Once a week long-time radio producer and author Rick Kaempfer shares his favorite brushes with greatness in a feature he calls “Celebrity Snippets.”
Richard M. Daley has been the mayor of Chicago since 1989. If he completes the term he was just elected to serve (with 71% of the vote), he will set the record for longest serving mayor in Chicago—surpassing his own father’s record. By Rick Kaempfer
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and nobody is a bigger symbol of the Irish Catholic holiday in Chicago than Chicago’s very own Irish Catholic Mayor Richard M. Daley.
I’ve met the Mayor several times over the years during my radio career. The first time I spoke to him was actually before he even became the Mayor.
It was 1989. At the time I was the producer of the Steve Dahl & Garry Meier show on WLUP AM 1000. Steve & Garry were celebrating their ten year anniversary together that year.
Unlike most radio personalities, Steve & Garry actually thrived on surprise. It brought out the best in them because they were both gifted improvisers. Periodically during this year-long anniversary celebration, I would get people from their past or well-known celebrities to make surprise phone calls during the show.
After a few of these “surprise” calls, they began to trust me. Whenever I would walk into the studio and point at the blinking hotline they knew it was going to be a call worth taking on the air. They didn’t know if was going to be a celebrity like Jay Leno or Albert Brooks or someone from their past—especially a person they had feuded with, or someone who had fired them, but they knew it was going to be interesting.
During the election campaign of 1989 when Richie Daley was running for Mayor, two of his biggest fans were Steve & Garry. They often played audio clips of Daley’s common sense wisdom, his tortured syntax, and his big hearty laugh.
When I called the future Mayor’s campaign headquarters, I didn’t think there was a chance he would come on the show. After all, Steve & Garry had a reputation. They were naughty. They had been fined by the FCC. They were considered “shock jocks.” Politicians usually avoided the show like a plague because they feared being associated with them.
Plus, Daley didn’t strike me particularly as a risk-taking politician. In fact, he was widely known as being exactly the opposite. I was lucky, though. Someone on his campaign staff was a regular listener of the show. He knew that Steve and Garry had been overwhelmingly positive, and he advised Daley to do it—to connect to the young voters.
The day he called I could hear how nervous he was on the phone. He asked me if it was OK to congratulate them on their anniversary. I said yes. He asked me if was OK to say something about Hawaiian shirts (Steve’s trademark at the time), and I said yes. He took a deep breath, and I put him on hold.
The call itself lasted only a few minutes, but it turned out to be great move by the Mayor. He didn’t slip up, he laughed heartily at everything Steve and Garry said, and he got off the phone before they said anything too controversial. Steve & Garry were thrilled that he called. The next day it also got a positive write up in two of the biggest gossip columns in Chicago. The man who was widely mocked for being an overly-cautious intellectually-challenged political lightweight had passed the test with flying colors.
Four years later I was producing the John Landecker show on WJMK. By then it was almost impossible to get Mayor Daley to do a radio appearance. His schedule was booked ridiculously far in advance, and he avoided any appearance that had even a whiff of trouble. We were just getting the Landecker show off the ground at the time, and I knew an appearance by the Mayor would give us instant credibility, so I pushed hard for an in-studio visit.
It took almost six months, but he finally agreed. We had him for thirty minutes, which doesn’t sound like much—but ask any producer in Chicago how many of them have gotten the Mayor to come into the studio for a thirty minute conversation. It simply doesn’t happen.
That morning he was relaxed and amazingly comfortable. John had classic tapes of Daley’s father, and the two of them talked about what it was like growing up in that household, what it was like at the ’68 convention, and what kind of rules and regulations they had in the Daley house. Landecker & Daley formed an instantaneous generational bond. It really was an entertaining interview—and the mayor was candid, warm and friendly.
A few years later, on the day John was given a special tribute by the Museum of Broadcasting in Chicago, Mayor Daley declared it John Records Landecker Day in Chicago. I believe he did the same for Steve Dahl a few years later when Steve celebrated his 20th year in Chicago radio.
I’ve heard all the horror stories about how hard it is to work for Mayor Daley. Rumor has it that he possesses a hair trigger temper. Judging by the incredible staff turnover, it’s probably true. I’m also not blind to the corruption in City Hall. His administration, especially in recent years, has been ethically challenged to say the least. Judging by how closely he worked with the people who have been indicted and/or sent up the river, he must be involved too. At the very least, he turns a blind eye.
For those reasons, if I still lived in Chicago, I probably wouldn’t have voted for him this time around—although his opponents weren’t exactly Abe Lincoln and FDR.
On the other hand, I’ll always appreciate those two times he let his hair down a little and took a risk by appearing on the Steve & Garry and John Landecker shows.
That’s the Mayor Daley I salute on this St. Patrick’s Day in Irish Catholic Chicago.
Last year for St. Patrick's Day, I asked my friend Brendan Sullivan to write about what is was like growing up south side Irish in Chicago. He did a nice job.
