As people complimented Chicago Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse on his Baseball Hall of Fame speech for winning the 1983 Ford Frick Award, he always redirected the praise to the WGN-TV and WGN Radio sports editor and producer best known for feeding him info during broadcasts.
“Jack Rosenberg wrote that speech for me,” Brickhouse noted in the book he wrote with Rosenberg. “I read it over and … Jack really came through. All I had to do was read it.”
Rosenberg died Sunday at Chicago’s Swedish Hospital, according to former colleagues. He was 94.
A TV sports pioneer who for more than 40 years was an unseen hand in WGN’s sports broadcasts, Rosenberg played a role in shaping many of today’s coverage conventions and in building WGN’s national reputation through Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks, Bears and local college broadcasts.
“Rosey” — as he was known to co-workers, friends and, through on-air mentions, WGN’s audience — constantly passed to announcers such as Brickhouse, Harry Caray, Lloyd Pettit and Vince Lloyd quickly typed notecards with stats, stories, facts and trivia during games.
“The sound of his typewriter softly clicking behind Jack Brickhouse was the soundtrack of summer for generations of Cubs fans,” tweeted Bob Vorwald, WGN-9’s director of production and the author of “Cubs Forever: Memories from the Men Who Lived Them.”
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Chicago/Midwest chapter inducted Rosenberg into its Silver Circle in 2011. WGN-AM added him to its Walk of Fame six years later.
Current Bulls radio announcer Chuck Swirsky, a former WGN-AM 720 sports director who knew Rosenberg for more than 40 years, called him “a great man” and a friend and mentor with a warm personality, exceptional people skills and tremendous wisdom.
“People often refer to Jack as the man with the typewriter in the Cubs booth, but he was so much more than that,” Swirsky said.
“Early in my career, I was struggling learning how to become a leader. I was failing miserably, and it was Jack who nurtured the process with encouragement and direction. I owe him a debt of gratitude. … He was a gentle man who was always a gentleman.”
Rosenberg, a World War II Navy veteran, began at WGN in 1954. He met his future wife, Mayora, at a party in 1955. They were married Feb. 5, 1956, and had two children.
“If I were coming down the road again, I’d pick the same one,” Rosenberg told the Chicago Sun-Times upon her death in 2007 at age 82 after a long illness. “That’s a pretty good testament to her. She was a great, great lady.”
It was Brickhouse, originally from Peoria, who convinced the Pekin-reared Rosenberg to join him at WGN. Rosenberg was with the Peoria Journal-Star at the time, a newspaper Brickhouse once had delivered.
Rosenberg “was a newspaperman at heart (and) wrote Sunday features for the Tribune sports page for years after he came to WGN,” said Vorwald, who credited Rosenberg with giving him his professional start by hiring him in 1982 as a sports assistant “doing a little bit of everything” during his junior year at Northwestern.
Others whose broadcasting careers Rosenberg gave important boosts included Cubs radio analysts Lou Boudreau and Ron Santo.
Boudreau, a Hall of Fame player and a major-league manager, was talked into trying color commentary in 1958 by Rosenberg and Brickhouse after his firing as manager of the Kansas City Athletics.
Although it took a while for Boudreau to figure out when it was his turn to speak, Cubs fans took to the “Good Kid” much as they later would Santo, another Hall of Fame player turned broadcaster.
Santo and Bob Brenly were up for the Cubs radio analyst job with WGN in 1990. Brenly’s audition went great, Santo’s not so much. The former Cubs third baseman was flummoxed by how to work his microphone.
“Ron said to me, ‘I’m out of this,’ ” Rosenberg told the baiduhai in 2014. “I said, ‘Ron, wait a minute. I have an idea.’ “
Rosenberg had a hunch about Santo and went with a three-man booth, hiring both.
“I knew he was going to be someone everyone would love,” Rosenberg said. “He just needed time.”
Rosenberg also was responsible for coordinating the memorable string of guest announcers — including sportscasting novices Bill Murray, Mike Royko, Tom Dreesen, Jim Belushi, Tom Bosley and George Will — who filled in for Caray alongside analyst Steve Stone on Cubs TV broadcasts in 1987 after Caray’s stroke.
“It is a classic case of making a plus out of a minus,” Rosenberg told the Associated Press. “The feedback has been phenomenal. The people await each personality to compare their styles, voices and looks. It gets to be a game to see who does what.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), in a December 2019 speech on the Senate floor recognizing the end of WGN-TV’s lengthy run carrying the Cubs, noted Rosenberg “routinely pulled off the impossible in support of the telecast.”
As someone so deeply rooted in the Cubs-WGN relationship, it saddened Rosenberg to see the ballclub leave the TV and radio stations behind for more lucrative arrangements elsewhere.
“I know money talks. We can’t get around that. But I’m sorry to see this happen,” he said. “WGN and the Cubs were supposed to be forever. It’s hard to believe it won’t.”