WGN Radio celebrates its 100th anniversary as the ‘Voice of Chicago,’ a legacy AM station still making waves — despite losing the Cubs

When Chicago radio enthusiasts Thorne Donnelley and Elliott Jenkins fired up a newfangled transmitter from the Wrigley Building on May 19, 1922, they launched one of the first experimental stations in the U.S., piercing the airwaves with a mélange of talk, weather reports and concerts as the precursor to WGN Radio.

On Thursday, WGN-AM 720 celebrates its 100th anniversary, still going strong as the “Voice of Chicago” after a century of broadcasting that spans the dawn of radio to the digital age, using a format that has essentially remained unchanged.

“There’s a number of stations out there that are celebrating 100-year anniversaries around this time, but in terms of stations that have remained the same kind of programming style for a century, that is kind of rare,” said Dave Marzullo, 52, head of digital operations for WGN Radio and the station’s unofficial historian.

The pioneering WDAP shifted its studios to two handball courts atop the Drake Hotel in July 1922 after a sudden violent storm destroyed its inaugural antenna, with pieces “picked up in all directions for weeks,” Jenkins wrote in a 1923 edition of Radio Broadcast. The station gained some early listeners, including Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick, who wrote to his mother, “you cannot help being thrilled at the little box that picks sounds from the air,” according to a WGN history published by the station in 1961.

McCormick acquired the station in 1924, changing the call letters to WGN, which stood for the “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” the slogan that adorned the Tribune’s front page. Since then, WGN Radio has been an integral part of the conversation and culture in Chicago, broadcasting news, sports, entertainment and major events across the Midwest with 50,000 watts of power. It aired its first baseball game in 1924 — a crosstown matchup between the Cubs and Sox — and carried the Cubs for 90 years until losing the broadcast rights in 2014.

Over the years, WGN has waffled between the 1922 and 1924 origin stories to mark significant anniversaries, but settled on 2022 for the centennial, Marzullo said.

WGN Radio is commemorating its anniversary with a TV documentary airing at 7 p.m. Thursday on sister station WGN-Ch. 9, while former on-air personalities including Lyle Dean, Spike O’Dell, Orion Samuelson and Max Armstrong will make guest appearances on the radio station during the day. The station will also launch a limited-edition centennial beer dubbed “Chicago’s Very Own” golden lager, which will be available beginning Friday at Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago and at other retailers.

For many Chicagoans, the history of WGN Radio runs much deeper than a commemorative 12-ounce can of beer.

A perennial ratings powerhouse, WGN Radio had double-digit audience shares and millions of regular listeners from the 1960s through the 1980s, when Wally Phillips, Bob Collins, Roy Leonard and other legendary broadcasters ruled the airwaves. In the spring of 1986, as Phillips was ceding the morning show to Collins after nearly 20 years, he still had a 15.7 audience share, nearly double the nearest competitor.

WGN ranks 11th in Chicago with a 3.1 share in April, according to the most recent Nielsen ratings.

Slogans during its ratings pinnacle included “WGN Radio is Chicago,” a bold assertion issued in TV spots by a cartoon bird, reflecting both the station’s market dominance and cultural significance.

Dan Fabian, 78, who rose through the programming ranks over three decades at WGN Radio, helped guide the station during its heyday before retiring as general manager in 1997. He also provided the original voice of the cartoon bird.

“Not only did the station have all of the front-line talent that was really world class, we had the Cubs and the Bears and two helicopters and an in-house weather guy, and on and on and on,” said Fabian. “And nobody else could come close to having as much of that stuff as we had.”

Phillips, whose “people helping people” mantra personified the station, rose to the top of the ratings after camping out at the station during the blizzard of ’67, and hitting the airwaves the next morning while all of Chicago — including his competition — was snowed in, Fabian said.

Fabian, who hired morning drive successors Collins and O’Dell, said the key to success at WGN was not necessarily a big voice.

“It had to be somebody who was in the moment and who got the fact of what we were doing,” Fabian said. “We tried to be the audience.”

But change has been in the air at WGN Radio during the new millennium, as the station struggles to navigate the fragmented digital landscape that has diluted audience and revenue for traditional legacy media.

In 2008, Kevin Metheny was hired by then Tribune CEO Randy Michaels as program director at WGN-AM 720 and charged with shaking up a Chicago radio institution and expanding its still large but aging audience. The short-lived tenure of Metheny, a well-traveled program director dubbed “Pig Virus” by shock jock Howard Stern, led to the exodus of key on-air personalities amid growing resentment from longtime listeners.

“They brought in a guy who just did not like the station, and said so out loud,” said Fabian. “And boy, it took a tumble.”

Other initiatives that did not fare well included The Game, WGN’s short-lived foray into FM sports talk radio, which lasted less than a year in 2014. Weigel Broadcasting subsequently leased the low-power TV signal at 87.7 FM and turned it into a top-10 Chicago radio station with its MeTV FM oldies format.

