Blogpost #8

Happy Mommy Day to you and your mommy, wherever she is today.

In honor of my mom, I'm playing an hour of classic radio clips featuring her second favorite radio announcer, the late 'Chicago' Eddie Schwartz. He passed away after a long illness this past February, and the Chicago Tribune's Trevor Jensen interviewed his old colleagues for his obituary.

My mom started listening to him in 1977. Ed Schwartz was always good company when her insomnia kept her awake. She bought a cassette recorder from Radio Shack just so she could tape his radio shows for me. During the summer months, we'd stay up till 5 am together listening, laughing, and rolling tape. Over the next five years, we managed to save over 200 hours of Ed on cassette.

This hour of clips is not only a tribute to Ed, but also to my mom. She kept the tapes hidden away from me for years because she knew I would've erased them to use them over again. She made this tribute possible, and I only wish that I had thought of sharing these tapes with Ed before he died. He gave one final live phone interview on January 4, 2009 to WIND Radio's Geoff Pinkus, and you can hear an edited version of it on YouTube.

One of the funniest moments on my Ed Schwartz tribute is a clip from a 1976 show featuring a schoolteacher named Charlie who plays harmonica with his nose! You can listen to that show online at talkzone.com along with Ed's interviews with veteran radio entertainers Arthur Godfrey and Mel Blanc. This is the only place on the web to find full-length Ed Schwartz airchecks, and there's more coming up in the months ahead.

If you'd like to hear even more from Ed Schwartz, tune in next week for a rebroadcast of his live 1978 studio interview with Bill Cosby on WIND Radio. There's a sneak preview from the interview in the tribute show.