Roman Conrad Pucinski was born into the Polish American community in Buffalo, New York, in 1919. Moving to Chicago as a child, he grew up in the Polish Downtown neighborhood before enrolling in Northwestern University in nearby Evanston in 1938. After graduating in 1941 he served in the US Army Air Corps during World War II, during which he was the lead bombardier on the first B-29 mission to Tokyo. Following the war, he attended John Marshall Law School in Chicago from 1945 to 1949 while simultaneously pursuing a journalistic career with the Chicago Times, later to become the Chicago Sun-Times. As a reporter, he covered city hall, which one observer described as “a plum assignment that included covering the city's Byzantine politics and a host of characters, many crooked but nearly all colorful.”1
Pucinski's first appearance on the national stage came in 1952 when he took...
