Suburbanites Floyd Brown, Tom Petersen to join WGN Walk of Fame

When seven former employees of WGN Radio are honored Friday with induction into the WGN Walk of Fame, the honorees will include suburbanites Floyd Brown and Tom Petersen.

Brown, 85, performed numerous jobs at WGN Radio and WGN-TV between 1971 and 1999. He hosted a Sunday-night radio show of jazz music, sacred music, interviews and financial advice; anchored newscasts on both radio and TV; read commercials; and did play-by-play for the Illinois state basketball tournaments. For 20 years he also hosted the “Sunday Evening Club” on WTTW-TV and some other PBS stations.

In his hometown of Elgin, Brown — an African-American — became a leader in the fight to integrate the city's housing. He ran a local marketing and advertising firm, served on corporate boards and city commissions, and was the longtime voice of the Kane County Fair.

Petersen, 74, lives in Streamwood. He worked for WGN from 1982 to 2005. As the station's news director, Petersen also was the on-air news anchor for top-rated morning-drive hosts Bob Collins and Spike O'Dell.

Brown said his career had to row against the current for some 20 years because of his race. Growing up in a middle-class family in Washington, D.C., he told a favorite teacher at his prep school that he would like to get into radio broadcasting. The teacher told him that, being “colored,” he would be wiser to become a radio repairman.

Brown studied accounting at Northwestern University. He planned to handle the books for a bevy of black-owned retailers starting up on the South Side. But while riding a bus to his after-class job as a hotel porter, he noticed a school that taught radio announcing and engineering. So he stopped in and enrolled.

He was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, and manned the only Armed Forces Radio station in northern Alaska for two years. After that, he was hired by Elgin's WRMN to be its engineer — which brought him to what would be his hometown for the next 65 years. When the WRMN morning show's host failed to show up one day, Brown signed onto the air, becoming Elgin's first on-air black personality. “And the world didn't cave in,” Brown recalls with a chuckle.

Brown and his wife, the former Betty Stevens, encountered prejudice in their early days in Elgin. She once was told she couldn't enroll in a nurse-training program because white patients wouldn't want her to put them on a bedpan.

After Floyd and Betty found no home for sale — for them — in the “white” parts of Elgin, Floyd helped found the Elgin Human Relations Commission and became president of the Elgin Housing Commission. They were finally able to buy a home on Jefferson Avenue — with a 40 percent down payment — then built a home in the upper-middle-class Century Oaks subdivision on the city's far northwest side.

Three huge stories

Petersen recalls listening to “The Lone Ranger” and other radio dramas while growing up in Milwaukee. After graduating from high school in 1960, a man who was broadcasting a German-language program on a daytime-only Milwaukee station hired him to read English-language commercials on the show, for $1 an hour.

Petersen came to WGN in 1982 after working for the Detroit station where “The Lone Ranger” was staged.

One thing he does not miss from serving as the newsman for morning-drive kings Collins and O'Dell is having to get up at 2:30 a.m. “I loved Friday night because I could actually stay up past 8 o'clock,” he said. “But you never got into a normal schedule.”

Petersen said three news events he can never forget are the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the sudden death of WGN morning host “Uncle Bobby” Collins in a plane crash in 2000, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

On Nov. 22, 1963, he was working at a station in Duluth, Minn., when the UPI news teletype suddenly started ringing its bell over and over — the signal for a hot breaking news story. “When I picked up the printout, it didn't say 'Urgent.' It didn't say 'Bulletin.' It said 'Flash — President Kennedy has been wounded by gunfire during his visit to Dallas, Texas.'

“We were a rock 'n' roll station. But I just jumped in and started reading wire copy. For five days we broadcast only classical music and news. You felt like a piece of history.”

Petersen worries, though, of what history holds — not just for talk-news radio, but for AM radio in general.

For decades, Petersen says, WGN had a family-like relationship with its listeners, who would call in on the phone. O'Dell once described the format as “neighbors talking with each other over the fence.” Then a new regime led to a more opinionated, tightly controlled format soon after Petersen and O'Dell retired.

“Listeners complained, 'What did you do to my radio station?'” Petersen notes. “How many radio stations have that kind of loyalty?”

With new management in charge now, and old-style hosts such as Steve Cochran and former WLS star Roe Conn on the air, the station has regained its old neighborly feeling. But the days when Wally Phillips would attract one-third of all listeners in Chicago to that one station among 100 competitors have gone, Petersen says.

“Carmakers are even talking about taking AM off car radios. I talked to some college students the other day. They looked at me like I was from another planet. Young people don't listen to radio anymore. Everything is on that cellphone now.”

Back to normal

Brown's interaction with the world now is significantly limited. While undergoing an angiogram in 2013, he suffered a stroke that has left his left arm and leg paralyzed. Though he's still able to talk and think like the Floyd Brown everyone knows, he uses a wheelchair, depending on Betty and a paid caregiver for everyday activities.

Petersen can relate to that condition. One day in 1988, he woke up to find himself totally paralyzed, unable even to blink his eyes. Doctors determined he had a viral disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome. Fortunately, his ability to move slowly came back during the next four months.

Petersen said he spends his time “spoiling two grandchildren,” hanging out at a vacation home in the Wisconsin Dells, serving as president of the Elgin Golden K Kiwanis Club, and participating in a senior bowling league.

Brown clings to hope that he too will someday get back to normal. In April he flew to Mexico and was injected with stem cells in an experimental treatment that Brown hopes will help his brain recover from the stroke damage enough that he can walk again and go back to playing golf.

As the two radio legends swapped stories in Brown's backyard as they were photographed for this story, Brown said to Petersen, “Someday, I may be over there bowling with you.”