Longtime WGN radio host Wally Phillips dead at 82

I don't usually post obituaries of media personalities. But this man was "the voice of Chicago" when I was a kid. I remember when I was 12, there was some discussion about drilling for new oil off the intercontinental shelf; I called his show and he put me on the air so I could tell people what I thought of the issue. 12. Talk about giving a voice to the community. May his memory be for a blessing. RS

Longtime WGN radio host Wally Phillips dead at 82
Tribune report

8:53 AM CDT, March 27, 2008

Wally Phillips, whose wit and charm dominated the art of the on-air radio personality in Chicago for two decades, has died after battling Alzheimer's disease for the last five years, WGN Radio announced Thursday. He was 82.

Phillips was the morning program host on WGN Radio from January 1965 until July 1986, and was number one in the morning slot from 1968 until his departure for an afternoon radio slot in 1986. He retired from WGN in 1998 after 42 years with the station, but came out of retirement the following year to host a weekly two-hour program on WAIT-AM, a station based in Crystal Lake.

Phillips was an individual with a personality as unique and unforgettable as his voice, though both were gentle and calming, in a way that made him, to many, feel like a member of the family. He set a moderate but steady pace of news, interviews, commentary and regular applications of wit that seemed to come out of nowhere, that listeners sometimes didn't realize was funny until it was past.

Phillips' delivery occasionally had an edge to it, like the time he tracked down formal-wear mogul Ben Gingiss on a cruise ship on the Pacific Ocean and got him on the phone, saying "We're down here at the store. . . . Where do you keep the fire extinguisher?" More typical was the morning when he started his broadcast by chatting with farm reporter Orion Samuelson about the coming Stomach Rumbling Finals in Stuttgart, Germany.

He was number one in his morning time slot from 1968 until leaving that post.. In the spring 1986 Abitron ratings, he drew a 15.7 share of the audience, far outdistancing second-place WBBM-AM 780 with its 8.7.

Phillips was born on July 7, 1925, in Portsmouth, Ohio, one of four children. When he was 6, his father died and the family moved to Cincinnati. He dropped out of high school to enter the Army Air Forces in World War II, ending up in Georgia in a tow-target squadron assigned to fly targets for pilots and the artillery.

Returning to Cincinnati after the war, he attended a drama school run by actor Tyrone Powers' aunt, sent out some tapes and landed a disk-jockey job in Grand Rapids, Mich.

A year later he was back in Cincinnati at a radio station where he developed his madcap style by messing around with prerecorded interviews. In one instance, on a Doris Day tape, she had answered a question by saying "Yeah, that was half the fun of it." The jock was supposed to ask, "You've been all around, meeting all these different people . . ." Phillips' question was "Doris, I understand there are innuendoes that you and the guys on the bus got just plain drunk, that it was nothing but an orgy from place to place."

The station eventually fired him for inserting a phony item into a news broadcast.

"I wrote, 'All members of infantry company so-and-so report immediately to your draft board,' and I described an insurrection in some phony country. He read it on the air. Hell, they even had the FBI all over the station," Phillips said in an interview published in the Tribune in 1976.

Phillips was succeeded as WGN's morning man by Bob Collins, who died in a plane crash in 2000.

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