Perhaps you have noticed, amid that soon-to-end numbing onslaught of political ads and the ongoing commercial avalanche for the Shen Yun performance troupe, some television mentions of WGN-TV’s 75th anniversary.
It’s certainly worth hoopla: since it first went on the air on April 5, 1948, the station has brought a number of people and shows to your living rooms and, more recently, your array of devices, including Bozo the Clown, Jack Brickhouse and Tom Skilling
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. For many locals, WGN has been a constant, friendly lifelong companion.For weeks, the station has been peppering its programming with special segments, many of them by reporter Mike Lowe, who is the point man and principal reporter for the occasion, spicing up every 9 p.m. Thursday news broadcast with reports on such things as an ancient (huge) camera, the station’s collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a fine and tender profile of Brickhouse, a lot of sports clips and other bygone matters.
Retirees make cameos — Mark Suppelsa, Steve Sanders, Robert Jordan and producer Pam Grimes among them. Current employees pop up, with morning co-anchor Robin Baumgarten especially charming with her memories of childhood visits with “Bozo’s Circus.” There’s a two-hour special marking the anniversary at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
I don’t know if any time will be devoted to “Backstory with Larry Potash,” which I have long considered one of the station’s most engaging and smart offerings. It’s conceived and hosted by morning news co-anchor Larry Potash, with principal collaborator Mike D’Angelo, an artful cameraman/producer. The 12th season premieres at 7 p.m. Saturday.
A native of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city close to Boston, Potash obviously has been inspired by the deep history of that area. His TV career took him to a couple of requisite small market jobs before he arrived at WGN in 1994, settling into the anchor chair the next year. For a few years at the start of this century, he wrote a regular and lively column for the Tribune’s bygone RedEye section.
Potash has anchored the WGN Morning News for more than a quarter century. He has won more than a dozen Emmy awards and the news show he helms, primarily with co-anchor Baumgarten, weather forecaster Paul Konrad, sports reporter Pat Tomasulo, entertainment reporter Dean Richards and woman-about-town Ana Belaval consistently tops its competing programs, local and national.
It is often a wild mix of the serious and the silly, but so is the world and this city, and the on-air personalities mesh as neatly as a theatrical ensemble. Their ability to switch from hard and sometimes dire news to trivial topics is often jarring but generally compelling.
I do not know Potash, have never met him, but admire his work. Others do too. “I’ve been a fan of Larry Potash for a long time,” said DePaul University professor and author Miles Harvey, who also helped found Big Shoulders Books. “I sometimes start my day with ‘Morning Joe’ on MSNBC, where it always seems as if the world is about to destroy itself before I even have time for a second cup of coffee.
“When I turn to WGN’s morning show — well, the world still seems problematic and imperiled but also amusing and fascinating and quirky and fun. A lot of the credit for that goes to Larry, who has a real gift for simultaneously being a serious journalist and a hilarious human being.”
Harvey’s most recent book is “The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch.” The story of James Jesse Strang, a mid-19th century figure so famous in his time that his death made front-page headlines across the world before quickly fading into history, it is, as I wrote in a 2020 review, a “deeply researched, artfully written and splendidly compelling” book.
Strang was quite the character, leading a controversial breakaway religious sect and declaring himself king of an island in the Great Lakes. At the end of the book, Harvey writes, “But people like James Strang never really vanish. When the time is right, they reappear, wearing a new guise, exploiting new fears, offering new dreams of salvation. Americans are fixated on such figures especially in periods of profound social and economic upheaval. … So it is that the King of Confidence lives on.”
And so he does, as the “star” in the main segment of one of the four shows in the new “Backstory” season. Harvey enjoyed participating, saying, “When I chatted with Larry before our interview, I learned that he has a huge intellectual curiosity. That sense of wonder, in fact, is no doubt what makes ‘Backstory’ such a great show.”
It is, too, a welcome and fast-paced 30 minutes that is a manifestation of Potash’s curiosity and passion, exploring little known and generally compelling stories from the past, whether about slain mobsters, bicycles or a massacre in Tulsa. Usually delivered in three varied segments, each show satisfies and, I can only hope, might lead viewers to further exploration.
So, the 75th anniversary special arrives Wednesday and the first of the four new episodes of this “Backstory” season comes Saturday, with segments on a top-secret WWII operation to prevent Nazis from developing nuclear weapons, a Native American artist in Oklahoma trying to bring new life to a down-the-the-heels town, and the history and uncertain future of comic books.
And the morning news rolls merrily on.