Friday, March 28, 2008

Although I made fun of him, I always respected Wally Phillips for entertaining almost half of Chicago for so many years and for making WGN the powerhouse that it still is today. We had a nice moment at his last broadcast. "We are dealing with two very flawed individuals here" is what he said to me, and I had to agree. I played some old tapes of his on the show on Thursday, and I was thinking that I might have overlooked the sheer genius of the simplicity of what he did back in the day.
Wally was there for his listeners, day in and day out. He woke them up, he shared their morning coffee, and he rode with them to work. He was their friend. Radio is the most personal of all mediums. Wally Phillips understood that, and he made the most of it.  You knew that he knew what life in Chicago was really like. He is a part of Chicago history. Sure, I made fun of him when I got here. I had to. Nobody knew who I was, and everybody knew who he was.

Keep in mind that when I got here Wally had something like a fifty share. That means that out of all of the radios turned on during his time period, half of them were tuned to him. That included a lot of kids who were either forced to listen to him because of their parents, or just didn’t know any better. All it took was a few words from Wally about how sick and weird I was and the kids were tuning in. Wally never even really knew what hit him, but I had already failed at WDAI and I wasn’t going to fail at The Loop.

I really hadn’t even heard Wally until I left WDAI in December of 1978. Back in those days, it wasn’t as easy as listening to a stream or downloading a podcast. I remember driving around one morning trying to listen to and understand Chicago radio better. Fred Winston and Larry Lujack were the big targets for me, but when I heard Wally talking to people my age on the phone, and knowing he had so many kids listening, I thought it would be more expedient to go after him.

Fred Winston fell by the wayside. Larry Lujack proved to be a less than formidable opponent, and Wally hung in there until 1986, when he voluntarily took himself off the morning shift to do afternoons. He was still number one in mornings at the time. The afternoon thing is harder to maintain. It’s less of a habit than morning listening, and Wally soon was demoted to middays. I guess he thought he wanted to sleep in. I bet in hindsight he wished he had held on to that coveted morning slot. Oh, Wally!