Who Will Buy These Memories?
Radio legend Ed Schwartz is in anguish. He wrote former radio-TV critic Gary Deeb to denounce him as “a gross failure and an ethical disgrace.” When Deeb didn’t reply, Schwartz posted the letter on Jim Romenesko’s popular media Web site–the national hot stove of gossiping journalists. And this week in the column he writes for the Lerner papers, Schwartz says that what Deeb did “is more than a sellout, it is a moral burnout.”
If WLS hired Deeb to shut him up, it worked. His old readers watched appalled as Deeb, the fearless media analyst who’d let the chips fall where they might, shilled for ABC programs. Deeb’s new job not only silenced him, it discredited him. And as the years went by, the on-air time WLS allowed its old nemesis steadily diminished to the point where he all but disappeared. Deeb finally went back to Buffalo in 1996–twice married and twice divorced in Chicago, 50 years old, and nearly as obscure as he’d come.
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He went into the specifics of the letters. There were two from Larry Lujack. One had “Uncle Lar beefing about too much kindness shown rival Fred Winston (‘I’m more worried about my next golf score than I am about Fred’).” In the other he was “contending that he’s never been against WLS hiring Steve Dahl (‘complete fabricated bullshi–!’ and ‘F— the truth’).”
“I swear to God,” Schwartz says, “I don’t know what that could be in reference to. I don’t recall ever having a problem with him.”
Deeb said he’d stay in touch. “It’s great to trade with you on Ebay–and I’ll contact you when I gather more Chicago broadcast letters from my basement crates o’ stuff.”
What a lovely letter! Out it goes.
Rumor Has It was Dickinson’s newspaper book. It was set at a woebegone Chicago tabloid about to go under, a tabloid very much like the Sun-Times, where Dickinson worked for six years, jumping to the Tribune just before the book came out in 1991. His fictional Bugle was peopled by journalists remarkably similar to specific friends at the Sun-Times. “A lot of people had hurt feelings,” he says.
