Wally Phillips, RIP

Perhaps The Tribune will update this story as the day goes on, but I am surprised that the sister company of WGN Radio had so little material ready for arguably the greatest broadcaster who ever graced the airwaves of that station.

Link: Longtime WGN radio host Wally Phillips dead at 82 -- chicagotribune.com.

Maybe they should have interviewed a few of his listeners, like me.

I moved to Chicago in 1983, so I only got to hear Phillips toward the end of his career as that city's preeminent morning man. He was smooth as butter, segued seamlessly in and out of commercial breaks -- usually by playing a funny sound bite from a movie my parents might have watched -- and seemed to have an average listener age of 65. I had never heard anything quite like his show growing up in Montana, though that was true of much of what I heard on Chicago radio, but Phillips really was a one-of-a-kind. If someone has some sound bites from his show please send the links and I'll post 'em here. I guarantee you, if you did not grow up in Chicago listening to him, you have no idea.

Much as the arrival of David Letterman in late nights signaled the end of Johnny Carson's reign as the king of the night, so too did the arrival of a mischievous Detroit DJ named Steve Dahl signal the beginning of the end of Wally Phillips. One of Dahl's early song parodies was "Oh Wally," set to the tune of Barry Manilow's "Oh Mandy," and sung by a lovestruck housewife from Tinley Park (Dahl in a pitch-perfect impression).

Though Phillips would remain the top rated morning host in Chicago until he stepped down in 1986, the rivalry with the upstart on WLUP-FM clearly signaled the beginning of the end. Younger listeners like me were tuning away from GN and to hipper hosts like Dahl and his then cohost, Garry Meier, part of whose shtick was making fun of the old biddies whose radios had been stuck on WGN since the time of JFK. The irony now, of course, is that Dahl is the grand old man of Chicago radio, and his attitude toward Phillips has mellowed considerably over time. (Dahl did point out, quite often, that WGN had never paid Phillips a salary commensurate with his dominance.)

I was a junior in college when I decided to stay in Chicago, my first summer ever away from home. Although I mopped floors in the cafeteria to pay my rent and get free meals, I did get to enjoy a few luxuries that summer, thanks largely to winning my first WGN radio contest. And that was courtesy of the Wally Phillips morning show, which I still listened to during baseball season. By correctly guessing that Chicago Cubs color commentator Lou Boudreau was the answer to a trivia question (probably involving the Cleveland Indians), I got 10 seconds on the air with Wally, and two months of goodies shipped to my apartment, everything from juices to dinner at Lawry's The Prime Rib to free observatory tower tickets at the John Hancock Center.

It was while using that John Hancock pass that one of my indelible Chicago memories was formed: It was during the air and water show of 1986, and as I stood 600 feet over the city, looking out at Lake Michigan, I was startled as four skydivers trailing colored smoke suddenly shot through my frame of sight, rapidly descending, descending, until it seemed like they were going to go splat -- and then when they were well below me, they opened their chutes. Pretty pedestrian entertainment, I guess, but I found it thrilling and at that moment, felt lucky to be a Chicagoan.

Thank you, Wally.