Wally Phillips, 1926-2008

Just got around to reading Saturday's paper and, while I normally skip over the obituary pages, something in that day's paper caught my eye. Longtime Chicago radio host Wally Phillips died last Thursday after suffering from Alzheimer's. For those of you who never heard of Wally Phillips, he was the king of morning radio in Chicago from 1966 through 1986. When I was a kid, I spent many nights at my grandparents' house in Valpo, and every following morning I would hear Phillip's rich voice coming through their radios on WGN. Phillips was perhaps the most dominant local radio personality in US history; at his peak, he had local listenership of 1.5 million--that was half the population of Chicago! His mix of drop-ins, humor, and local news (plus an occasional song or two) made me want to get into radio when I was a kid. He will be missed.