Ron Grossman, a staff writer for the Chicago Tribune for the past thirty-two years, was raised in Albany Park on Chicago’s Northwest side. It was an ethnic polyglot of Jews, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and Irish.

As a young man he studied architecture with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He then went to the University of Chicago where he took a BA and PhD in history. His area of academic concentration was classical and medieval history. Subsequently he taught for 20 years, serving on the faculties of the University of Nebraska, St. Olaf College, Michigan State University, and Lake Forest College, in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

Returning to the Chicago area put Grossman back into contact with the city streets of his youth. He began to study and write about ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago. In 1982 he made a map of ethnic communities in Chicago that was widely adopted by universities and government agencies. It remains the most recent mapping of Chicago’s ethnicity. Grossman also published a book titled Guide to Chicago Neighborhoods.

He also increasingly wrote for the mainstream press, finally giving up his academic position and becoming a fulltime journalist. His stories and “think” pieces have carried datelines from such far-flung places as Jerusalem, Paris, Milan, and the Mani region of Greece. He’s covered issues in higher education and interviewed intellectual luminaries Arthur Miller and Joseph Heller as well as others. He covered the “culture wars” that have roiled American campuses over the last 20 years. But time after time he returns to his first love, life on the streets of Chicago, in neighborhoods where only the language of the immigrants have changed since the years of his youth.