Jack Levin was 16 when he picked up his first WLS Silver Dollar Survey of Top 40 singles. It was July 29, 1966, and the number one song on the yellow card was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” There was also a blurb promoting overnight DJ Don Phillips and an ad on the back for Canfield’s short-lived Cherry-Ola Cola. Levin, who collects and sells music magazines and works for a paintball-gear distributor, still has the card–and most of the ones that came before and after it.
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WLS started giving away free surveys a few months after adopting a Top 40 format in 1960. Their surveys continued through the late 80s (with a brief hiatus in the early 70s) after the AM station went all-talk and the music moved to their FM outlet. WBBM FM also put out a survey, and WXRT produced a monthly “featured artist” card for many years. But the colorful WLS surveys, with their ads for the U.S. 30 Dragstrip and $19.99 home stereos, are the ones people remember picking up at the record store.
Levin used to pick up a card every week at Flip Side Records near Foster and Kimball. “I thought they were really cool,” he says. “Usually the new surveys came out on Fridays, and you would try to anticipate what the new number one song was going to be.” As a kid he collected comic books and baseball cards; as a teenager the charts–and records–became his new obsession. But it wasn’t until he was in his 20s that he started tracking down the old surveys.
Levin’s still working on completing his own collection, which he stores in little plastic bags. “It’s more or less the same principle as rare albums and 45s–whoever has them isn’t parting with them,” he says. “This is why people go to record shows–in the hopes that maybe something unusual will show up.”
