As Jerry Springer tapes his final show from Chicago today before packing up his miasma of misery and high-tailing it to Connecticut, one thing about this confounding man is clear: Chicago will not miss him.
"It feels as if he was never really here," the Tribune says.
Except for that one disastrous moment when Channel 5 chased off Carol Marin and Ron Magers by adding Springer to its newscasts as a commentator - and not an entirely horrible one - Springer never really ingrained himself into our consciousness as a Chicago personality.
Perhaps he never wanted to be.
"He can't muster up more than generalities about the city, and we, truth be told, rarely remembered his Chicago connections," the Trib's Steve Johnson writes. "He was never top-of-the-tongue for lists of local celebrities; he maintained principal residence in Florida; and the show rarely came to mind when you thought of national-stage things made here."
Or perhaps he wasn't allowed to be.
Springer faced howls of protests and a petition against him when Northwestern University's law school announced him as its commencement speaker in 2008. He spoke anyway, and despite joking that he would've chosen someone else too, he knocked the address out of the park.
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"It is perhaps inevitable that we are inclined to always be judging others," Springer said that day. "But let me share this observation. I am not superior to the people on my show - and you are not superior to the people you will represent. That is not an insult. It is merely an understanding derived from a life spent on the front lines of human interaction. We are all alike. Some of us just dress better - or have more money - or perhaps we were born into better circumstances of parental upbringing, health, brains and luck."
Of course, that sentiment would ring truer and warmer if you never saw his bloodthirsty audiences chanting his name as a reward for delivering a perfectly provoked fistfight between multiple betrayed lovers sometimes related and most times clueless.
And that remains the mystery of Jerry Springer, a man who may not be superior to the people on his show but is superior to the show itself.
Now he's Connecticut's conundrum, but they may not get to know him any better than we did.
And like us, they may not care to.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
