had read every word of it, his questions reflected it and his audience, as always, benefitted from it.

In an interview with the Tribune, Callaway explained his craft and revealed why he was so masterful at it.

“A good interview,” he said, “at a really deep level just requires preparation beyond anything that I can tell you. When I was doing the old `John Callaway Interviews,’ the national series that we did for a couple of years, when I interviewed Updike, I think I read everything that he wrote. And I want to tell you, pal, that’s a lot. That’s a lot. And you want to know something? He knew it about 12 seconds into that interview. He knew it. And he came to play, and I came to play.”

You can’t fool most interview subjects and Callaway knew that and lived that. There is no cheating. To be a good interviewer, he said, is to be truly engaged.

When you lose a John Callaway, there is just simply a void. His was a voice unlike any another. He had an authenticity unlike any other. Work ethic is, unfortunately, a concept his generation did not subscribe to as if it was an option. They just held to it.  But more than that was his generosity.

When I lost my job at the Tribune, I made a list of people of the smartest people I knew, those whose advice I wanted and needed. He was among the first people I called and the first who responded.  And he continued to keep in touch even after I stopped, offering ideas for me, encouragement, giving recommendations to people he thought could help me, signing each e-mail with warmest best wishes, love and hugs.

I suspect I was not the only journalist he ever helped.

With all my heart, I will try to return that generosity.

He was a dear man. And I miss him already.

They don’t teach you about softball questions in journalism school. It’s just one of those things you pick up, like how to push “record” on your tape recorder. You want to ask an athlete about an 0-for-April slump, you start by lobbing in a few about his charitable foundation.

Of course, this technique is also older than hot type and any athlete with the sophistication of a little leaguer sees right through it immediately, which is why I dispensed with any softball small talk today when I interviewed Jackie Joyner-Kersee for an ESPNChicago.com story, and launched right into the day my high school basketball team pasted hers in the 1979 state title game.

Mostly — because in addition to being the greatest female athlete of the 20th century, she is also a very nice woman — she just laughed. She told me we had a good team (which we did, and that’s not bragging since I rarely played) and remembered that the officiating was bad (it was, but I also felt compelled to remind her that a 16-point victory virtually erases any bad reffing differential).

She also remembered — or politely pretended she did to humor me — the interview conducted by WGN’s Floyd Brown on the state tournament telecast, in which he said he heard she was quite a little athlete and might one day even be in the Olympics.

Jackie, who was a shy 16-year-old junior at the time and just thrilled to be on TV, bounced up and down and acted slightly embarrassed as she shrugged a giggly “Yes.”  This was before she took the court and soared above the rim for a tip-in, something we had never before seen a girl even close to pull off and scared us right out of our socks.

Joyner loved basketball, so much that she played at UCLA in addition to competing for the Bruins and training for the Olympics in track and field. So much so that she had a one-year stint with the Richmond Rage of the fledgling American Basketball Association in 1996.

So much so that like us, growing up about 300 miles or so away, she ran around her neighborhood playing with her older brother Al and the other boys. There was not too much running around, however, and not too much playing with the boys if her mother Mary, a nurse’s aide, had anything to say about  it.

“My mom didn’t believe in that,” Jackie said, “and really didn’t understand what I was doing in athletics. Thank God I had a dad who thought it was ok. My mom was like, ‘No sports. Get your education, come clean the house, sports is out the door.’

“For my mom, it was about morals, values, character, integrity, about me being a good person, to be respectful and understanding the challenges of life.”

Mary Joyner understood. She married Jackie’s father Al Sr., when she was 16 and he was 15 and did not want her four children following the same path.

“Even as I continued to develop and grow . . . me and my brother talked about going to the Olympics (Jackie’s brother Al won the gold medal in triple jump in the ’84 Olympics) and she’d be like, ‘OK, OK.’ “

The tragedy is that Jackie was called home during her freshman year at UCLA after her mother was struck by meningitis and died at 37.

“She never saw me compete on the Olympic level,” Joyner-Kersee said.

Talking to her this morning, she looked like she could still run barefoot across gravel and appear the Olympic champion. And annoyingly, she would not go along with me when I all but begged her to tell me she at least felt a little sore when she worked out.

She reminded me that after losing that ’79 title game, “We came back and won the next year, you know. Didn’t lose a game.”

I told her I remembered hearing something about it. Trash-talking an Olympic legend is always in good form. Then I asked if she still shot around, if she still had some game.

“It would take me a while,” she said. “You always have it, but at this point you have to go get it.”

I imagine she doesn’t have to go very far.

I went back to the Tribune Tower Sunday morning, for the first time since being axed.

I had been invited to be a guest of Rick Kogan’s on his weekly WGN radio show, “Sunday Papers” and he asked me to come to the studio, which is inside the Tower.

My husband Rick came with me because it was Father’s Day and what man doesn’t want to wake up at 6 a.m. on the Sunday of Father’s Day and drive his wife downtown?

As we were walking in, I remarked how stupid it was that I hadn’t remembered to bring in my Tribune-issue laptop and cell phone, since they had to be returned. But Rick told me he had already returned them for me, several weeks before.

I had absolutely no idea, which may give you some indication of how tight a rein I keep on my very important to-do list and valuable equipment that doesn’t belong to me. My husband obviously knew I could not bear the thought of stepping foot in the place, so much so that he quietly just did it for me, meeting someone from the sports department in the lobby to hand over the stuff.

