Callaway ready to learn even more about Chicago

Chicago's great blessing is that John Callaway never let college get in the way of a good education. "The good news is my dad and also my mother were in the newspaper business, and the bad news is they never made any money," Callaway says. "So I had to work my way through college. And I was starting to fall behind financially. I think I was $800 behind," he says, pausing to chuckle as he compares that with the six-figure debt college students routinely run up now.

"Little Johnny Callaway got scared he was going to run up too many bills," he adds. "So in the great tradition of my sister - she went to college, dropped out, made money, went back, dropped out, made money, went back and finished - I said, 'It's time to drop out and go make some big money. Maybe I can make $75 a week, and maybe I'll go to Chicago get a job in a steel mill.' "

So, in a story he has repeated many times since, the West Virginia native left Ohio Wesleyan University and hitchhiked to Chicago with 71 cents in his pockets. "And when I got here I found out there were no jobs in the steel mils," he says.

He found work as a clerk and started fantasizing about a new dream job. "I thought I was going to be an actor," Callaway says. "And I was in the Y theater group. And one night the director, he said, 'Pal, I just want to tell you, you are the worst actor I have ever had the pleasure of working with. And as an aspiring playwright you're not much better.'

"He said, 'I don't know if you realize it or not, but when you're down in the cafeteria you're always talking about your parents and you're always talking about the newspaper business. I know you're starving, and I know there's a place in Chicago called the City News Bureau where reporters sometimes get to cover political dinners and they get free meals.' And I thought, 'Jeez, free meals, that's for me.'

"So, anyway, with those great aspirations I went over and applied, and two weeks later I got the job," Callaway says. "So I called my dad back in West Virginia and told him I got a job working in Chicago at the City News Bureau.

"It was as though somebody who had graduated from West Point had just been told his son had gotten into West Point," Callaway adds. "He was thrilled. He said, 'If they don't fire your (rear end) out of there in eight minutes you're on your way. You'll be able to do anything.' "

That was 1956, and those words have been prophetic. Callaway went from City News ("the greatest experience I ever had, and the toughest I had in journalism," but no free meals, as it turned out) to CBS within a year. He worked 17 years in radio and TV at CBS, in 1968 helping WBBM 780-AM make the transition to the all-news format it still has. In 1974, he made the jump to public television, running "The Public Newscenter" with Jim Ruddle at WTTW Channel 11 and going on to several other shows until he helped create "Chicago Tonight" 15 years ago and became host of the panel news-analysis program.

"C2N" proved to be the perfect job for Callaway, a man of wide-ranging interests and a voracious intellectual appetite. The weeknight interview program enabled him to move from politics to economics to sports to literature to national and international affairs with equal facility - in short, just about anything and everything.

He never went back to school, although he has stopped in to pick up seven honorary doctorates along the way. Instead, he got his education through the full range of Chicago journalism.

"I just found when I came to Chicago it was this incredible intellectual playground," Callaway says. "This city, and all its educational resources, and all its street resources, was simply a fabulous education - and still is to this day."

Now Chicago's great curse is that Callaway won't let "C2N" get in the way of his continuing education. He plays host to his last "C2N" in a live broadcast from the Winter Garden in the Harold Washington Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday on 'TTW.

Callaway admits that at age 62 he'll be "in retirement, so to speak," but he is hardly planning the stereotypical life of leisure. "No, I'm really going to get to work now," he says. "This is a retirement from nightly broadcasting. It should be phrased essentially as a retooling for me.

"I want to go away, shut up, feel, detox a little and then find my way back," he says. First, he plans to get himself physically fit after 43 years of the relatively sedentary journalistic lifestyle. "I want to quit talking and start walking," he adds. "And then I want to write."

Although "C2N" gave Callaway a free range in subject matter and forever tested his abilities as an interviewer, it was relatively limited in the skills it required of him as a journalist. If there was a talent that atrophied, he says, it was his writing.

"Any time you have this much talk going on, it hurts your writing," Callaway says. "The construction of a well-structured question is perhaps the best writing I do."

He wants to become adept at the Internet, sort through his archives ("there's a book in there somewhere") and then see where his interests take him, whether in the direction of books or magazine articles or long-form TV pieces who knows, although it will almost certainly be something related to Chicago.

"I am at the point where I can get back out and see for myself," he says. "I want to see this city. I suspect this is a better city than most city writers give it credit for ... and in some ways this city may be worse."

Yet even Callaway recognizes he leaves behind "C2N" as what may be his greatest legacy. "I think it was a nice convergence of interests and mission," he says, a show driven by his intellectual appetites and focused by its role as a public-affairs, news-analysis program on public television.

Callaway says from the very beginning he and 'TTW President Bill McCarter figured it would be a lasting show, which is why Callaway's name was never part of the title. Now he passes it to Phil Ponce, a similarly inquisitive and wide-ranging journalist who left "C2N" a couple of years ago to join PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Ponce returns to succeed Callaway next month.

"I was substantially responsible for him being here in the first place," Callaway says. "I wanted him to be the lead correspondent for 'Chicago Tonight,' and I wanted this franchise to continue in case I had a heart attack and keeled over."

Callaway knew then he wanted Ponce to succeed him as "C2N" host. When Ponce went to Washington, D.C., and the "NewsHour," that only enhanced his credentials for the job. As important as it is personally for Callaway to move on now, it is equally important to leave the show in good hands.

"You don't want it to end, you want it to grow, and it will now," Callaway says. "You've got to know when to let go, and it's been such a privilege, such a great run. I feel good about it all."