WBEZ and I go way back. In the mid-1980s, when I was freshly fired from the Wheaton Daily Journal and looking for any kind of work, Ken Davis gave a whistle, and I started filing live reports on his “Studio A” program.
I didn’t get paid, of course — taking advantage of the ambitious young is a venerable media tradition. But it was reporting on the radio.
I broadcast from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, watching attendants slide big numbers into place. From a live poultry store, watching a chicken, its throat cut, upside down in a metal funnel, blood running out the bottoms, talons scratching uselessly against the galvanized metal.
Awkward situations made good radio. I broadcast naked from a sensory deprivation tank — quite the thing in the mid-1980s — on Lincoln Avenue.
After floating peacefully on heavily salted water in total darkness for nearly an hour, imagining myself an amoeba on an ancient sea, the door was ripped open and phone receiver into my hands. Ken asked what I was thinking about at the moment he called.
“How much I have to pee,” I replied, blinking.
As the years passed, I’d circle back to WBEZ, first in the creepy old Bankers Building at Clark and Adams, with the radio tower on the roof, and then at their new digs at Navy Pier. For several years, the Tribune’s ace columnist Eric Zorn and I would meet on Michigan Avenue every Friday and walk over to the pier to do a rundown of the week’s news.
Or I’d be a guest on particular programs — Scott Simon’s “Weekend Edition” or “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” or Jim Nayder’s “Magnificent Obsession” — a quirky early morning show on addiction and recovery. It was periodically rebroadcast, and now and then I’d hear from someone who caught my segment and was braced in their struggle.
And that’s just being on the station. I haven’t even touched upon my experience as a listener. WBEZ reflected life in Chicago. Jazz at night in the city that practically invented jazz. Live feeds of important historical events — hearings, trials.
Plus lots of fun — Garrison Keillor’s folksy “A Prairie Home Companion,” a mix of humor and music. “Car Talk” with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers — and if listeners today have a hard time imagining WBEZ running a show dedicated to car repair, well, let’s say that station didn’t take itself quite so seriously.
Then again, these are more serious times.
Last week, the U.S. House chainsawed $1.1 billion intended for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR’s parent. The good news is WBEZ only gets 6% of its budget from the feds.
It’s much worse nationwide. In swaths of the rural countryside, the NPR station is the only game in town, a key source of important local and emergency news. More than 120 stations get more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government.
I rattle the cup occasionally for the Sun-Times, so I hope they — and you — will forgive me for switching hats to urge you to divert a few coins WBEZ’s way — you can give at donate.wbez.org/.
Consider it a vote that Chicago’s past will continue to inform Chicago’s future.
WBEZ hit the airwaves as the voice of the Chicago Board of Education on April 15, 1943 — another critical time when American freedom was imperiled. There was a lot of news going on, and Chicago classrooms would tune in for current events lessons. They worked.
“When our parents talk about the war news at home, we know more than they do,” a sixth grader in Mrs. Floreine C. Ruth’s class at Dixon School told the Daily News in 1945. “We have something on them.”
Over the years, WBEZ kept the city informed. When National Public Radio was established in 1970, WBEZ was among the first stations to sign up. Lest you think the current war on diversity is anything new, let me quote from NPR’s first mission statement:
“National Public Radio will serve the individual: it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.”
We live in an era of derision and hate. The vacuous and banal are winning, though this weekend demonstrated the mighty desire of patriotic Americans to refuse to surrender to apathetic helplessness but instead raise our voices in favor of the infinitely varied.
WBEZ has always been one of the loudest voices treating differences with respect and joy. Let’s keep it that way.