Phillips, Collins and Leonard have all moved on to that radio booth in the sky, and the Cubs pulled up stakes for CBS Radio and their new home at the Score nearly a decade ago. The new WGN Radio owners, Nexstar, are a Dallas-based TV station group that purchased Tribune Media, the former broadcast parent of Tribune Publishing, for $4.1 billion in 2019.

In 2018, with Tribune Tower sold for redevelopment as million-dollar condos, WGN Radio left its longtime street-level studio on North Michigan Avenue for new digs and an 18th-floor perch at 303 E. Wacker Drive. The station also left behind its Walk of Fame, where former WGN air personalities were enshrined in sidewalk plaques in Pioneer Court. Those plaques have since been distributed to families of the honorees, winding up in closets and gardens across the city.

But the station is hewing closer to its radio roots these days under Mary Sandberg Boyle, 46, a veteran radio producer and executive who became the first female GM at WGN Radio in 2019.

“We belong to the listeners,” Boyle said. “No personality is larger than what the brand is. And they all understand that. It’s public service to the people listening, it’s not about building stars, or their own brand or ego.”

Over-the-air radio industry revenue peaked at about $18 billion in 2006, but it fell precipitously during the Great Recession and has never really recovered. The pandemic accelerated the decline, with radio revenue plummeting nearly 24% to $9.7 billion in 2020, according to media research firm BIA Advisory Services.

The only radio station in the Nexstar portfolio, WGN weathered the economic downturn of the pandemic without furloughs or layoffs, thanks to the support of its new owner, Boyle said. The station is profitable, she said, but declined to disclose revenue.

One of her first personnel moves in December 2019 was naming veteran Chicago radio and TV personality Bob Sirott as morning drive host on WGN Radio. It was a return to the station for Sirott, who co-hosted middays with his wife, Marianne Murciano, from 2013 to 2015, and previously hosted “The Noon Show” from 2007 to 2010 while co-anchoring the WFLD-Ch. 32 news at 9 p.m.

A Chicago native, Sirott launched his media career in the 1970s as a rock jock at WBBM-FM 96.3 and WLS-AM 890. He shifted to television news in 1980, with stints at nearly every station in Chicago over the course of three decades. But Sirott grew up listening to WGN Radio, and specifically, his beloved Cubs.

“The reason I got into this business was listening to Cubs broadcasts growing up,” said Sirott, 72. “I’d go to sleep with the transistor radio under my pillow listening to the West Coast games that started late.”

Sirott said he idolized former Cubs play-by-play announcer Jack Quinlan, who partnered with Lou Boudreau on WGN Radio broadcasts from 1957 to 1964. Quinlan died in an auto accident during spring training in 1965.

While he aspired to be the Cubs radio play-by-play man, Sirott turned down an offer from Fabian to take the job during the height of his TV hosting commitments.

“The man is a stone-cold pro broadcaster who understands the game and loves the Cubs,” Fabian said. “He would have been fabulous.”

Fabian, who tried to hire Sirott “at least six times” over the years to work at WGN Radio, said the versatile Chicago air personality is the rightful heir to the morning chair. Sirott’s show ranked 3rd among Chicago stations in morning drive during the first quarter, according to Nielsen.

Sirott said he is happy to fill the coveted morning drive seat at WGN Radio, despite not being an early riser at heart. Cubs aside, he said WGN today is very similar to the station many Chicagoans grew up with, making it something of an outlier in the tightly-formatted world of corporate radio.

He called the long-running WGN news/talk format “news plus,” adding conversation to topical issues to engage rather than enrage listeners.

“You get the news, but it’s all about the plus and the plus is personality, the plus is fun, the plus is let’s talk about this issue a little bit,” Sirott said. “Let’s not yell and scream about it. But let’s have sensible, sane conversations, have some fun along the way. It’s kind of in short supply, especially these days.”

Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, a radio trade publication, called WGN a “national treasure” among radio stations for embracing its heritage, something most other legacy radio stations have long since abandoned.

“A lot of companies, they have heritage stations, but they don’t necessarily put a lot of value on that history,” Harrison said. “WGN still conducts itself as if it were the ‘Voice of Chicago,’ as if it were the station of record. And it’s a very difficult thing to do in 2022.”

The loss of the Cubs, however, still stings for listeners and WGN staffers alike, hanging on like a phantom limb to the station where Chicago play-by-play broadcasts were born. WGN Radio missed out on calling the Cubs 2016 World Series victory after 90 years of futility.

Boyle said the decision was “out of our hands” and predated her tenure at the top, but she bears no ill will toward the team or WSCR-AM 670, the successor play-by-play station.

“We don’t want to move on from the Cubs, it’s a huge part of our heritage,” Boyle said. “But it’s OK that they’re no longer broadcast out of here. And we’re doing well without them.”

rchannick@chicagotribune.com