Toward the end of last summer, my wife Barbara and I went to Chicago to visit a few friends and generally enjoy the ambiance of a midwestern city in the summer. A lot of beer and a Sammy Sosa homer (#56), to boot. But on a Saturday afternoon in a fairly famous (but whose name I cannot recall) bookshop on Clark, I bumped shoulders (well, my shoulder to his side) with a genuine celebrity.

Well, to be fair, I'm not so sure I ran into the guy. My more reliable memory sensors told me that I kinda listened in on his conversation with the clerk without making any actual contact. Let me assure you I did not recognize the tall, ghostly thin guy wearing a bad hat.

While I am rarely recognized as a tourist, the clerk found me out immediately. "That was Gene Siskel," he said. "No way," I said. "Not to be mean, but he doesn't look good." The clerk didn't think I was mean. "Well, he did have brain surgery a couple months ago," he said.

Simple midwestern acceptance of fact. I had forgotten about all that. In my years since college, I have for the most part lived on the eastern seaboard (or pretty close to it). I've had my mind warped by black-clad legions of fashion freaks, telling me that if you look good, you feel good. In Siskel's case, he looked bad. And, I guess, he didn't feel so good either. Maybe there is something to that looking good thing after all.

Gene Siskel died Saturday. He had the number one obit in my Sunday paper today, and I figure he was pretty high up most places.

Yeah, he was a television talking head, someone everybody knows. His name (or at least his thumb) is plastered across so many video tape cases, I sometimes wondered if he collected a mechanical royalty for its use. The thing is, though, this guy was a critic. The sort of person most folks hate.

Read any celebrity interview, and who do they complain about? The critics. Or, more often, they protest a bit too loudly that the critics don't bother them. Never mind that these stories are most often written by aspiring critics (either film or music), the anti-critic refrain is often heard. And very rarely are critics remembered. When Robert Palmer (the rock critic, not the singer) died, there were a few nice articles. But nothing like the outpouring for Siskel.

Probably because Siskel wasn't so much a critic as a cheerleader for the movies. Oh, sure, he said nasty things about some dreadful flicks, but mostly, Siskel and his television partner Roger Ebert (they're going to be linked forever, like it or not) tried to talk folks into seeing good movies. Which, when you think about it, is a good thing for a critic to do.

Some folks think people don't read books because they don't like to read. I think it might have something to do with the critical culture which surrounds them. Almost all book reviews are written by authors, many of whom have axes to grind. Every week in the New York Times Book Review there is an egregious example of catty sniping. Any review written by John Updike is bound to be bitchy. Things like that can't encourage people to read books.

But Siskel loved the movies. Period. While most movies suck (and he gave a thumbs up to more than a few of those), there are plenty of good ones. When Pulp Fiction lost to Forest Gump at the Oscars, Siskel was livid in his analysis. He said Pulp Fiction was the only great movie in the running for best picture, and I think he was right. Nights like that, I admired Gene Siskel.

And it's too bad he's gone. I'm kinda glad I had the chance to bang into him (or at least stand in close proximity to him) that afternoon in Chicago. If for no other reason than to be able to say I did.

Jon Worley hopes that when he dies at least one member of one band will hear of his death and think, "Thank God. He was a real prick".