Jack Dykinga scared the hell out of me.

I grew up in a three-newspaper household in a four-newspaper town. Maybe I didn’t pay quite as much attention to bylines as to box scores, but journalists were my heroes, right up there with ballplayers. Mornings began with the Chicago Sun-Times — tabloid in design but no gossip rag, the crusading alternative to the staid Chicago Tribune of Gothic Michigan Avenue headquarters grandeur and “Dewey Defeats Truman” infamy.

On a Sunday in July 1970, I went straight to the back page for the sports headlines, only to see that the Cubs and White Sox had both lost, before flipping the paper over to the news section. That’s when I saw Jack’s black-and-white photos from a pair of psychiatric facilities. The pictures, the critical component of a five-part investigative series, graphically revealed living conditions akin to something out of a 19th century asylum.

The misery is overwhelming. Unclothed residents stare vacantly from hard benches while another curls up on a bare...