So kind a gesture was it, that if it had been Mother’s Day rather than Father’s Day, this would have sufficed as a present.

I have written about this lobby before. I had never been one to necessarily buy into the arrogant notion that everything attached to the great Tribune edifice was sacred and even if I did then, I think it’s pretty safe to say I don’t now.

But the building is well, I can’t help it, it’s just special. Even if I hadn’t worked there, I would have taken my children there to see the fragments stuck into the outside of the building from such historically significant places as the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall and Abraham Lincoln’s original tomb.

But inside is where I stood agape the first time I ventured in as a college student, saw the famous quotations describing the ideals of a free press etched into the walls, and grew dizzy as I spun around and around to read each one.

The Hall of Inscriptions, it’s called.  

I read them over and over. I might have even tried to memorize them. And I felt important, like I was a part of this scared trust, even as a kid just starting out.

Where there is a free press, the governors must live in constant awe of the opinions of the governed.Lord Macaulay

Again and again as I walked through the lobby over the years, I would read that quote and the others. It’s hard not to as they loom over you. And like most sportswriters, I wasn’t in the building all that much over the years, which only heightened the experience when I walked through the front doors.

But strangely, I never became all that comfortable there, like it was my building, my place. I felt lucky that I got to work there, but also intimidated by the surroundings as if I was never dressed quite well enough or that one day someone might tap me on the shoulder and test me on the quotations. Like Col. McCormick himself was looking down and might swat me away at any given moment.

Newspapers are the sentinels of the liberties of our country.  Benjamin Rush

I still have my employee ID in my wallet, for some reason. I had it there Sunday, when I signed in as a visitor. I realized afterward that I never looked up while I was there, even while waiting for Rick Kogan’s producer to come out and bring us into the studio.

Maybe I didn’t want to get those familiar goose bumps. Maybe I didn’t want to know what it was like not to feel lucky I got to work there.

But here’s the funny part. I wasn’t intimidated. I was wearing shorts, a t-shirt, had bad hair and I felt OK, familiar, kind of like this was my place. I know every inch of that lobby.  I know all the secret back ways up to the newsroom. How many times did I bring my kids up those elevators to the fourth floor, where Wendell buzzed them in and they knew where my mailbox was and where to go to visit Rose, our former sports department secretary, and to see Holly’s Pez dispenser collection?

I’m glad I went.

I’ll probably never go back.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. Flannery O’Connor/files/0/9/0/8/7/188681-178090/isaacson.mp3″>The Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan – 06/21/09

I think of many things on Father’s Day.

I think of omelets because my dad was great at making them. If my mother ever asked him to, say, bake a potato, I’m sure he would have panicked. But he made beautiful omelets. Fluffy and perfect with whatever you could dream of to go inside, providing we had it in the refrigerator.

My dad was big on breakfast. All of us would sit queasy and silent on dark winter mornings, waiting for the obscenely early school bus while he ladled heaping bowls of steaming cream of wheat before us, pretending he didn’t hear the gagging sounds that followed and insisting we eat.

I think about how he worried. And if any world event had any remote chance of adversely affecting his family, he worried more. If there was a recall, the item must be destroyed. “But dad, our babyseat is a different brand than is being recalled. And it’s only being recalled in India.”

Things did not always make sense where it concerned my dad.

I think about how he loved sports, worshipped the Bears, admired pro golf, enjoyed baseball, liked to swim, even coached Little League. But he couldn’t play a game of catch without breaking his glasses. 

I think of how he seemed strong and unafraid but could cry at a particularly tender episode of “Little House on the Prairie.”

“You’re crying?” my mom would say.

“Jack the dog died,” my father would explain, wiping his eyes.

He was smart but sure you caught pneumonia from wet hair.

He was stubborn and had a temper, but hated for anyone to stay mad at him and was the most affectionate man I ever knew.

He could also soothe any crying baby handed to him. Didn’t have to know the baby, baby didn’t have to know him, but once in his arms that baby would stop crying, look deep into my father’s eyes and fall asleep within a minute. Every time.

My dad loved a good bowl of soup, had to be mad hot; a good hot dog with mustard and onion (“even though it doesn’t like me,” he would lament);  vanilla milkshakes and vanilla ice cream, even at “31 Flavors.”

“Again with the vanilla?” my mother would say. “It’s french vanilla,” my dad would reply, mushing it into soup. 

He wore the same style slippers and pajamas, and went to the same barber shop, drug store, dry cleaners and bank for close to 50 years – and at the exact same time each week. He lived on Maalox (see hot dog reference) and never had a good night’s sleep in his life.

“So how come I could hear you snoring?” my mom would say.

We teased him that he had no sense of humor, but he knew how to laugh and how to take a joke.

He never actually fixed anything that I’m aware of, but he loved his tools.

He couldn’t change the oil in his car but he loved his garage and nobody ‘s was cleaner (painted the floor of the garage, too, though no one could figure out why). He couldn’t barbecue either, but loved his lawn and his flower and vegetable gardens.

He was far from a neat freak but once every month or so, also for reasons unknown, he used an industrial buffer on the linoleum.

He could be tight with the buck but he was generous to a fault.

He would go anywhere, at any time and any distance for his children, including driving eight hours to pick me up from college and take me home, two round trips in one weekend, because I was homesick.

He was loyal and honest and adored his family. And no one will ever worry about us like he did.

He was a good father.

And I still can’t ruin an omelet without missing him terribly.